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ordinary."[7]
Collage in painting [ edit ]
Collage in the modernist sense began with Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. According to some sources, Picasso was the first to use the collage technique in oil paintings. According to the Guggenheim Museum's online article about collage, Braque took up the concept of collage itself before Picasso, applying it to charcoal drawings. Picasso adopted collage immediately after (and could be the first to use collage in paintings, as opposed to drawings):
"It was Braque who purchased a roll of simulated oak-grain wallpaper and began cutting out pieces of the paper and attaching them to his charcoal drawings. Picasso immediately began to make his own experiments in the new medium."[7]
In 1912 for his Still Life with Chair Caning (Nature-morte à la chaise cannée),[8] Picasso pasted a patch of oilcloth with a chair-cane design onto the canvas of the piece.
Surrealist artists have made extensive use of collage. Cubomania is a collage made by cutting an image into squares which are then reassembled automatically or at random. Collages produced using a similar, or perhaps identical, method are called etrécissements by Marcel Mariën from a method first explored by Mariën. Surrealist games such as parallel collage use collective techniques of collage making.
The Sidney Janis Gallery held an early Pop Art exhibit called the New Realist Exhibition in November 1962, which included works by the American artists Tom Wesselmann, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal, and Andy Warhol; and Europeans such as Arman, Baj, Christo, Yves Klein, Festa, Rotella, Jean Tinguely, and Schifano. It followed the Nouveau Réalisme exhibition at the Galerie Rive Droite in Paris, and marked the international debut of the artists who soon gave rise to what came to be called Pop Art in Britain and The United States and Nouveau Réalisme on the European continent. Many of these artists used collage techniques in their work. Wesselmann took part in the New Realist show with some reservations,[9] exhibiting two 1962 works: Still life #17 and Still life #22.
Another technique is that of canvas collage, which is the application, typically with glue, of separately painted canvas patches to the surface of a painting's main canvas. Well known for use of this technique is British artist John Walker in his paintings of the late 1970s, but canvas collage was already an integral part of the mixed media works of such American artists as Conrad Marca-Relli and Jane Frank by the early 1960s. The intensely self-critical Lee Krasner also frequently destroyed her own paintings by cutting them into pieces, only to create new works of art by reassembling the pieces into collages.
Collage with wood [ edit ]
wood collage is the dominant feature in this 1964 What may be calledis the dominant feature in this 1964 mixed media painting by Jane Frank (1918–1986)
The wood collage is a type that emerged somewhat later than paper collage. Kurt Schwitters began experimenting with wood collages in the 1920s after already having given up painting for paper collages.[10] The principle of wood collage is clearly established at least as early as his 'Merz Picture with Candle', dating from the mid to late 1920s.
In a sense, wood collage made its debut indirectly at the same time as paper collage, since according to the Guggenheim online, Georges Braque initiated use of paper collage by cutting out pieces of simulated oak-grain wallpaper and attaching them to his own charcoal drawings.[7] Thus, the idea of gluing wood to a picture was implicit from the start, since the paper used was a commercial product manufactured to look like wood.
It was during a fifteen-year period of intense experimentation beginning in the mid-1940s that Louise Nevelson evolved her sculptural wood collages, assembled from found scraps, including parts of furniture, pieces of wooden crates or barrels, and architectural remnants like stair railings or moldings. Generally rectangular, very large, and painted black, they resemble gigantic paintings. Concerning Nevelson's Sky Cathedral (1958), the Museum of Modern Art catalogue states, "As a rectangular plane to be viewed from the front, Sky Cathedral has the pictorial quality of a painting..."[11] Yet such pieces also present themselves as massive walls or monoliths, which can sometimes be viewed from either side, or even looked through.
Much wood collage art is considerably smaller in scale, framed and hung as a painting would be. It usually features pieces of wood, wood shavings, or scraps, assembled on a canvas (if there is painting involved), or on a wooden board. Such framed, picture-like, wood-relief collages offer the artist an opportunity to explore the qualities of depth, natural color, and textural variety inherent in the material, while drawing on and taking advantage of the language, conventions, and historical resonances that arise from the tradition of creating pictures to hang on walls. The technique of wood collage is also sometimes combined with painting and other media in a single work of art.
Frequently, what is called "wood collage art" uses only natural wood - such as driftwood, or parts of found and unaltered logs, branches, sticks, or bark. This raises the question of whether such artwork is collage (in the original sense) at all (see Collage and modernism). This is because the early, paper collages were generally made from bits of text or pictures - things originally made by people, and functioning or signifying in some cultural context. The collage brings these still-recognizable "signifiers" (or fragments of signifiers) together, in a kind of semiotic collision. A truncated wooden chair or staircase newel used in a Nevelson work can also be considered a potential element of collage in the same sense: it had some original, culturally determined context. Unaltered, natural wood, such as one might find on a forest floor, arguably has no such context; therefore, the characteristic contextual disruptions associated with the collage idea, as it originated with Braque and Picasso, cannot really take place. (Driftwood is of course sometimes ambiguous: while a piece of driftwood may once have been a piece of worked wood - for example, part of a ship - it may be so weathered by salt and sea that its past functional identity is nearly or completely obscured.)
Decoupage [ edit ]
Decoupage is a type of collage usually defined as a craft. It is the process of placing a picture into an object for decoration. Decoupage can involve adding multiple copies of the same image, cut and layered to add apparent depth. The picture is often coated with varnish or some other sealant for protection.
In the early part of the 20th century, decoupage, like many other art methods, began experimenting with a less realistic and more abstract style. 20th-century artists who produced decoupage works include Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. The most famous decoupage work is Matisse's Blue Nude II.
There are many varieties on the traditional technique involving purpose made 'glue' requiring fewer layers (often 5 or 20, depending on the amount of paper involved). Cutouts are also applied under glass or raised to give a three-dimensional appearance according to the desire of the decouper. Currently decoupage is a popular handicraft.
The craft became known as découpage in France (from the verb découper, 'to cut out') as it attained great popularity during the 17th and 18th centuries. Many advanced techniques were developed during this time, and items could take up to a year to complete due to the many coats and sandings applied. Some famous or aristocratic practitioners included Marie Antoinette, Madame de Pompadour, and Beau Brummell. In fact the majority of decoupage enthusiasts attribute the beginning of decoupage to 17th century Venice. However it was known before this time in Asia.
The most likely origin of decoupage is thought to be East Siberian funerary art. Nomadic tribes would use cut out felts to decorate the tombs of their deceased. From Siberia, the practice came to China, and by the 12th century, cut out paper was being used to decorate lanterns, windows, boxes and other objects. In the 17th century, Italy, especially in Venice, was at the forefront of trade with the Far East and it is generally thought that it is through these trade links that the cut out paper decorations made their way into Europe.
Photomontage [ edit ]
Collage made from photographs, or parts of photographs, is called photomontage. Photomontage is the process (and result) of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. The same method is accomplished today using image-editing software. The technique is referred to by professionals as compositing.
Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? was created in 1956 for the catalogue of the This Is Tomorrow exhibition in London, England in which it was reproduced in black and white. In addition, the piece was used in posters for the exhibit.[12] Richard Hamilton has subsequently created several works in which he reworked the subject and composition of the pop art collage, including a 1992 version featuring a female bodybuilder. Many artists have created derivative works of Hamilton's collage. P. C. Helm made a year 2000 interpretation.[13]
Other methods for combining pictures are also called photomontage, such as Victorian "combination printing", the printing from more than one negative on a single piece of printing paper (e.g. O. G. Rejlander, 1857), front-projection and computer montage techniques. Much as a collage is composed of multiple facets, artists also combine montage techniques. Romare Bearden’s (1912–1988) series of black and white "photomontage projections" is an example. His method began with compositions of paper, paint, and photographs put on boards 8½ × 11 inches. Bearden fixed the imagery with an emulsion that he then applied with handroller. Subsequently, he enlarged the collages photographically.
The 19th century tradition of physically joining multiple images into a composite and photographing the results prevailed in press photography and offset lithography until the widespread use of digital image editing. Contemporary photo editors in magazines now create "paste-ups" digitally.
Creating a photomontage has, for the most part, become easier with the advent of computer software such as Adobe Photoshop, Pixel image editor, and GIMP. These programs make the changes digitally, allowing for faster workflow and more precise results. They also mitigate mistakes by allowing the artist to "undo" errors. Yet some artists are pushing the boundaries of digital image editing to create extremely time-intensive compositions that rival the demands of the traditional arts. The current trend is to create pictures that combine painting, theatre, illustration and graphics in a seamless photographic whole.
Digital collage [ edit ]
Digital collage is the technique of using computer tools in collage creation to encourage chance associations of disparate visual elements and the subsequent transformation of the visual results through the use of electronic media. It is commonly used in the creation of digital art.
Three-dimensional collage [ edit ]
A 3D collage is the art of putting altogether three-dimensional objects such as rocks, beads, buttons, coins, or even soil to form a new whole or a new object. Examples can include houses, bead circles, etc.
Mosaic [ edit ]
It is the art of putting together or assembling of small pieces of paper, tiles, marble, stones, etc. They are often found in cathedrals, churches, temples as a spiritual significance of interior design.Small pieces, normally roughly quadratic, of stone or glass of different colors, known as tesserae, (diminutive tessellae), are used to create a pattern or picture.
eCollage [ edit ]
The term "eCollage" (electronic Collage) can be used for a collage created by using computer tools.
Collage artists [ edit ]
Gallery [ edit ]
In other contexts [ edit ]
In architecture [ edit ]
Though Le Corbusier and other architects used techniques that are akin to collage, collage as a theoretical concept only became widely discussed after the publication of Collage City (1978) by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter.
Rowe and Koetter were not, however, championing collage in the pictorial sense, much less seeking the types of disruptions of meaning that occur with collage. Instead, they were looking to challenge the uniformity of Modernism and saw collage with its non-linear notion of history as a means to reinvigorate design practice. Not only does historical urban fabric have its place, but in studying it, designers were, so it was hoped, able to get a sense of how better to operate. Rowe was a member of the so-called Texas Rangers, a group of architects who taught at the University of Texas for a while. Another member of that group was Bernhard Hoesli, a Swiss architect who went on to become an important educator at the ETH-Zurirch. Whereas for Rowe, collage was more a metaphor than an actual practice, Hoesli actively made collages as part of his design process. He was close to Robert Slutzky, a New York-based artist, and frequently introduced the question of collage and disruption in his studio work.
In music [ edit ]
The concept of collage has crossed the boundaries of visual arts. In music, with the advances on recording technology, avant-garde artists started experimenting with cutting and pasting since the middle of the twentieth century.
In the 1960s, George Martin created collages of recordings while producing the records of The Beatles. In 1967 pop artist Peter Blake made the collage for the cover of the Beatles seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the 1970s and 1980s, the likes of Christian Marclay and the group Negativland reappropriated old audio in new ways. By the 1990s and 2000s, with the popularity of the sampler, it became apparent that "musical collages" had become the norm for popular music, especially in rap, hip-hop and electronic music.[14] In 1996, DJ Shadow released the groundbreaking album, Endtroducing....., made entirely of preexisting recorded material mixed together in audible collage. In the same year, New York City based artist, writer, and musician, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky's work pushed the work of sampling into a museum and gallery context as an art practice that combined DJ culture's obsession with archival materials as sound sources on his album Songs of a Dead Dreamer and in his books Rhythm Science (2004) and Sound Unbound (2008) (MIT Press). In his books, "mash-up" and collage based mixes of authors, artists, and musicians such as Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, and Raymond Scott were featured as part of a what he called "literature of sound." In 2000, The Avalanches released Since I Left You, a musical collage consisting of approximately 3,500 musical sources (i.e., samples).[15]
In illustration [ edit ]
Collage is commonly used as a technique in Children's picture book illustration. Eric Carle is a prominent example, using vividly colored hand-textured papers cut to shape and layered together, sometimes embellished with crayon or other marks. See image at The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
In artist's books [ edit ]
Collage is sometimes used alone or in combination with other techniques in artists' books, especially in one-off unique books rather than as reproduced images in published books.[16]
In literature [ edit ]
Collage novels are books with images selected from other publications and collaged together following a theme or narrative.
The bible of discordianism, the Principia Discordia, is described by its author as a literary collage. A collage in literary terms may also refer to a layering of ideas or images.
In fashion design [ edit ]
Collage is utilized in fashion design in the sketching process, as part of mixed media illustrations, where drawings together with diverse materials such as paper, photographs, yarns or fabric bring ideas into designs.
In film [ edit ]
Collage film is traditionally defined as, “A film that juxtaposes fictional scenes with footage taken from disparate sources, such as newsreels.” Combining different types of footage can have various implications depending on the director’s approach. Collage film can also refer to the physical collaging of materials onto filmstrips. Canadian Film maker, Arthur Lipsett, was especially renown for his collage films, many of which were made from the cutting room floors of the National Film Board studios.
In post-production [ edit ]
The use of CGI, or computer-generated imagery, can be considered a form of collage, especially when animated graphics are layered over traditional film footage. At certain moments during Amélie (Jean-Pierre Juenet, 2001), the mise en scène takes on a highly fantasized style, including fictitious elements like swirling tunnels of color and light. David O. Russel’s I Heart Huckabees (2004) incorporates CGI effects to visually demonstrate philosophical theories explained by the existential detectives (played by Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman). In this case, the effects serve to enhance clarity, while adding a surreal aspect to an otherwise realistic film.
Legal issues [ edit ]
When collage uses existing works, the result is what some copyright scholars call a derivative work. The collage thus has a copyright separate from any copyrights pertaining to the original incorporated works.
Due to redefined and reinterpreted copyright laws, and increased financial interests, some forms of collage art are significantly restricted. For example, in the area of sound collage (such as hip hop music), some court rulings effectively have eliminated the de minimis doctrine as a defense to copyright infringement, thus shifting collage practice away from non-permissive uses relying on fair use or de minimis protections, and toward licensing.[17] Examples of musical collage art that have run afoul of modern copyright are The Grey Album and Negativland's U2.
The copyright status of visual works is less troubled, although still ambiguous. For instance, some visual collage artists have argued that the first-sale doctrine protects their work. The first-sale doctrine prevents copyright holders from controlling consumptive uses after the "first sale" of their work, although the Ninth Circuit has held that the first-sale doctrine does not apply to derivative works.[18] The de minimis doctrine and the fair use exception also provide important defenses against claimed copyright infringement.[19] The Second Circuit in October, 2006, held that artist Jeff Koons was not liable for copyright infringement because his incorporation of a photograph into a collage painting was fair use.[20]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]After the first awesome day at #oSC13 and a more exciting night, we’re over 200 participants. Many more interesting presentations and workshops took place and everyone had fun! The schedule was printed and handed to our visitors letting them know about their options from the big variety of presentations, from technical to social.
#oSC13 Day 2 begins!
Day two kicked off with a keynote (see below) and continued as Friday: people went to the talks,various workshop sessions and hang out and discuss technology in the premises. Throughout the day our conference theme music ‘geeko-greeko’ played, often resulting in a sing-along. Lunch break at 1 PM was welcomed by everyone. There was a queue for first ordering, later retrieving food and then there was a bit of relative quiet as everyone had food. The conference organization also provided snacks for in between session cravings. A wide selection of very sweet but tasty cookies and cookie-like snacks were always around.
A bit of great news is that video’s are beginning to appear on YouTube – check them out here!
Keynote about SUSE and openSUSE
The second day opened with the technical keynote by Ralf Flaxa, VP of Engineering at SUSE. He noted that he would talk from both a company and a community perspective about the evolution of the Geeko. He began with a short history lesson, showing how openSUSE went from tgz’s on floppy disks via CD and DVD to cloud computing.
“History we come from a single SUSE Professional box that everybody worked on to the model of an enterprise and a community edition. This change was prompted purely by money. If it was possible, SUSE would still be doing just ONE box. It was fun to do, but change came and the Geeko had to go with it. Today, SUSE does not make any money on the community product – and that is by design. The openSUSE contributions are paid for by a percentage of SUSE profit and that is how SUSE likes it. These changes of course resulted in more than openSUSE: the opening of processes and release of tools like OBS are outcomes as well. A major goal of SUSE was to give the community influence on the development and encourage a variety of derivatives and flavors of openSUSE.”
Results
Did it work out? From the SUSE point of view yes! SUSE is a profitable business and can and will continue to support openSUSE; and as we grow, SUSE promises to also grow their contributions. Our businesses’ need for SLE12 is, of course, driving contribution at the moment. In general, SUSE wants to see openSUSE successful.
And how did it work from the openSUSE side? Good too. Building on the infrastructure of OBS, openQA, Studio, Hermes and our other tools, the community grew with more contributors and maintaining more packages. A big proof of this success is the community-organized conference that we are reporting on. SUSE has also expanded the role of the openSUSE Board, started the TSP and other open projects and promises to continue to give the community more control, in a quest for a lasting “win-win” relationship.
However, just like in any organization there are also challenges to be faced, things to improve. Let’s review some of them.
Challenges
We have SUSE and openSUSE whose code bases have diverged. This has become a problem. Ralf wants his engineers to contribute to openSUSE and this is hard with vastly different code bases; it results in spending time on back porting or simply doing double work. The need for customers/users are different for each distribution but there are things which are the same. Both home users and enterprise users need stable and moving components. We need to think about how to bring things together. Then there is the upgrade path between openSUSE and SLE. There is none! We have customers using openSUSE who might want to move to SLE who cannot do so since the distributions are so different at this time.
But there is more. We received feedback from the openSUSE community. Looking at Factory where you can get an openSUSE-of-the-day distribution image. It is a flexible tool, up to date and easy to hack on. However, it can be terribly unstable. It takes a lot of complicated work to maintain and has no lifecycle.
The openSUSE release, the product we send out, is stable with a nice, 8 month cycle and 18 months of maintenance and offers a lot of choice. But for some, 18 months is not enough and all the choice can be confusing and create problems in itself.
Suggestions
Based on SUSE’s own experiences and the feedback from the community there are a few suggestions Ralf shared. About Factory, Ralf suggested increasing the amount of automated testing and be “more picky” about what goes into the distribution. He also pledged further investment from SUSE and suggested that we should talk about improving our integration process itself as well. About our release we should work at the balance we have between the scope, quality and life cycle of our distribution. Perhaps by focusing on a more restricted set of packages we could increase our life cycle to improve quality. Last but not least, he stressed the importance of transparent governance and an open ecosystem. He made very clear that SUSE does not commercialize openSUSE but he is perfectly happy if other partners, be it commercial or not, come in and try to generate a revenue stream, building on openSUSE and contributing to it. The presentation video is online here.
Many More Talks
After the keynote many community based presentations took place with presenters showing how the openSUSE distribution is released, openSUSE in numbers and how to share the Linux Desktop, the new local coordinator program. There were also presentations about the MATE project, Enlightenment and LibreOffice, MySQL and Linux I/O. Moreover, there were interesting workshops giving attendees an opportunity to get their hands dirty on OBS coding with Henne Vogelsang and on Rasberrt Pi with Bernhard Wiedemann.
Board meeting: oSC14 location!
At the end of the conference day the openSUSE Board chair Vincent Untz opened a session on project-wide issues. On Friday this session was used to have the various teams in openSUSE present on their work and progress.
On saturday a big announcement was made the: the next openSUSE Conference will take place in Croatia, in the city of Dubrovnik. You might not recognize the name Dubrovnik but you should. The popular HBO series ‘Game of Thrones’ is actually being filmed in and around many locations in this city! You can imagine that Dubrovnik is a beautiful, medieval-looking city. But it is not all old buildings there, there is change coming in the IT world. While the community is currently spread all over Croatia, the government is picking up on the Free and Open Source trend. The government has started supporting FOSS and the Croatia’s President recently opened the 20th local Linux/Open Source Conference. There is now a Linux Workgroup sponsored by the Croatian government in order to push for more open technologies!
The team pushing this local conference has now offered to take care of us “Geekos” next year! The conference will take place at the University of Dubrovnik, during the month April. An exact date will be announced later but the local Croatian team is already busy negotiating, pinning down the date, location, rooms and other details. On stage, Kostas (Greek conference organizer) gave Svebor Prstacic (Croatian community member) the official Conference Geeko and a bottle of Ouzo.
Board meeting
There was a big thanks to conf team and sponsors for their contributions and hard work. The board then gave a report on the work done in the last year. They made progress in increased visibility; worked on setting up new/improved ambassador program; and discussed the foundation and money handling. A report on that last point will come. Of course there is always more room for improvement, and the board welcomes feedback. During the Q&A there were questions about the strategic direction of openSUSE as a project, technical developments and discussions that are happening since Ralf’s keynote this morning; oSC organization work and involvement of the board.
Find the talks online here!
Party party party party!
After a hard day of work a Greeko party was well-deserved rest. The conference atmosphere was excellent and everyone was delighted about the results of the conference so far. But it’s true that after the first day’s party outside the venue with lots of drinks and beers everyone was waiting for the main party and what ideas Greeks had about entertainment. Expectations were high and the Greeks met them!
After the conference everyone went for barbeque at a bar next to the venue! Steaks, souvlaki, sausages, Greek salad, beers, cocktails, shots and lots of drinks were available! Everyone ate, drinking danced and had fun! It was a night to remember!
#oSC13 Info
You can find lots of pictures from #oSC13 on openSUSE Greek Fans on facebook or on G+. Also on twitter you can follow @openSUSEConf or search for the hashtag #oSC13.
If you missed the chance to be here with us and have fun you can attend the conference and all the fun online from the live streaming that is set up in the venue. Also if you have any questions for the presentation you attend online there is an IRC Channel set up in order to make your questions.
Last but not least we have our local newspaper!
Both comments and pings are currently closed.[Vain attempt to avoid SOPA if, Luna forbid, it passes]:
I know I said there weren't going to be any new vectors until Wednesday, but there were just too many good opportunities to pass up with this latest episode.A few notes about this image (original of which can be found here ): first time I have done such elaborate clothing, man that takes a while; I could not for the life of me find the highlights in the eye so I took my best guess; Iadd the legs later (i.e. not before Wednesday) if I am motivated enough and find the right reference images.Also, feel free to come up with your own explanation for why she's in that pose. I know choking is a pretty obvious choice, but think outside the box (or inside the chimney), I want to see what you come up with. Oh, and all hail Chancellor Puddinghead!Alright, that's all from me for now, time to get back to my studies, and I mean it this time.MLP: FiM was created by and is property of Hasbro.This particular vector is property of me, feel free to use it as long as you credit me, and preferably tell me about it so that I can link to it.Mark Zuckerberg has revealed his new mission for Facebook at the social network’s first Community Summit in Chicago on Thursday, reports Forbes. The social media magnate revealed his vision to the leaders of over 120 Facebook groups in the form of a vague yet intriguing phrase:
“Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
As part of his mission, Mark Zuckerberg set a goal to help 1 billion individuals join “meaningful” Facebook groups and has created new tools to help group administrators manage their groups and vet members, including a “removed member clean-up” tool that automatically erases all posts made by members who were deleted from the group.
What Is Mark Zuckerberg Really Saying?
While his words and efforts may seem benevolent at first glance, it only takes a cursory examination under the surface to see the intentions that are truly at play. In his speech, Zuckerberg states that Facebook should go beyond its original mission of connecting family and friends, and must now turn its focus to connecting “communities.” While this seems innocent, this is a thinly-veiled attempt to encourage individuals to isolate themselves from their families in favor of “connecting” to people they don’t even know. While this conclusion may seem like a stretch to some, it makes perfect sense when taken as part of the context of the anti-family left-wing agenda that seems bent on destroying any semblance of kinship and tradition left in this country. To the attuned ear, Mark Zuckerberg is crystal clear about his intentions:
“Connecting friends and family has been pretty positive, but I think there is just this collective feeling that we have a responsibility to do more than that and also help build communities and help people get exposed to new perspectives and meet new people — not just give people a voice, but also help build common ground so people can actually move forward together.”
Moving forward towards what, exactly? Zuckerberg’s statement rests upon the false assumption that movement towards liberal ideas is a natural “progress,” as opposed to an artificially imposed sociopolitical paradigm, as all such human movements are. And why exactly do human beings need Facebook to get exposed to “new perspectives”? Forbes explains that individuals can change their perspectives as a result of new relationships and that in order to “productively” debate an issue, folks need to first recognize common ground. That sounds fair enough, but it seems like Mark Zuckerberg may have something else in mind:
“People share more information, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that understanding is shared — that doesn’t mean the perspectives people have are getting closer together…We can help you connect over things that you share before exposing you to debates that are really important to have productively.”
Is it just me or does that sound super Orwellian? The point of debate is to discuss different perspectives, not necessarily for all participants to end up in the same place. The world is rich and intriguing because of differences in opinion, not in spite of them. And why do “connections” need to happen before a person is “exposed” to a debate? A debate should be naturally occurring and operate under few parameters in order to allow the most authentic and free flow of information. It seems like Mark Zuckerberg wants to limit debate under the guise of expanding it.
Are Facebook Groups A Substitute For Real-Life Communities?
Another disturbing aspect of Mark Zuckerberg’s new vision for Facebook is his apparent conviction that online communities are comparable to real-life human connections. In the Forbes article, an example is given of a Facebook group that operates as a sort of online church, with sermons streamed over Facebook Live and informal counseling given through Facebook chat. While a “church” group like this may be useful for individuals with illnesses or disabilities that prevent them from going to an actual church, it is ultimately incomparable to the real-life church-going experience, filled with joyous laughter, empathetic tears, pious solemnity, and friendly hugs. This example is especially disturbing, considering the fact that worshipers often feel a special spiritual connection while being in a physical church. This experience is totally discounted by implying that it could be replaced through an online forum.
The Verge, in another shining piece praising Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto, published a telling quote from the Facebook CEO, in which Zuckerberg stated that part of Facebook’s mission was to “develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us”
Facebook groups could never be a substitute for real-life communities. And a global community could never be a substitute for a local community. Online communities are great, but they are lacking in the qualities of real human interaction as well as the similarities among members that build communities in real life. Folks from the same neighborhood, region, and country have interests that are inherently connected. The further out the frame of reference moves, the less in common a group will have. Mark Zuckerberg is creating a world where individuals connect digitally with citizens all over the globe whose core interests in areas of economy, culture, and values may be at odds — while at the same time neglecting real-life interactions that they could be having in their own communities with folks whose core interests and values they most likely already share.
We mustn’t be fooled by Mark Zuckerberg’s pretty words or the press’ rush to idolize him. Mark Zuckerberg is just another globalist, using Facebook as a tool in the cynical aim to disconnect people from real-life family and friends only to be artificially tethered to evanescent internet “communities.”
[Featured Image by Nam Y. Huh/AP Images]Lee "INnoVation" Shin Hyung, also known as "Bogus", is a StarCraft progamer from South Korea currently playing for Team Reciprocity.
Wings of Liberty [ edit ]
INnoVation played his first official StarCraft II match during the hybrid 2011-2012 Proleague Season 2.
OSL [ edit ]
On July 19, 2012, INnoVation participated in the 2012 OSL KeSPA Preliminaries. INnoVation received a BYE in round one and then took down Sang, herO, and faced Crazy-Hydra in the finals. After taking down Crazy-Hydra by a score of 2:0, INnoVation advanced in to the 2012 OSL KeSPA Dual Tournament.
GSL [ edit ]
In the 2012 GSL Season 4, INnoVation qualified for Code A after going through the preliminaries. There, he beat the seven-time Code A finisher YuGiOh in the first round, with a score of 2-1, and then followed it up with a 2-0 win over Bomber. After beating Happy in the round of 24 with a score of 2-1, INnoVation made it into Code S for the next season. There, his round of 32 group consisted of Leenock, KeeN and Squirtle. INnoVation first lost to Leenock 2-0, then beat both Squirtle and KeeN 2-0, which placed him second and gave him a spot in the round of 16. In his Ro16 group, he was placed in an even harder group, with Polt, Sniper and PartinG. He placed first in his group this time, dropping only one map to Sniper. This secured him a spot in next season's Code S, and advanced him to the next round. In the round of 8, he was against fellow KeSPA player, Soulkey, who he beat with a very solid 3-0. In the semifinals, he played against HyuN, against whom he lost 1-3, and was knocked out of the tournament.
With his semi-finals finish in the previous GSL season, INnoVation headed into the last Wings of Liberty GSL in Code S. In his round of 32 group, INnoVation took out the foreign Zerg player Stephano, but lost to the GSL Champion DongRaeGu. After beating Stephano again, INnoVation advanced to the next round in second place. In his round of 16 group, he took out the GSL veteran TaeJa before facing DongRaeGu again. This time however, INnoVation defeated DongRaeGu 2-0 to secure first place in his group. Facing another Zerg in Symbol in the round of 8, INnoVation narrowly lost with a score of 2-3 to end his final Wings of Liberty GSL run.
Heart of the Swarm [ edit ]
Close Finishes [ edit ]
INnoVation played in the first ever Heart of the Swarm MLG event shortly after the release of the expansion. He dominated his first three matches, taking out the Canadian player HuK, the multiple MLG champion Leenock and his fellow KeSPA player Rain all with a 3-0 score. He met the legendary Brood War Terran Flash in the semi-finals where Flash showcased his superior TvT to take the series 3-1. Dropping down into the third place match, INnoVation played another Protoss player in MC, another decorated StarCraft II player. He defeated the Protoss player 2-1 which secured him a third place finish in the first premier Heart of the Swarm tournament.
Back to Korea, INnoVation dominated the Korean scene, acting as the ace player of his team in Proleague and going 15-5 in his first 20 games. He also achieved success in the individual leagues, such as WCS Korea 2013 Season 1 Premier League |
are so many issues I think are important,” Zagar said. “I imagine the first session will be spent working with the party and caucus, but I would also like to work on the future of energy in Vermont.”
Although he is yet to set foot in the Statehouse as a representative, Zagar is already preparing for the next election.
“I think I’ll have to start campaigning right away because I’ve got my work cut out for me. I’m only guaranteed one session,” Zagar said.
An elusive agreement languishes
The USDA failed to respond to a request filed by VTDigger.org under the Freedom of Information Act last month, in violation of federal law.
The request, filed June 14, was for the Programmatic Agreement between the USDA Rural Utilities Service and Vermont Telephone Company regarding the $114 million broadband expansion project VTel is pursuing with RUS funds. The document, which was released to VTDigger.org by the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation, sets out rules for the VTel buildout.
On a phone call the morning of June 14, Laura Dean, historical preservation officer at the USDA, said, “I’m looking at [the programmatic agreement] right now,” and that she planned to send VTel the approved copy later that day.
Once the document has been approved by all parties, it will serve as a regulatory document as VTel works to expand broadband in rural Vermont before its 2013 deadline. The programmatic agreement is a list of rules regarding building around historic sites, the unexpected discovery of such sites, and under what circumstances VTel can proceed.
The agreement states that VTel may move forward with the project in places that entail modification of already existing infrastructure, exempt from historical review. If VTel has to install infrastructure where it doesn’t already exist, the agreement lays out review procedures which must take place before the work can be done.
Both Dean and Devin Coleman of the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation said the agreement was fairly standard, and that it was normal procedure for such a document to be created for a federally-funded project. VTel spokeswoman Sharon Combes-Farr said in an email that the agreement presented “no surprises.”
Dean refused to release a copy of the document because doing so might undermine the official process. Once the process was over and the document was approved, she said, she may release it.
VTDigger later that day sent a letter to Dean via email formally requesting the document under the Freedom of Information Act. Federal law requires a response to such requests within 20 business days of receipt.
Candace Boston at the Office of Government Information Services in College Park, Md., said it is normal for requests to take longer than the legally required 20 days to fulfill. “Even though the law says 20 days,” Boston said, “there (are) only a handful of agencies that respond within the required amount of time.”
Some requests, she said, take up to a year before any information is delivered. The Freedom of Information Act requires that public officials “determine within 20 [business] days after the receipt of any such request whether to comply with such request and shall immediately notify the person making such request of such determination and the reasons therefore …”
Response was required under this language no later than July 13. VTDigger.org has not received any communication from Dean or her office since June 14.
Editor’s note: Taylor Dobbs, Anne Galloway and Eli Sherman contributed to this report.House leaders, confident but not yet certain they have the support to pass sweeping trade legislation, are aiming to bring the package to a floor vote by the end of this week — even as they rush to resolve a last-minute hangup over how to pay for aid to displaced workers.
The vote to grant President Barack Obama fast-track authority to negotiate a massive Pacific Rim trade deal will be extremely tight by all accounts. Senior aides and lawmakers in GOP leadership are intent on scheduling the vote at the moment they believe they have the votes locked up — ideally by Friday, to spare supportive lawmakers the possibility of another weekend of attacks by trade foes back in their districts.
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“We’re doing very well, we’re close,” Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who’s been at the forefront of the GOP effort to round up support, said Tuesday of the current vote count. If Republicans want to bring the trade legislation to the floor Friday, they must decide Wednesday. They took a first step toward a vote early Wednesday morning, when GOP leadership posted the legislation online.
Still, the state of play remains fluid, GOP lawmakers and aides cautioned, and there’s a chance the vote will slide into next week.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has been holding small meetings with lawmakers in his office as he seeks to maximize Republican “yes” votes — and he huddled late Tuesday with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to address some unresolved spending and procedural issues. House Republicans will hold a closed-door meeting on Wednesday morning at which the trade vote is expected to be a major topic of conversation.
The White House, meanwhile, is working with House GOP leadership to solidify Democratic support. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise’s operation has developed a whip list of at least 22 Democratic supporters of so-called Trade Promotion Authority, and they have worked with the White House and Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.) to identify other lawmakers believed to still be in play.
Sources involved in canvassing for support say from 25 to 30 Democrats must vote for the package for it to pass. Ryan, Scalise and Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), the chief deputy majority whip, have persuaded many undecided GOP lawmakers to support the legislation.
Behind the scenes, Boehner and Ryan are consulting with Pelosi, the White House and other senior Democrats to avoid capping Medicare spending to pay for financial assistance to workers who lose their jobs to free trade, aid formally known as Trade Adjustment Assistance.
Although the timing of the trade package votes isn’t certain, the process by which the bills will come to the floor is becoming clearer. The House will vote separately on TPA and TAA, and both must pass in order for the package to advance.
In fact, TAA emerged as a last-minute sticking point between Capitol Hill Republicans, Democrats and the White House. Pelosi privately pressed Boehner to drop a proposal, already passed by the Senate, that would prolong a cap on Medicare spending to pay for TAA. But late Tuesday night, the two sides appeared to be in agreement. The measure will now be offset by increasing penalties on companies that file incorrect 1099 tax returns, and by stepping up enforcement of fraudulent higher-education tax credit claims.
A GOP leadership aide said “there is more work to be done, but this is process.”
This floor vote is one of the most consequential of Obama’s second term in the White House, with major stakes for an array of Washington interests. Should Democrats fall short, it will be seen as just another example of Obama’s lack of clout on Capitol Hill. In a last-ditch move, Obama has begun leaning on the Congressional Black Caucus — chiefly Reps. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, Terri Sewell of Alabama and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi — to come through for him on the floor.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore, speaks during an interview with the Associated Press in his office on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, May 13, 2015.
Boehner, Ryan and the GOP leadership have a chance to notch a significant political victory. Republicans appear likely to deliver the vast majority of votes on a major bill that will be signed into law.
Pelosi may face the most difficult path of any party leader on this issue, and she has not publicly declared how she’ll vote. She is loyal to Obama, and she played the most important role in the biggest legislative victory of his presidency — passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. But labor unions are one of the most important constituencies for House Democrats, and they bitterly oppose fast track.
Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), one of Pelosi’s closest allies, is leading the anti-fast-track faction and will help round up at least 150 Democratic “no” votes. Pelosi has expressed her own preference for an alternative bill by Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, that the White House opposes. So when fast-track eventually does come up for a vote, all Democrats will be closely watching their leader.
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) also hasn’t said how he’ll vote. His noncommittal stance on this issue means the White House must have total confidence in its whip count, since Hoyer seems unlikely to wrangle votes if things go awry on the House floor.
Lauren French contributed to this report.State newspaper says police were acting on a tipoff that militants from the Muslim minority were being sheltered in the village
Myanmar is to investigate police officers who were filmed beating Rohingya villagers, an unusual admission that security forces may have carried out abuses against the Muslim minority.
The office of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader, said action would be taken after a YouTube user called Rohingya Blogger posted the video over the weekend. At least four officers have been detained, a statement said.
Filmed by a police officer smoking a cigarette, it shows his colleagues kicking two men sitting on the ground and using a baton on them, while dozens of other male villagers sit alongside with their heads down.
The Rohingya are a minority of about a million people who, despite living in the country for generations, are treated as illegal immigrants and denied citizenship. The government and nationalist Buddhists have persecuted them for years.
The Guardian has been unable to authenticate the video, because it was purportedly shot in Rakhine state, where the government is conducting an intense military operation and has blocked access for aid workers and journalists.
Myanmar says it is responding to several Rohingya militant attacks that killed nine police officers on 9 October.
Nobel laureates warn Aung San Suu Kyi over 'ethnic cleansing' of Rohingya Read more
The state counsellor’s office, run by Aung San Suu Kyi, said the footage was filmed on 5 November during a “clearance operation” in Kotankauk village.
It named four officers in the video, including the one who filmed it. “Those who [were] initially identified were detained. Further investigations are being carried out to expose other police officers who beat villagers in the operation.”
The state-run newspaper, the Global New Light of Myanmar, cited the police as saying the operation was launched in response to an attack by motorbike gunmen against police in which a lance corporal died.
It said the police were acting on tipoff that militants were being sheltered in the village and that a man living there had distributed “placards containing fake information” used during a protest when foreign diplomats visited the area.
The government had organised a trip for ambassadors to the area after embassies requested access. Rohingya rights activists say residents were ordered not to complain.
The recent bloodshed is the most deadly since hundreds of Rohingya were killed in clashes in 2012 and more than 100,000 were forced into squalid camps. A further 50,000 have fled to Bangladesh since October.
Last week, more than a dozen fellow Nobel laureates criticised Aung San Suu Kyifor the crackdown, warning of a tragedy that amounted to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
The army and officials have always alleged they are following the law, despite satellite images of burned villages and numerous reports of rape, indiscriminate killings and attacks on civilians.Ever wondered if Canada’s spy agency has a file on you? We know from Edward Snowden that spy agencies are vacuuming up unprecedented amounts of information. That got me wondering if, somewhere in a Canadian Security Intelligence Service database, my name would turn up.
So in January, I asked CSIS to search their records by filling out a form on the federal government’s Access to Information and Privacy website. The form took less than five minutes to fill out. Beyond basic personal information – like my home address and birthday – I was asked to tell them what I was requesting. This is what I wrote:
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“I’d like to be provided with documents or be informed about the existence of documents related to my identity. This might include but is not limited to, internet surveillance, publication history (I’m a journalist), travel history or any record where my name (“Craig Desson”) occurs.” My expectation of even having a CSIS record was low. Besides watching a few ISIS propaganda videos on YouTube, I couldn’t imagine how I might have attracted CSIS’s attention. That’s why I felt a minor panic when a sturdy envelope arrived in the mail three weeks later. It was a plain and brown, and the return address was simply “Access and Information Privacy,” care of a post office box in Ottawa – the same mail box that appears on the CSIS letterhead. (It seems everything about CSIS is wrapped in secrecy, even their mailing address.)
My CSIS file
I tore open the envelope and looked at 15 crisp pages of information printed on some nice heavy stationery. There was a two-page cover letter, a printout of one of my Toronto Star articles, and a scant bit of information – such as employer and date of birth – spread over 12 pages. The letter was signed by “Ken Benson, Head, Disclosure I,” and included sentences like this: “This is a Program Record and not a Personal Information Bank and thus contains no personal information about you.”
It also had this line: “Some of the information has been exempted from disclosure by virtue of one or more sections... as it relates to the efforts of Canada towards detecting, prevention or suppressing subversive or hostile activities.” The Toronto Star article was about a Chrome plug-in that alerts users to sites that used unencrypted cookies. It didn’t mention CSIS but did allude to the Communication Security Establishment, another Canadian spy agency. I assumed this was collected as part of an internal media monitoring program.
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The rest was 11 pages of “SCREENING REQUEST INFORMATION.” This is related, I believe, to a background check I requested from the RCMP before I covered Prince Charles’s visit to Toronto in 2012. It was pretty oblique. I decided to contact CSIS to see if they could help me make sense of it all. The cover letter said if I had questions I could contact CSIS using the phone number and address in the letterhead. I called twice but nobody picked up, so I left messages. I also sent some questions to the email address that was provided when I made my request. Ken Benson replied with an attachment that had answers to the questions I had emailed before. The one I was most interested in was why some of the information they had about me was exempt from disclosure. The answer? “Section 21 of the Privacy Act is an exemption that is used to protect, among other things, employee names, certain parts of our organizational structure and other information which may not necessarily be personal in nature. What we are saying is that there is information in the records we processed that we determined needed to be withheld because its release would be injurious to the efforts of Canada toward detecting, preventing, or suppressing subversive or hostile activities.” In other words, we can’t tell you. They confirmed that they had my Toronto Star article because they had collected it as part of a CSIS media monitoring program. “While the article is part of a Program Record (PRN939 – Communications) and is not part of any personal Information Bank, it was provided to you nonetheless as part of our Duty to Assist.” Well, thanks for that. I also asked how long my background check would be kept on record, to which they replied “from six years to 50 years.” And after that? Well, if it’s deemed “historical,” it might be shipped off to the National Archives. So will the record of me on a CSIS database outlast any other digital mention of my name? I can only wonder. On the other hand, CSIS is withholding information about me. Kind of feels like a badge of honour.A Libyan military commander is taking legal action against Jack Straw, to find out if the ex-foreign secretary signed papers allowing his rendition.
Abdel Hakim Belhadj claims CIA agents took him from Thailand to Gaddafi-led Libya, via UK-controlled Diego Garcia.
His lawyers have served papers on Mr Straw after the Sunday Times reported claims that he allowed this to happen.
UK ministers have denied any complicity in rendition or torture and Mr Straw did not comment further.
He said he could not do so because of the ongoing police investigation into the UK's alleged role in illegal rendition.
Earlier this month, the BBC revealed that the UK government had approved the rendition of Mr Belhadj and his wife - Fatima Bouchar - to Col Muammar Gaddafi's regime, though it was unclear at what level.
On 15 April, the Sunday Times published an article, which quoted sources as alleging Mr Straw had personally authorised Mr Belhadj's rendition to Libya.
On Tuesday, Mr Belhadj's lawyers - Leigh Day & Co - served papers on Mr Straw, referencing the article and seeking his response to allegations that he was complicit in torture and misfeasance in public office.
The civil action is against Mr Straw personally - Mr Belhadj's lawyers believe it is the first time legal action of this kind has been taken against a former foreign secretary.
Mr Belhadj and his wife allege Mr Straw was complicit in the "torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, batteries and assaults" which they say were perpetrated on them by Thai and US agents, as well as the Libyan authorities.
They are seeking damages from Mr Straw for the trauma involved.
Analysis Serving legal papers on Jack Straw probably marks the high water mark in this case, in terms of trying to apportion blame in Britain for what happened to Mr Belhadj. The only person higher up the chain at the time was Tony Blair. And much as Mr Blair's detractors may want to see him embroiled, as PM it is unlikely he would have been involved in the minutiae of a secret intelligence operation. So for now, this will be a matter for the Foreign Office, MI6, the Met Police, Jack Straw and the lawyers. Whatever the final outcome, Mr Belhadj will draw some comfort that his case is now being aired in the most public way possible.
'Inhuman and degrading treatment'
Downing Street declined to comment on the case but said it was "looking closely" at the legal action brought against Mr Straw.
A spokeswoman said: "The Government's position on torture is well-known. We stand firmly against it and any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. We do not condone that and we do not ask others to do it on our behalf."
In 2004, Mr Belhadj was the leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and was living in exile after leading opposition to the Gaddafi regime. MI5 had believed the LIFG was close to al-Qaeda.
Mr Belhadj alleges he and his wife were detained by CIA agents in Bangkok as they travelled to Britain to claim political asylum - he believes the plane they were transported on refuelled at the UK territory of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean.
Mr Belhadj claims that he and his wife were tortured during the rendition process and in Libya, where he was subsequently imprisoned.
Papers have already been served in the High Court to sue the UK government, its security forces, and senior MI6 officer Sir Mark Allen, for damages.
Mr Belhadj's lawyers said their letter of claim against Jack Straw relied on the same allegations and evidence set out in the letters to Sir Mark and the government.
They said Mr Straw had been foreign secretary with responsibility for MI6 at the time of Mr Belhadj's rendition and that a 2004 letter from Sir Mark to Libya's former intelligence chief congratulated the Libyans on Mr Belhadj's safe arrival.
'Neither confirm nor deny'
The lawyers said they anticipated that Mr Straw's response would mirror the government solicitor's "neither confirm nor deny" reaction to their previous letters of claim regarding Mr Belhadj.
They said therefore that, while Mr Straw would ordinarily have six months in which to respond their allegations, they sought a response by close of business on 17 May "following which proceedings may be issued against you without further notice".
If Mr Straw did not admit liability within that time, they said they expected him to provide copies of the documents described in the Sunday Times article and copies of government communication and memos relating to Mr Belhadj.
Image caption Mr Belhadj wants to know whether Jack Straw personally approved his illegal rendition in 2004.
Sapna Malik, a partner at Leigh Day & Co, said she believed Mr Straw did approve Mr Belhadj's rendition: "If the former foreign secretary does not now own up to his role in this extraordinary affair, he will need to face the prospect of trying to defend his position in court."
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Ms Malik said that the real issue was not the amount of compensation but a public acknowledgement and an admission from Mr Straw and those involved about their role in the rendition.
"It's not some sort of cheap publicity stunt, but there are real concerns here about who signed off on what."
'Not complicit'
The Metropolitan Police is investigating Mr Belhadj's claims and Ms Malik said that if its inquiry were broadened, Mr Straw could face criminal prosecution.
In an interview with Radio 4 last year, Mr Straw said the Labour government had been opposed to unlawful rendition.
"We were opposed to any use of torture or similar methods. Not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it and nor did we turn a blind eye to it."
But Mr Straw added, "No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time."
In an interview with the BBC, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said: "This is one of a number of civil actions that are going to be terribly embarassing for M15 and M16."Endless. Pointless. Why was she still here? Why was she still sitting through this, despite more pressing, more urgent business being at her doorstep.
The ace of Beacon's first years, Pyrrha Nikos, wanted to simply get out of class. Despite being the ever serious student she was, even she could barely focus on the lesson at hand, her notebook filled with the few scattered words that actually stuck in her head long enough to be jotted down. The reason for her lack of concentration? It was obvious, right? It was Ruby, it had to be. In her head was a typhoon of emotions and thoughts.
On one hand, Pyrrha, despite some of the others in her dirty little secret passing it off and joking it away, was one of the few who took it seriously. Though, who was she kidding? Even those jokers realized the high odds. Everything Pyrrha had shown them matched up, and even as illogical as it sounded, it still sounded more logical than any other theory. No body was found, despite Grimm not even needing to eat, leaving that up in the air. Her weapon was never recovered either. It made sense that the Red Queen might end up being Ruby, come back from the dead with some new ability to control Grimm. And this terrified Pyrrha to no known end. And why wouldn't it? It took a special kind of hunter, a special kind of person, to not shiver when facing down a Grimm. Most simply suppressed it, but there were few to none who were immune to that deep, instinctive fear. Knowing that a huntress, even one as looked down on by her peers (mostly out of jealousy, mind you) as Ruby, leading a group of Grimm, creatures born, or spawned or whatever, specifically to hunt down and kill humans and faunus, creatures with abilities far beyond that of a normal man or woman. And now, they had a leader, one with intelligence far surpassing any living Grimm.
On the other hand, Pyrrha was absolutely pissed off. And to her, the anger was justifiable. It didn't matter what anyone said, she couldn't have been wrong. Even among her peers, her generation, she was considered one of the best. Flawless in nearly every aspect, with more experience in actual hunts than most, as well as a track record that spoke volumes of her abilities. On the other hand was Ruby, a girl virtually unknown with probably the bare minimum training and very good luck. Why did Pyrrha have to dance on pins and needles to avoid letting others know that she was one of those who took Ruby out. If anyone were to look at their worth, it stood to reason that they would obviously see Pyrrha as being much greater than Ruby. So what about the loss of one huntress, even in the circumstances the world is currently facing, in comparison to the one who lived. Pyrrha felt- no, she knew that she was definitely worth ten, no a hundred Ruby Rose's.
With all of this running through Pyrrha's head faster than Nora on her fifty meter dash after consuming enough sugar to kill a hundred diabetics, Pyrrha remained staring into space, her concentration lapsing. It was only when that familiar chime, the one indicating the end of the period, and the beginning of lunch, that Pyrrha snapped to attention. Gathering her things, Pyrrha threw them all into her bag and slung it over her shoulders. Exiting the classroom, she made her way to Beacon's cafeteria. In there, she found the two she was looking for; Blake and Weiss.
In order to finally give herself some peace, Pyrrha felt it was necessary to throughly prepare for what would be coming, and decided to ask Ruby's former teammates if they knew anything that could help her take the little red speed demon on. Grabbing her food, she swiftly took one of the empty seats at the same table as the two.
"Good afternoon Weiss, Blake."
"Hello Pyrrha," Weiss replied, sounding rather chipper.
"..." Meanwhile, Blake was rather silent. It wasn't as though she was ignoring Pyrrha, but rather that she was simply out of it.
"Well, what can I do for you, Pyrrha?"
"I wanted to talk. About," and carefully looking around, Pyrrha leaned in a bit closer and lowered her voice before resuming. "Ruby."
Immediately, even Blake's attention returned to the situation, and the three of them quietly got up and left the cafeteria. Without a word, they made their way to the academy's courtyard, a rather popular place during lunchtime which, for some unknown reason, was rather empty right now. Just a few scattered students here and there. And no faunuses. Perfect. Settling near one of the larger trees, with it being between them and any possible prying eyes from the direction of the cafeteria, Pyrrha continued their conversation.
"I want to talk about Ruby."
"But Pyrrha," Weiss interjected. "There isn't much to talk about. You already told us what you found out about this Red Queen crap. Personally, I don't see it as being any big deal. I mean, even if that little red nuisance survived what we'd done to her, there was no possible way that she could have raised an army of Grimm. Perhaps she's working with this Red Queen, in which case it seems unlikely that any possible resources this Queen has would be wasted on coming back here to take revenge on us."
"Weiss, what if I'm correct? I need to know anything you can tell me about Ruby. If she attacks-"
"Then we deserve it." Pyrrha and Weiss looked at Blake, who finally spoke her mind. On their faces was a simple look of confusion and disbelief at what she'd just said. Especially considering she would likely also feel whatever was coming their way. But before either could ask her what the heck was wrong with her, Blake continued. "We deserve any revenge she wants to take on us. What we did, what all of us did, in unforgivable. I'm hoping, I'm praying that she's still alive, even if she's the Red Queen. Even if she wants to take her revenge on us, I would not complain. We have to right."
"You idiot, do you even realize what you're saying?! If she comes back, then everything we all have will be lost! And I don't know about you, but I have a lot to lose. And besides, isn't this a little hypocritical, especially with what you've likely done as a dog of the White Fang?"
Those words were not lost on Blake, who immediately put the morbid conversation on hold, and glared at Weiss with a ferocity that one would liken to a lion or a panther; sharp, and ready to pounce.
"Watch you mouth you self entitled bitch." At that word, Weiss noticeably flinched, especially as she'd never seen Blake so much as utter a small profanity. But before she could try and act a little offended, Blake cut her off. "First, that was- is my past. Second, what give you the right to even speak about it? Next time you mention that, I will silence you. I'm out of here." Picking herself u, Blake began to walk away when another thought came to mind. Turning to back to Weiss and Pyrrha, she finished. "Oh, and I'm a cat. Next time you call me a dog, I'll show you my bite." Narrowing her eyes and finishing with a glare, Blake walked away from the two girls, leaving them wondering just what the faunus girl was capable of.
Later that night, in the dorm room for team RWBY, a certain cat faunus was sitting up in bed, reading another book from her collection. It was a collection of old children's stories. Well, the actual stories in the book are copies of the originals, which were much less children friendly. The current story she was reading was a rather interesting one. The main character was a young female, on her way to visit her grandmother whose house lie deep in he woods. The girls choice of attire was actually a plain dress and a red hooded cape. In it, she gets to the house, only to find that her grandmother was eaten by a wolf. There are two sides to the story though. In the kid version, the grandmother is saved by a passing woodsman. However, in the original, the little girl in the red riding hood is also eaten by the wolf, and both the grandmother and little red die. It's a rather disturbing tale, but to Blake it felt eerily similar to her current circumstances. The big bad wolf, or rather ten in this case, all who decided to end up taking little red out of the picture. Only this time, little red does indeed come back. And the big bad wolf was currently shaking at the thought.
The thought that she, thankfully, did not lead to Ruby's death. At the same time, she feared the retribution Ruby would be bringing with her. She knew she deserved it, but at the same time she was paralyzed with fear at the thought that Ruby was gathering Grimm to simply come back and take her revenge on all of them. And right now, Blake could only shiver in her bed. Despite the warm air blasting through the air conditioning unit, and despite the lit candelabra nearby providing her some light for reading, she felt an indescribable chill running through her spine. Finally putting the book down and blowing the lights out, Blake slipped back under her covers and tried to let sleep take a hold of her. The story, fresh in her mind, incited tears from Blake as she tried to sleep, hoping that the world of dreams would take away this pain. Hopefully before it was Ruby who got the chance.
The morning didn't bring any happier news or feelings for Blake. Opening her eyes to an empty room became a new thing to her. With Weiss hanging outside of the team now, Yang away on some unknown mission, and Ruby... well, that much speaks for itself really. But with all of this going on, Blake has been the only one staying in the dorm room as of late. It was lonely, it was stifling. Thinking on it for a slight second, Blake gave a slight chuckle at the thought. Well, they always say that rabbits can die of loneliness, and yet here she was, a cat faunus, who was getting sick and tired of being alone. And yet, who exactly could she go to at this time? It's not like anyone would be able to understand the situation, or rather they would. And they would likely have the right idea in mind with how to deal with it, basically turning Blake and the others in.
Hopping out of her bed, Blake got dressed in her casual clothes and decided on a trip out to town. Grabbing her Gambol Shroud and placing it in a sheathe on the small of her back, she left for the school's front gate, where the shuttle- well it's called a shuttle, it's just one of the schools older Bullhead's being used for transportation purposes, sort of like a bus- would take her out to town.
After being dropped off in one of Vale's nicer, busier sections, Blake immediately headed to the little spot she had in mind earlier. It was a nice cafe, just a bit east of where the Bullhead dropped her off. It would be maybe a four or five minute walk. And without much to stop and look at along the way, that's about how long it actually took Blake to reach her destination. Entering, she was greeted by a familiar face. As she had come to this shop rather often as of late, the manager and a few of the waitresses knew her and she was on rather good terms with them. Taking her usual spot near the window at the front of the shop, Blake placed her usual order and pulled a book out of the bag she'd brought with her. It was the same book of tales that she'd been reading the night before. Using the ribbon that was attached to the fancy leather bound book, Blake opened it back up to the story she'd stopped on the night previously.
With her nose buried in the book, Blake passed the time as her order came. Sipping down on the drink whose name she still didn't think she could pronounce without some sort of guide, Blake let the disturbing take on children's stories, or rather what was really the origins of those stories, whatever, sober her thoughts up a bit. So much so that she almost missed the newscast that had just popped on.
'Well I mean, you know Lisa that things have been getting worse as of late, right?'
'Indeed Tom. What with the discovery of three hunter's corpses, all sporting the same evidence as the past ones, it looks like the Red Queen has brought her rampage a little closer to Vale.'
Hearing that word, no those words uttered together, Blake immediately became more alert of the news.
"Hey, manager!" Blake shouted, grabbing him as fast as she could. Thankfully he was nearby. "Raise the volume please."
"Eh, sure." Without asking why, he simply complied with Blake's random outburst and wish.
'You sure said it, huh? Reports indicate that the bodies, much like all of the other huntsmen and huntresses's bodies that have been appearing as of late had a multitude of slash marks, as though originating from a curved bladed weapon. And get this, included was also evidence of being attacked by a wild beast, as large claw marks were found across the bodies of the hunters.'
'Wow, that is freaky. Well, what could you tell us about the hunter's mark?'
'More like marks in this case, Lisa. From the reports gathered from the HA, it seems like the team had flagged a hunt for a nest of Nevermores, of all things. Remains found at the scene indicates that quite a few must have no doubt been killed, however there was no indication that the primary target had been hunted.'
'The primary target?'
'Yes. In this case, the HA had a bounty out on a rather large Nevermore. Initial estimates put it's age around the one hundred and fifty to two hundred range. It was a rather large threat. But one thing that's strange is that there was supposed to be a fourth hunter among the crew found, and yet no other body, or DNA was found at the scene...'
Just as Blake was getting engrossed in the report, a loud crash sounded behind her. It seemed that a customer had gotten startled and stood up too swiftly. While the customer helped the waitress clean up a bit of the mess, Blake thought she heard the customer mutter something.
"Fuck! There was a fourth?"
Her ears twitching under her bow, Blake immediately whirled around and looked at the customer. She couldn't see much as the customer had a red hoodie on, but it didn't really matter. What they'd just said, that set alarm bells off in Blake's mind. Nothing else mattered now but finding out what this person knew. But before she could do much, the person seemed finished with everything. Placing some lien on the table, the person muttered their thanks, told the waitress to keep the change, and left in a quick hurry. After the customer had gotten out of the door, Blake told the waitress to put her meal on her tab, grabbed all of her gear, packed up, and readied herself to leave. Rushing out the front door, she looked around, and found the person heading away. Based on the smaller body frame, and the thinner figure, Blake assumed it was a female. Blake jeans, red hoodie, and some boots. Noting this down, Blake immediately set after this person, trying her damndest to not get caught while tailing her. But it was for naught it seemed, as a few moments later the hood seemed to jerk a bit, and the person set off on a full on sprint away. No time to think, Blake gave chase, immediately following the person in the hood.
Weaving through the crowds proved to be no problem for Blake, who was used to swimming through obstacles. But the person ahead of her seemed just as good, likely due to their shorter stature. And with her speed, Blake was amazed that the other party could weave through so well. Concentrating, Blake tried to see if she could focus on the other person. Blocking out all of the surrounding noise she could, she tried zeroing in on the person she was chasing.
"Who the hell is following me? They couldn't have figured anything out, right?"
That was further proof that this person knew something. Taking a chance, Blake increased her speed. After a few more minutes of running, the mystery person ran into an alley to the left. Catching up and turning the corner, Blake saw them standing there in the alley, looking up and down for an exit. A dead end. How fortuitous. Pulling Gambol Shroud from her back, Blake made a show of cocking the gun portion, and spoke to the person before her.
"Don't move." Hearing her voice, the other person flinched a bit. "Put your hands up, and turn around slowly. I see you have no weapon, and I |
a pre-season game a couple of years ago and I didn't really celebrate then," Bale told the Daily Mail.
"I suppose it depends on how you feel on the day. If it's a 91st-minute winner, can you control yourself? That's the question."
Madrid begin their Champions League defence at home to APOEL on Wednesday, and are among the favourites to win the trophy for a third consecutive year.
On last month's group stage draw, Bale said: "I was in a meeting when the draw was made and my phone was going off constantly and I thought,'something's happened.'
"I remember playing against Real Madrid when I was still at Tottenham and 'Crouchy' [Peter Crouch] being sent off after only 15 minutes and that killed the game for us.
"All my friends are still Tottenham fans. That is their team in the Premier League and I will certainly have a lot of ticket requests."Theropods underwent 12 stages of miniaturisation – from 163kg beasts to becoming the first birds on Earth, study finds
Huge meat-eating dinosaurs shrank steadily over 50 million years to evolve into small, flying birds, researchers say.
The branch of theropod dinosaurs which gave rise to modern birds decreased inexorably in size from 163kg beasts that roamed the land, to birds weighing less than 1kg over the period.
The radical transformation began around 200m years ago and was likely driven by a move to the trees where creatures with smaller, lighter bodies and other features, such as large eyes for 3D vision, fared better than others.
Scientists pieced together the dinosaurs' sustained shrinkage after analysing more than 1,500 anatomical features of 120 species of theropods and early birds.
The evolutionary tree reveals that the theropod ancestors of modern birds underwent 12 substantial decreases in size that led to archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird on Earth. The rate at which they evolved distinct features, such as feathers, wings and wishbones, was four times faster than adaptations in other dinosaurs.
"Birds evolved through a unique phase of sustained miniaturisation in dinosaurs," said Michael Lee at the University of Adelaide. "Being smaller and lighter in the land of giants, with rapidly evolving anatomical adaptations, provided these bird ancestors with new ecological opportunities, such as the ability to climb trees, glide and fly. Ultimately, this evolutionary flexibility helped birds survive the deadly meteorite impact which killed off all their dinosaurian cousins," he added. The study is published in the journal, Science.
The steady reduction in size saw the two-legged land-based theropods evolve new bird-like features, including shorter snouts, smaller teeth and insulating feathers.
Gareth Dyke, a vertebrate palaeontologist and co-author of the study at Southampton University said: "The dinosaurs most closely related to birds are all small, and many of them, such as the aptly named Microraptor, had some ability to climb and glide."
In an accompanying article, Michael Benton at Bristol University, said that the long-term trend that led to modern birds was probably shaped by the animals taking up in new habitats. "The crucial driver may have been a move to the trees, perhaps to escape from predation or to exploit new food resources," he writes.
A smaller body size would have benefited animals living in the trees, while enlarged eyes would improve their 3D vision to avoid collisions with branches. Insulating feathers could have helped them hunt at night, and elongated forelimbs gave them increasingly more impressive wings to enable more daring leaps from tree to tree, Benton writes.Ubaldo Jimenez isn’t what he used to be. His pitches have all declined in velocity and bite since his peak in Colorado, and his Cleveland numbers, both superficial and underlying, look pale in comparison. And this with a move out of one of the most extreme hitter’s parks in the big leagues to one more friendly to pitchers.
But 2013 was a story of redemption for Jimenez, and his adjustment to the current state of his stuff was a big part of that. The Orioles believe in that adjustment, hoping it will stick enough to make the four-year, $50 million investment they made in him look wise.
First, let’s look at how stark the decline in his stuff had become. Starting with his age-25 season in 2009, here are the swinging strike metrics on his primary pitches over the past few seasons.
The underlying cause may have been velocity drop. All of his pitches generally dropped in velocity over the same time period, most notably his four-seamer, which dropped from 96+ to 91+. Command of those pitches is always an issue with Jimenez, but that seems come and go as it pleases, and there’s no linear loss of command as there is with swinging strike stuff.
Pitchers sometimes regain stuff and velocity, but at 30, that seems unlikely for Ubaldo going forward. So it’s probably good news that the change in Ubaldo last season was *not* one about regaining stuff or velocity. His change-up (14% whiffs), slider (11%) and curve (7%) — all pitches that used to be plus in terms of whiffs — are still all below average when compared to the league.
Somehow Jimenez arrested a three-year decline in swinging strike and strikeout rates last season, though. Without regaining velocity or bite on his arsenal. Hey look at that, he threw his split-finger more than ever. Maybe we should all learn the split-finger like Jimenez did.
The narrative isn’t super clean. Jimenez has had a split-finger for a long time. But he hasn’t used it like he did in 2013 ever before. Over his career going into 2013, he’d thrown the pitch 3% of the time according to BrooksBaseball. Last year that number was 14%. Add a pitch with a 17% whiff rate, even if that whiff rate is basically league average, and you’ll see more strikeouts.
It’s a trend you’ll see across his arsenal. By any classification system on this site, he’s thrown the fastball less as he’s aged. We know there’s some evidence pitchers use their fastball less as they age, and Jimenez puts this into focus — as the fastball becomes less effective, you have to throw your junk more.
Of course there’s evidence that heavy breaking pitch usage leads to more injuries, but when you’re buying a 30-year-old pitcher, that’s just part of the price. If this new version of Jimenez sticks, he is a pitcher that has manged 30+ starts since he became a regular. And past disabled list stints are still the best predictor of future disabled list stints.
There’s some evidence that this will be a good fit for the Orioles. Recently, Jimenez’ ground-ball rates have been mediocre, but his career number (47.6%) and increased reliance on off-speed stuff suggest that there’s some bounce in those numbers. If he can garner grounders, the Orioles are ready. They had the fourth-best batting average on balls in play allowed and the second-best team Ultimate Zone Rating in the American league. They shifted their infield defense more than anyone last year with 470 shifts according to Jeff Zimmerman’s piece in The Hardball Times Annual. Once Manny Machado is healthy again, this is a defense that can gobble up ground balls.
With a little bit of help from his defenders, and perhaps even more split-fingers in the future, this new Ubaldo Jimenez could easily put up a 2014 season similar to the one he had in 2013. Even with aggressive aging projections, that probably makes this contract a value. And maybe all it took was throwing the fastball less and the split-finger more.Sen. Christopher Coons set the liberal Twitter world ablaze Friday night when he told MSNBC that the FBI has transcripts of intercepted calls that may spell out collusion between President Trump’s campaign and top Russians, maybe even President Vladimir Putin.
The Delaware Democrat, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, further said the transcripts “provide…. very critical insights” into whether Russian intelligence “were cooperating, were colluding” with the Trump team.
It appeared to be the first government disclosure that such top secret transcripts, likely the product of National Security Agency intercepts, exist.
The MSNBC producer for host Andrea Mitchell later tweeted, “Sen. Coons tells @mitchellreports that the FBI has transcripts that may show Russian leaders colluding with the Trump campaign.”
The tweet triggered over 3,000 gleeful retweets, such as, “If true Trump and his team are spending their golden years in Guantanamo.”
The senator later took to Twitter to tamp down the liberal excitement over a possible smoking gun. He emphasized that such transcripts “could” show collusion. He does not know.
“We need to find [out] whether or not Trump campaign colluded with Russia,” he said.
“He said nothing about what the transcripts say,” Sean Coit, his spokesman, told The Washington Times. “The key is that he did not say that transcripts proving collusion exist. Just that transcripts exist. And he did not say anything definitive about what those transcripts show.”
Both the Senate and House Intelligence committees are investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election via propaganda and by hacking into the Democratic Party emails. The big question is whether Trump people conspired with Russian intelligence, which directed the cyber attacks.
Mr. Coons told MSNBC, “There are transcripts that provide very helpful, very critical insights into whether or not Russian intelligence and senior Russian political leaders, including Vladimir Putin, were cooperating, were colluding with the Trump campaign at the highest levels to influence the outcome of our election. And if that information is stonewalled or hidden away and if we are not able to get that on the Senate intelligence committee, House intelligence committee then I think that has real consequences for our democracy.”
Of the transcripts, he said, “I have not seen them. I believe they exist.”
Mr. Coons was following a theme set by other Democrats: that FBI Director James Comey, in closed-door briefings, may not have been forthcoming in disclosing all he knows about possible Trump-Russia contacts.
The New York Times reported last month that the FBI has evidence of “repeated contacts” between Trump campaign staff and Russian intelligence. In other words: evidence of collision.
White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has said that the FBI deputy director told him the New York Times story was “BS.”
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said such contacts never happened and has called Times stories “false.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, California Republican, has said at two press conferences that he has seen no evidence of Trump-Russia contacts or collusion during the campaign.The fifth instalment of the Gran Turismo PlayStation epic has slipped back from 5 November, probably to the first week of December 2010. But this month’s CAR Magazine – on sale now – reveals the new game’s hero car, the ultimate track racer designed by Red Bull and GT coders Polyphony.
The 249mph racer, the Red Bull X1 prototype, is a collaboration between legendary F1 designer Adrian Newey and Kazunori Yamauchi, the genius behind Gran Turismo. Yamauchi took time out from his round-the-clock work mastering the final game, to tell CAR magazine all about Gran Turismo 5. Buy the November 2010 issue to discover the X1’s full tech spec, and how much faster Sebastian Vettel is around the Suzuka track compared with his RB6 F1 racer.
CAR: The tie-up with Red Bull Racing sounds very exciting. Was it your idea to approach Adrian Newey to design a unique race car?
Kazunori Yamauchi: 'This was an idea that I had kept to myself for several years. The concept for achieving the “Fastest Car on Land” was already set prior to this, and the design for the car was being worked on within Polyphony. But my next thought was that if we were to create this, that we would want to work together with an experienced racing car designer. If possible the best in the world, the “Real Deal” so to speak. And thanks to Red Bull, a path connecting us to Adrian was opened for us.
'I can’t forget how nervous I felt when we went to Red Bull Racing in Milton Keynes and presented the model we designed to Adrian for the very first time. I had fully expected to be scolded, that he would tell us that “this is a useless piece of junk”. But Adrian was actually interested in our sketches and our modelling, and liked the design. And he proceeded to give us finely detailed, wonderful advice that only Adrian would know. He also presented us with a great technical concept that is prohibited in the world of F1 within which Adrian normally resides, the X1 Prototype.'
How did you find working with him and are you pleased with the way the X1 turned out?
'Adrian is a person that can understand the simple facts, that something beautiful, is just simply beautiful, without question. He did not seem like a hard-headed engineer type, rather, he was an artist. The communication between Adrian and myself was very smooth and exciting. It was something like an improvisation between two jazz musicians. Through that session with Adrian, I was endowed with this priceless experience, like that of a student being given confidence from a teacher or a mentor.'
Have you driven their F1 simulator? How does it compare to GT5?
'I have in fact tried driving an F1 simulator before. I only have one thing to say about the experience… I really envy that incredible hardware and facility! I want to try using that hardware with GT5! And - I think one day it will happen.'
GT5 has been a long time in development. Have there been problems or is the timeline a reflection of the sophistication of the new game?
'The development of the first Gran Turismo took 5 years, and even with three titles released between GT4 and GT5 this is the longest development time we’ve taken since that first game. I can physically feel myself getting older and older when creating video games!
'The reasons for the development taking so long has to do with the great increase in the quality expected from a product since moving to the PS3, and also because the hurdles we set for ourselves were very high. Our objective was to create a great revolution in GT5, something to the likes of which has never been seen since GT1 back in 1997, so we had to set our sights very high. As a result, GT5 became an extremely large and complex project, almost like the Apollo Space Programme.'
How big a leap is the simulation of car dynamics and the graphics over GT4?
'I think you can see the evolution in graphics as soon as you see the screen. The amount of information on that screen is significantly higher than in GT4 and the precision of the car models have been improved by a hundredfold. It’s also important to note that weather and time-of-day transitions have been implemented. This has great meaning to both the graphics and the physics. And the physics have been revised 100% for GT5. If you accelerate, brake, turn the steering and feel the information coming from the front and rear tires, you’ll be able to tell the difference immediately. And while it has now become a tool that nurtures real racing drivers as in the GT Academy project (run in conjuction with Nissan the Academy pitched the best gamers from around the world in real race cars. The winner of the first competition in 2008, Lucas Ordóñez, is still competing with success), GT5 is also designed to answer to the expectations of a wide range of players at the same time.'
Expectation is huge for GT5. Are you confident the new game will satisfy fans of the game?
'I‘m glad that expectations are high, but of course that brings some pressure at the same time. The final objective of Gran Turismo is always to answer to the expectations of the users, and furthermore, to exceed those expectations. It would make me very happy if we’re able to satisfy fans, and at the same time surprise them.'
What part of GT5 makes you the most proud?
'I think it’s the innovation. I think Gran Turismo is something that needs to always continue being innovative.'
Imagine you can only have one car and one track for the rest of your days playing GT5. What would the combination be?
'The Nürburgring has a special place in my heart. Driving there is fun in both real and the virtual. As for the car… the Ferrari 330P4 perhaps. That would be the dream combination.'
>> See the full feature in the November 2010 issue of CAR MagazineFrench authorities have issued new security guidelines for schools, which include three attack drills a year and advice to report on all suspected radicalized students. Teachers and children over 14 years old will now be taught a terror readiness course.
“The recent attacks and the context of the terrorist threat force [us] to maintain a stepped-up vigilance,” according to the official document of the plan, signed on July 29.
The paper also emphasizes the “absolute priority” given to the security at the educational facilities.
Read more
In particular, the plan includes students being taught “life-saving actions,” a step up in security for so-called “vulnerable spaces,” as well as live drills.
The measures were introduced by Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, and they are set to improve security at school upon the students’ return.
So what are those protective measures for schools?
First of all, three “mock attacks” are set to be carried out at schools during the year. Earlier, there used to be two exercises on security. The first of the “mock attacks” will happen before Halloween.
One of the drills is set to involve an “intrusion-type” attack. During the 45-minute exercise, students will have to barricade themselves in the classroom, move away from doors, walls and windows, turn off the lights, and stay as silent as possible. Children will also be asked to lie or sit on the ground for 20 to 30 minutes, the document said.
Read more
The warning given in this type of situation "must be different from the fire alarm" and "should be heard," it added.
Also, on the day before the return to schools, authorities are set to test sending an SMS alert warning students and staff about an attack.
Another measure will be teaching students and staff “life-saving” techniques to improve the "resilience capacities," that is to say "the ability not to be surprised and to have good reactions." Further details about this point will be made precise “before the return to school.”
Thirdly, special attention will be paid to securing "particularly vulnerable areas of schools" (for example, isolated access, especially exposed facades). Also, street supervision in the close proximity of schools will be stepped up.
The document also tackles the importance of informing parents, as well as students, of the new guidelines.
Read more
Last but not least, the text says that a particular attention should be paid to monitoring students and staff "reported to have entered a process of radicalization."
For the most sensitive situations, school leaders would be informed "to study the conditions of schooling and educational follow-up of these young people."
The same step is intended for school staff.
Over the past year, France has seen a growing number of attacks all over the country.
Last month, two attackers slit a priest’s throat in the north of France, taking several worshipers hostage, while in Nice on Bastille Day, 85 people were killed, after a truck driven by an IS sympathizer plowed through a crowd during the celebrations.The bodies of the three young Muslims who were murdered in Chapel Hill were barely cold before the finger-pointing began. Predictably, the religious, including some Muslims, expressed absolute assurance that this was a “hate crime” motivated by Craig Stephen Hicks’s animus towards Muslims.
What was almost as predictable but, perhaps, more reprehensible, was the eagerness of some atheists to blame this crime on the “militancy” of New Atheists. Indeed, some atheists accused people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Lawrence Krauss of creating a climate of hatred and “dehumanization” of Muslims that gave rise to the murders, and even of being complicit in the murders themselves. Those same accusatory atheists sneered at explanations, like mental illness, a parking dispute, and so on, that didn’t involve New Atheism and “Islamophobia” (see here, here, here and here for examples). In the rush to judgement, the facts were either unknown or ignored.
Well, the grand jury that just indicted Hicks didn’t indict him for committing a “hate crime,” which they could have done. As PuffHo says of hate crimes in the state:
To win a hate-crime conviction, however, legal experts say prosecutors would have to prove Hicks deliberately targeted those killed because of their religion, race or national origin. North Carolina does not have a specific “hate crime” statute, though its laws cover such acts of “ethnic intimidation” as hanging a noose, burning a cross or setting fire to a church.
In the absence of strong evidence that there was religious animus behind the crime, a grand jury indicted Hicks on three counts of murder and one count of discharging a firearm in an occupied building. That, of course, won’t stop those with an ideological agenda to continue calling it a hate crime—one motivated by atheism, “Islamophobia,” or both. But the evidence of an anti-Muslim animus is virtually nonexistent in this case. In the only analysis I know that minutely dissected Hicks’s motives, at least from his writings, Michael Nugent, after thoroughly analyzing Hicks’s Facebook page (see his posts here and here), concluded this:
It may be that [Hicks] murdered them because he was an atheist and they were Muslims, and that he simply did not reflect that part of his personality online. But the available evidence does not support that idea, and those who are engaging in speculation should take into account the available evidence.
I agree. Speculation not only outran the facts in this case, but is now obdurately against the facts. Unless and until Hicks or someone else provides evidence that he killed the Muslims in the name of atheism, I won’t accept that as a motive, and until I see evidence that he killed them because they were Muslims, I can’t bring myself to call this a hate crime. That, of course, is in distinction to the actions of those like the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, who told us their reasons for killing.
One of those accused of creating a climate that led to this murder, Sam Harris, produced an eloquent 24-minute audio response on his website, a response called “The Chapel Hill murders and ‘militant’ atheism.” It is a calm, reasoned, and eloquent piece in which Harris not only abjures responsibility for the crime and the climate that supposedly created it, but indicts those like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald, who, by being quick to accuse New Atheists of complicity in the murders, actually endanger the safety of those New Atheists. I know, for example, that Sam gets hate mail in Arabic after these accusations get into the Twi**ersphere. That would scare the bejeesus out of me.
Click on the screenshot below (or the link above) to go to Sam’s podcast:
Sam begins his piece with an expression of horror at the murder of these three young people, and ends with a plea addressed to those of us who want to maintain our rights to speak freely and publicly about what we need to express, including the dangers of faith, and yet not fear for our lives by doing so. Harris asks us to push back on social media against the distortions of people like Greenwald and Aslan who, using the Chapel Hill murders as an excuse, demand that we give up criticizing religion.
As Harris says:
“If you care about our ability to notice, and criticize, and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn this behavior. You have to condemn the deliberate manufacture of lies designed to make it unsafe to have honest conversations.”
Lest we forget that what’s getting lost in these ideological battles is the inexpressible tragedy of people whose lives were snuffed out before they had much of a chance to live them. Here are the victims:
The dead have been identified as: Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, of Chapel Hill
Yusor Mohammad Barakat, 21, of Chapel Hill
Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh Barakat was Mohammad’s husband; Abu-Salha was her sister. Barakat was a second-year student at the UNC School of Dentistry, who was raising money on a fundraising site to provide dental care to Syrian refugees in Turkey. He had been married for just over a month to Yusor Mohammad, who was planning to begin her dental studies at UNC in the fall, according to the school.Blackshades RAT: Australian Federal Police to help the FBI in malware crackdown
Updated
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has confirmed it is assisting the FBI in a global crackdown on computer malware which allows criminals to steal passwords, banking details and remotely activate webcams.
The FBI says Australians are being targeted in a global raid on users of the software program Blackshades Remote Access Tool (RAT).
"This software was sold and distributed to thousands of people in more than 100 countries and has been used to infect more than 500,000 computers worldwide," the FBI said in a statement.
The program has already been used by hackers to steal personal data and launch cyber attacks.
The FBI says the Blackshades RAT malware was uncovered during a previous international investigation called Operation Cardshop, which targeted "carding" crimes and offences in which the internet was used to traffic and exploit stolen credit cards and bank accounts.
Signs your computer may be infected: Mouse cursor moves erratically with no input from user
Web camera light (if equipped) unexpectedly turns on when web camera is not in use
Monitor turns off while in use
Usernames and passwords for online accounts have been compromised
Unauthorised logins to bank accounts or unauthorised money transfers
Text-based chat window appears on your computer's desktop unexpectedly
Computer files become encrypted and ransom demand is made to unlock files
"We spun off a new investigation and ultimately identified one of the Cardshop subjects - Michael Hogue - and Alex Yucel as the Blackshades co-developers," the FBI said.
"Yucel, the alleged head of the organisation that sold the malware, was previously arrested in Moldova and is awaiting extradition to the US."
The FBI says the malware performs unwanted actions on computer systems including hacking into social media accounts, recording keystrokes, accessing documents and photos and activating webcams.
This morning the AFP confirmed it was assisting the United States with the investigation, but a spokeswoman says the extent of its involvement cannot be revealed for operational reasons.
"The AFP continues to urge individuals to ensure they have the most up-to-date anti-virus software to protect themselves from malicious software," the spokeswoman said.
The US has also charged a group of Chinese military officials with corporate espionage, for allegedly stealing secrets from American companies.
Topics: viruses, computers-and-technology, personal-computers, law-crime-and-justice, fraud-and-corporate-crime, software, australia, united-states
First postedAdmittedly, I was mildly shocked and a bit scared when stumbling over @ZackMaril’s recent tweet claiming Clojure was a dying language. A huge discussion was sparked and a lot has been written since. A summary can be found in Arne Brasseur’s post which also offers some good insight into the community behind Clojure. Eric Normand added another layer of abstraction today and collected some more links in this week’s Drama edition of the purelyfunctional.tv newsletter.
I share Dan Lebrero’s sentiment on Clojure. Clojure taught me lessons and introduced concepts to me that I do not want to miss any more. First and foremost I love the built-in immutable collections. Immutability as default is a milestone in my life as a developer. I compare it to git, pair-programming, continuous integration and IntelliJ IDEA (with Cursive now, of course). There was a time when I did not even know about each of these. Now I cannot imagine to ever work without any of them.
In this post I want to emphasize another not less important aspect: Productivity. With Clojure we get a whole lot of stuff done. Seriously.
Learning
My team is working with Clojure for almost three years now. We came from an all-Java world and decided to be a polyglot team. We chose Clojure, Scala and Python to be our primary languages. None of the developers that joined us since has had any prior experience with neither Clojure nor Scala. With our pair programming routine and our microservice architecture we get newbies started up quickly, however.
From this experience I can testify that Clojure is more than easy to pick up. New team members – from student interns to seasoned hackers – are usually productive in days rather than weeks. Our ’non technical‘ team members – production leads, business designers and the like – started hacking Clojure, too and are now able to automate some of their tasks and also to help out the developers.
The fact that Clojure has hardly any syntax and its strive for a radical simplicity contribute to the ease of picking it up. This is much in contrast to e.g. the syntax-heavy Scala.
Implementing
Imagine the following situation: You have some change to apply to your software. By gut feeling it might take the afternoon. You sit down with your pair/buddy and discuss the problem. You are TDD-folks, so you write a test that assumes the yet to be built functionality. It is red. You say „Ok. Before we start coding, let me quickly draft this in some simple pseudo-code.“ You do just that. Your pair runs the test. It is green. You look at each other: „Are we done?“ You look at the code again. You are. It’s been 20 minutes.
This experience you could not have explained to my former java-developer-me no matter how hard you tried. Yet it happens every day. Clojure has that way of seemingly effortless materializing one’s thoughts into working code that I do not know from any other language. (There is, of course, plenty of languages I don’t know.)
Troubleshooting
When analyzing a piece of Clojure code, the code itself quickly steps aside and opens the the view on the problem at hand. It is again the minimalistic syntax and the focus on simplicity that make it easy to reason about the code. The language imposes little mental overhead when investigating issues. This is even true when discussing the problem with someone that does not know Clojure at all. It’s within minutes that the discussion moves from analyzing the code path to the business aspects of the problem.
This also extends to library code which oftentimes is astoundingly concise and gives you a fair chance to understand the inner workings of a library. Again this is not necessarily true when dealing with a language that is richer with syntax options.
Getting stuff done
In the recent discussion it was often said that Clojure does not per se make a team more productive. I think the opposite is true. Clojure’s design decisions do result in an amazingly productive language.
It is efficient to develop new functionality. There are little barriers in analyzing problems and exploring unknown code. It has excellent tooling. It’s fun. Is it dying? Heck, no! If you wanted to kill it, you’d have to wrestle it from my cold, dead hands first.
I can only guess that we are representative for a whole lot of teams in a whole lot of companies which happily and quietly enjoy the productivity of Clojure. No Drama.
PS: In this post I omitted a lot of Clojure’s properties that also contribute to making it an excellent choice. Those include stellar downwards compatibility, simple yet powerful concurrency primitives, JVM and Javascript as target runtimes and many more.
PPS: We still use Scala. We even like it. At least – but not only – for the highly different approach on programming. Looking at a problem from two different angles is a value in itself. Polyglot rocks!
PPPS: Honk if you love Clojure!Fernando Alonso is expecting a "completely different" showing from McLaren next season but stopped short of predicting a title tilt or even race wins.
This year, the first back with Honda power, has been a trying one for McLaren and their engine partner.
Reliability has been sorely lacking which has hampered the team's effort to build up speed.
As such McLaren-Honda head into the season finale ninth place in the championship with just 27 points to their tally.
But despite the difficult season that the team has endured, Alonso is adamant 2016 will be better.
"It's a guess where McLaren-Honda can be next year," he said.
"There is a lot of expectation in the team. We have worked hard all season, united in some difficult moments and always moving forward.
"I think for 2016 the main goal for the team is to come back to where we belong, being competitive, fighting for the top positions.
"I don't know if that means fighting for world championships, I don't know if it means fighting for victories or just being on podiums.
"It is always difficult to know in the complex world of F1. We have big challenges ahead in the winter, and I see all the things we have done in the last couple of months.
"It seems logical and positive. I am sure of a completely different season next year and I am happy with the focus."
Should McLaren finish year down in ninth place it will be the team's worst showing in the championship since 1980.
And Alonso concedes that taking eighth off Sauber, who are nine points ahead, is not a feasible target.
"I think it's unlikely," he said.
"They are nine points ahead. We have scored points three or four times only this year. To score as many as 10 in one race is a bit difficult.
"We will try to do our best, try and perform and have a good weekend but our minds are on next year's project.
"Half of the car is next year's parts and philosophy.
"So I don't think we need to worry about beating Sauber this weekend."[Nano-devel] GNU nano 2.4.0
From: Chris Allegretta Subject: [Nano-devel] GNU nano 2.4.0 Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2015 00:23:37 -0400 User-agent: Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12)
is released, at long last! :) 2015.03.22 - GNU nano 2.4.0 "lizf" is released. This is the first stable release in many years, and brinds together many new features from the 2.3 series: including: a fully functional undo system (now enabled by default), vim-compatible file locking, linter support, formatter support, syntax highlighting flexibility, and many fixes for issues reported since 2.2. Many sincere thanks to all of the bug reports, patches, well wishes and contributions from everyone who has continued to support us. Thank you for using nano! Chris A -- Chris Allegretta http://www.asty.org
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[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]Murad Ali and Arsheen Haji live large thanks to easy access to their home equity lines of credit, joining the many Canadians succumbing to the same temptation.
For the Toronto-area couple, it all started back in 2009 with a lavish $78,000 wedding.
Then came numerous overseas vacations. When touring Egypt, Ali bought four souvenir papyrus scrolls for $6,000. In Italy, Haji picked up a $7,000 Chanel bag. Arsheen Haji and Murad Ali on vacation in Egypt in 2012. They paid for their trip with a home equity line of credit. (Murad Ali)
After the birth of their daughter, the couple moved into a newly built home and spent more than $100,000 on upgrades, including a custom kitchen, hardwood floors and a high-tech fireplace.
The wedding, trips and high-end purchases were made possible with cash from two home equity lines of credit secured against a couple of investment condos the family owns. The debt from those loans now totals $370,000. They also recently got an unsecured $30,000 line of credit to buy solar panels for their new house.
Line of credit addiction
'It's like turning your house into an ATM' - David Trahair, chartered accountant
"We are addicted for sure. Who wouldn't be addicted to something so easy [to get]?" says 35-year-old Ali about the free-flowing lines of credit that have enabled him to splurge on the finer things in life.
"It's easy, accessible cash at a very cheap price. The banks make it so easy for you to obtain it," says the software engineer.
The couple is part of a national trend. Canadians love their lines of credit, which feature interest rates that are much lower than credit cards. Ali pays just 3.25 per cent interest on his home equity lines. Credit card rates typically hover around 20 per cent.
According to an RBC report last week, Canadians' outstanding debt on personal lines of credit hit $266 billion as of April, a 3.2 per cent gain over last year.
It should be noted that the rate of growth is slowing and sits well below historical highs. But one thing's certain. The total debt keeps mounting.
Home equity credit lines allow Canadians to borrow big – up to 80 per cent of a property's value when combined with a mortgage. According to the Canadian Association of Accredited Mortgage Professionals, 22 per cent of homeowners had a home equity line of credit in 2014. They owed an average of $57,000.
"It's like turning your house into an ATM," says chartered accountant David Trahair, who has written numerous books on personal finance. "If you've got a house, especially in Toronto with these insane values, you can borrow an incredible amount of money against the house."
Will it ever end?
Trahair worries that with potentially high credit limits, those lacking self-control can easily get in over their heads. "For spenders, the low interest rate environment is almost like a drug. It's almost impossible for them not to take advantage of these low interest rates and borrow."
But the Canadian Bankers Association is not worried. It states that Canadians are responsible borrowers and that banks are prudent lenders. Before granting a home equity line of credit, "banks complete a thorough due diligence process," said spokeswoman Kate Payne in an email.
Ali is now considering borrowing more money against the equity in his new home. He admits he's antsy about adding to his debt when the family already has a substantial mortgage on their 5,000-square-foot house.
But the place is still largely unfurnished and he's yearning to install a $40,000 glass railing for the staircase.
"Without the glass railing |
a variety of otherwise-marginalized figures in both interesting and refreshingly bland ways. At the end, if intent is unclear and genre is merely an ambiguous guide, then perhaps we can just be charitable and assume the best of a game that has tried.
Here we reach the limits of the MMO genre. The Secret World is not like the The Babadook, which takes Horror as a lens to examine grief and the origins of parental abuse; save for fascinating instances like Richard Sonnac, it merely runs a dark narrative through its fingers. The question of whether MMOs can appropriate the focused meaningfulness of works like The Babadook or Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has, for the moment, been answered: they are cousin to comic strips that have been running since the mid-twentieth century, their narratives and significance discounted by the annual need to add more and more to the structure.
But despite this bloat, The Secret World has regular, meaningful moments of representation that exist not merely for variety’s sake, but, sometimes, in order to reflect on different issues in our world. The very and varied depiction of women and queer characters does not merely add flavor to the player’s experience, but also to more accurately capture the world we are familiar with. At the same time, the way in which these moments of representation are discussed similarly mirrors the difficulty of examining and re-examining cultural conceits. Part of the challenge of these readings is the fact that they develop into ongoing conversations with different arguments, different vantage points, and different voices. And so life imitates art imitates life ad infinitum.
AdvertisementsBUSHEHR (Reuters) - Russia started loading fuel into the reactor at Iran’s first nuclear power station, on Saturday, an irreversible step marking the start-up of the plant.
The West suspects Tehran of seeking to produce its own nuclear bomb and has been critical of Russia’s involvement in building the power plant at Bushehr. Russia says it is purely civilian and cannot be used for any weapons program.
Here are some important facts about Bushehr:
ABOUT BUSHEHR:
* The Bushehr plant is on the Gulf coast of southwest Iran. It is Iran’s first nuclear power plant. * The Bushehr nuclear facility is associated with the city of the same name, but is actually located near Halileh about 12 km (8 miles) south of Bushehr proper. The site is also the location of Iran’s Nuclear Energy College.
* Construction of two pressurized water nuclear reactors began in 1974 with the help of German contractor Siemens and French scientists. The Bushehr I reactor was 85 percent complete and the Bushehr II reactor was partially complete prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
* With the fall of the shah in the revolution, the project was halted. The site was then damaged during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and equipment was looted.
* The project was later revived with Russian help but construction ran into repeated delays blamed by Russia on problems with receiving payment from Iran. Current plans are for one reactor to be launched.
* Bushehr will have an operating capacity of 1,000 megawatts. Iran, the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, has said it wants to build a network of nuclear power plants with a capacity of 20,000 megawatts by 2020 to enable it to export more of its bountiful oil and gas.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: * Russia said in January 2010 it would finish building the Bushehr plant this year. * Russian officials said in February that testing of the leak-tight enclosure system had been completed. This system would prevent the release of radiation into the environment in the event of any failure in the primary circuit, as well as protecting primary equipment from external impacts.
* Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced the start-up in March 2010, but visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said such a decision would be “premature” without Iranian assurances on its uranium enrichment program, which the West fears is aimed at producing atomic weapons.
* Iran has received nuclear fuel for Bushehr from Russia and will be obliged by contract to return all spent fuel rods to Russia, an arrangement that eased U.S. concern Iran could reprocess the material into weapons-grade plutonium.
CONCERNS OVER BUSHEHR:
* Switching on the Bushehr plant could still dismay some in the United States, Israel and Europe who are deeply suspicious of the Islamic Republic’s development of nuclear expertise and its ultimate nuclear intentions.
Sources: Reuters/World Nuclear NewsGopeshwar (Ukd), Mar 4 (PTI) Hundreds of people sat on a dharna at an ancient temple here to force the district administration to stop digging a sewer line close to its main gate saying it amounted to desecration of the shrine.
Residents of the hill town converged at Gopinath Mandir last night after coming to know that a sewer pipeline was being dug just two metres from its main gate and sat on a dharna in protest against the construction which they said was in violation of the Constitution as the ancient temple was a protected area.
Refusing to budge despite repeated attempts by the administration, the crowd of locals has been on a dharna in the temple premises in the presence of police personnel who are there to help the administration carry out the sewer line digging work.
Advertisement: Replay Ad Ads by ZINC
The revered shrine, one of the Panch Kedar pilgrimage centres spread over an area of one acre at a height of 4,500 feet, is said to be 3,000 years old and is protected under the Culture Ministrys Ancient Monuments and Archeological Sites and Remains Act.
According to the act no construction or repair work can be taken up within 300 metres of the temple without the prior permission of the Culture Ministry.
A protester Sushila Devi said construction of a sewer line inside the temple is desecration of the centuries-old temple which cannot be allowed.
"If a sewer line is dug only two metres away from the temples main gate, dirty water will flow into it," she said.
Deputy Superintendent incharge, Archeological Survey of India, Lily Dhasmana has also written to the Chamoli district administration asking it to immediately stop digging of the sewer line as it was in violation of the Ancient Monuments and Archeological Sites and Remains Act.
Locals had been protesting against the construction for the last three days but the administration went ahead with its plans and called in police yesterday starting work forcefully.
Chamoli SP Priti Priyadarshini said the police force was on the site at the orders of the DM. PTI Corr ALM KUNHappy Birthday to you… Happy Birthday to you… Happy Birthday, dear Heroes, Happy Birthday to you!
It’s almost only a week left until Heroes of the Storm has it’s first birthday on 2nd of June! Time flies, doesn’t it?
Since the very first release a lot of things happened to the game. There were many many new heroes added to the game, some maps and even a new gamemode (ARAM) found it’s way into the game. Of course, sometimes you get mad because of teammates not playing properly or even sabotaging your game. But we always have enough fun to keep it going 😉
Earlier this month we kindly asked you to participate in a survey which was or better is called Heroes Choice Award. And of course we didn’t ask only because we were bored! We’ve got something very special in mind for the very first anniversary of Heroes! We want to hand over an award to your favorite hero, map, mount, class and gamemode. So every vote counts! So, if you want your favorites to win the survey you better participate now!
The awards will be presented on Saturday 4th of June, 2016, and you can watch the show live! The event will take place in the TakeTV studios and therefor be streamed on their Twitch channel. Of course there will be some of the Stormkings staff members, as well as some proplayers. A little bird told us the team names mYinsanity and Team Liquid. But who knows? We are excited whom we will meet there in particular 😉
The event will last a minimum of 90 minutes. And of course we have already prepared something special for you for this time. There will be several raffles! The exact schedule as well as the things to do and how to win won’t be revealed yet! Just a hint: There will be some real cool stuff to win.
Further information like starting time, schedule, raffles, prizes and procedure will be announced the next days.
Quelle: Stormkings.deEDITOR’S NOTE: A previous version of this essay was published here. Mateo is a regular contributor to Latino Rebels and he gave us permission to publish this piece.
When it comes to voting red or blue, there is an optimism that compels us to approach presidential elections like a football rivalry between two teams. And, equally as bad, there is a cynicism that makes fueling our two-piston political engine seem logical—not because it is optimal, but simply because it runs. But if neither optimism nor cynicism are on our side at such a critical juncture in the timeline of our democracy, What can we do?
The truth is, our political psychosis is conquerable. We can begin remedying the situation by paying ever more critical attention to candidates outside the two-party system. The hope is to elect a president that is neither Democrat nor Republican, nor delivered us by big money, private interest, or capitalism. Moreover, the hope is no longer to have to choose between the likes of Trump or Hillary.
By now, the 2016 elections have made it clear to us, and to the world, that supporting either species of the two-party system amounts to aiding and abetting tyranny—the same harbingers of tyranny that Thomas Jefferson warned us about when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. But if we do not pay greater attention to the ways in which third-party candidates are being communicated to us (that is, if we do not pay attention to the texts and messages that invoke third-party candidates), How will we know if they are being treated with even a modicum of reporting fairness, or journalistic due diligence? Although we read the dailies and fancy ourselves informed, if we do not keep an ever more critical watch, Who should we expect to disabuse us of misinformation?
Paying attention is on us, and if the 2016 elections have demonstrated one thing, it is that we the people have been paying much closer attention than usual. This, moreover, has set the powers that be quaking in their boots. Going forward, the hope is thus to drive a steak directly into the heart of the two-headed monster that would divide and conquer us every four years. We can do it, but we are going to have to redouble our watchful efforts.
The Analysis
I posed this challenge to myself and asked how I could pay better attention to the language used to communicate Dr. Jill Stein, this year’s Green Party presidential hopeful. Using an online research database, I decided I could perform a content analysis of numerous newspaper and web-based publications. My guiding question was: How were the newspapers handling Jill? Specifically, I wondered if publications were communicating positive, negative, neutral, or mixed messages about her.
For my search, I chose articles containing “Jill Stein” to be the appropriate data for my analysis. Albeit a specific name, I kept the search broad because I wanted to explore as many publications as I possibly could. I ended up analyzing dozens of US newspapers from around the country, a couple hundred articles, and at least 50 web-based publications. These online ones were just for kicks.
A word on content analysis: According to Klaus Krippendorff, this is a research technique that allows us to make “replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use.” The data gathered from content analysis can be powerful because, supposedly, it provides practical evidence that researchers can use to test their hypotheses or answer questions. I hope my content analysis allows readers to know something about the communicator or the text—that is, in the data I analyzed, Was the context surrounding Jill Stein’s name positive, negative, neutral, or mixed according to my criteria?
One pitfall is that readers will have to trust the validity of my findings in order to appreciate the values I have generated. After all, I was the one reading and evaluating the data, determining whether the context surrounding Stein’s name was positive, negative, neutral, or mixed. Nevertheless, my analysis, which I believe anyone can do (given the luxury of time, or perhaps an anarchist penchant for doing research on the clock) is highly repeatable. So, were there any doubts or concerns (and skepticism is encouraged, if not, welcomed), readers could perform a similar analysis and judge for themselves the validity of my findings.
I am confident the measures I used to gauge the positive, negative, neutral, and mixed nature of the articles were accurate enough to satisfy my own pro-critical curiosity. At least, that is what I hope the distribution of the numbers in each category indicate. If not, perhaps the numbers indicate that I merely maintained a consistent opinion of the texts while reading them. Others should feel encouraged to do a kind of content analysis of their own.
Categories: Positive, Negative, Neutral and Mixed
For my analysis, I focused on the text immediately surrounding Jill Stein’s name. Sometimes, for clarity, it was necessary to use a sentence or two either preceding or following Jill’s name in order to discern the right category deserving of a tally. A note on the count: Each text was awarded one tally; then, all tallies were counted up for the four categories and totaled together for a final value. The categories and their respective qualifications are as follows:
For the positive category, I discerned the text surrounding “Jill Stein” to be either clearly pro-Jill, or at least favorable, rhetoric.
For the negative category, I discerned the text surrounding “Jill Stein” to be either hostile towards, or dismissive of, Jill.
“Neutral” tallies were by and large awarded to articles that reported on polling statistics.
For those texts falling into the “mixed” category, Jill’s name was mentioned, but the text invoking her name really did not have anything to do with her or the Green Party.
Overwhelmingly, the words “Jill” and “Stein” appeared in conjunction only once in the articles I read. In only a handful of articles did “Jill Stein,” “Jill,” and/or “Stein” appear in an article more than once. Her name seldom appeared more than once and was usually apparent as “Jill Stein.”
Examples of Each Category
An example of a “positive” text surrounding Jill Stein’s name might look something like William Frenger’s letter published by the Spokesman Review:
“In the interest of promoting true democracy in this country, I am writing to ask that you include coverage and the voice of Dr. Jill Stein and the Green Party in your newspaper.”
Also this quote, from the Hartford Courant:
“‘As the challenges and problems facing our nation grow, Jill Stein is the smart, articulate leader who can help move us forward,’ Pelto said… ‘People are looking for a third choice in the race for President and Dr. Jill Stein is exactly the type of person who provides voters with the positive option we need.’”
This one, published by Brittany Ea in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, is another “positive” example:
“My pick for a third-party candidate is Jill Stein, from the Green Party. The party’s ideology is more than environmentalism. It includes nonviolence, anti-racism and gender equality.” Or this, from the Eurasia Review: “Laugh about it, wrote Paul Simon. Shout about it. When you’ve got to choose. Every way you look at it you lose. Unless you support Jill Stein and/or build a more principled peace movement.”
An example of a “negative” inclusion of Stein might looks something like Dahleen Glanton’s quip in the Chicago Tribune:
“The next president of the United States isn’t going to be Libertarian Gary Johnson or the Green Party’s Jill Stein. A vote for either one of them is nothing less than a vote for Trump.”
Or this rhetoric, published at Washingtonpost.com by David Weigel:
“Supporters of Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has found support at protests all week, were outnumbered in the meeting of delegates. Some activists openly scoffed at the idea that the Greens could be a vehicle for Sanders’s cause.”
And this, from Eurasia Review (also posted by foreignpolicyjournal.com):
“Looking ahead to 2016 the issue of choice can be at this stage put as follows: vote for Hillary Clinton as ‘the lesser of evils’ or vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party as the most attractive presidential candidate, but someone with no chance to do more than enliven the debate and give alienated voters like myself a positive option that feels better than not voting.”
An example of a “neutral” context surrounding Jill Stein’s name might look like something else from Schoenburg in the State Journal-Register: “…Green Party candidates who filed Monday included Jill Stein of Lexington, Massachusetts, for president; William Kreml of Columbia, South Carolina, for vice president; Scott Summers of Harvard for the U.S. Senate; and Tim Curtin of Hillside for comptroller.” Or this, from CNN.com:
“Trump came out of his convention ahead of Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House, topping her 44% to 39% in a four-way matchup including Libertarian Gary Johnson (9%) and Green Party candidate Jill Stein (3%) and by three points in a two-way head-to-head poll, 48% to 45%, according to a CNN/ORC poll.”
An example of a “mixed” context surrounding Jill Stein’s name might look something like Bernard Schoenburg’s prose in the State Journal-Register:
“Sherman native and college student Mark Mangiaracina and friends Abby Poehls and Abby Clayton said they voted for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic primary, but they were deciding now between Clinton and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Sanders endorsed Clinton on Tuesday.”
Michelle Goldberg’s quotation in a Slate Magazine online publication gives an idea:
“There are certainly people who don’t like Clinton because they don’t like her record and her proposals. Marcella Aburdene, a 31-year-old market researcher in Washington, D.C., has a Palestinian father and is horrified by what she sees as Clinton’s hawkishness and allegiance to Israel. ‘She is disingenuous and she lies blatantly, but that’s what a lot of politicians do,’ Aburdene says. ‘It’s definitely more of a policy issue for me.’ She plans to vote for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in November.”
Or this bit, from Washingtonpost.com: “‘Never Hillary. Bernie or Bust. Jill Before Hill,’ read one protester’s sign, referring to Green Party candidate Jill Stein. ‘End corruption.’” Also this quote, from Eurasia Review:
“If the psychopathic war-monger Clinton is crowned the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, there is no way she can be considered the pragmatic ‘lesser evil’ to Donald Trump or any Republican – their bosses decide to spew out. At best, she might be the ‘equal evil’. In this case, more than 50% of the electorate will not vote. If, after being robbed of his growing movement for the Democratic Party candidacy, ‘Bernie’ Sanders does not break out with an independent bid for the White House, I will join the minuscule 1% who vote for Green Party candidate, Dr. Jill Stein.”
Findings
I have split my findings into three categories. First goes the university newspaper category; second, the professional one; and third, I have posted my findings for web-based news publications.
Under a “university newspaper” category, which was comprised of dozens of collegiate newspapers, I analyzed more than ninety articles, ranging from as early as the beginning March, 2015, to as recently as the end of July, 2016. I have ranked the message content of the newspaper articles in four categories in order to total them in a simple numerical fashion. The criteria for each of the categories is the same as above. Multiple publications of the same article were excluded. The results follow below.
Positive Negative Neutral Mixed 28 9 10 45
Under a “non-university newspaper” category, which was comprised of the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, local newspapers, etc., I analyzed more than one hundred articles from twenty newspapers. The articles date back as early as August, 2015, to as recently as the end of July, 2016. Ranking and enumeration are the same as the analysis above.
Positive Negative Neutral Mixed 15 7 13 66
Following similar timelines and the same category criteria, the results of my “web-based” publications analysis are as follows:
Positive Negative Neutral Mixed 10 2 5 33
Conclusion
After reading through the above-mentioned publication samples, it became painfully apparent that the texts communicating Jill Stein’s name were biased towards the two-party system and its potential candidates in their overall message. Whether collegiate or professional, web-based publications or printed newspaper articles, the text surrounding “Jill Stein” revealed a few other telling pieces of information as I read: (1) Jill’s name was invoked most when communicators were making points about the two-party system’s nominees; (2) writers often invoked Jill’s name when making points tangential to her or the Green Party; and (3) oftentimes Jill’s name was used when writers would speak of Jill’s likely third-part candidacy as being a virtual impossibility, let alone a viable alternative to the two-party system’s candidates.
Perhaps most surprising is the number of “positive” tallies that accrued. I was surprised, and I think there might be something to this. Additionally, although it might seem encouraging that there were more “neutral” than “negative” tallies, it is worth considering that the neutral tallies were awarded largely for a contextual use of poll percentage; seeing an arguably small percentage number next to “Jill Stein,” as compared to a larger value next to, say, “Bernie Sanders,” may discourage readers from thinking that a third-party candidate, and Jill Stein in particular, is a remote possibility in 2016.
***
Mateo Pimentel writes for political newsletters and publishes in academic journals. He currently pursues a Master of Science in Global Technology and Development, and he composes and records music in his free time. Follow him on Twitter @Mateo_Pimentel.The Planned Parenthood clinic in Lakeland will soon offer services for transgendered patients going through the transition process. Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida will begin providing the services Saturday at its 11 health centers, the nonprofit announced Monday.
LAKELAND — The Planned Parenthood clinic in Lakeland will soon offer services for transgendered patients going through the transition process.
Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida will begin providing the services Saturday at its 11 health centers, the nonprofit announced Monday.
“I think this is a group of patients that have been neglected and underserved, so Planned Parenthood wants to try to provide care for all people,” said Dr. Bob Slackman, who will oversee the services. “These patients are sort of where gays and lesbians were 20 or 30 years ago. I think that’s why it’s important for Planned Parenthood to offer this. These people have really been marginalized by society and even by health-care providers.”
The treatment mainly involves giving infusions of hormones to patients transitioning between genders, Slackman said. Those changing from female to male receive doses of testosterone.
Patients transitioning from male to female are given doses of estrogen and also a medicine that blocks the effects of the testosterone their bodies produce, Slackman said.
The hormones can be given through injections, pellets placed under the skin or topical creams.
Slackman, a reproductive endocrinologist, said he treated patients undergoing transitions for about three years in Virginia before moving to Florida and joining the Planned Parenthood staff this year. Slackman said he recently conducted training in hormone therapy with nurses and nurse practitioners at the 11 clinics.
“It’s a matter of prescribing the correct hormone at the correct dose and being able to follow the patient to make sure we’re giving the proper amount but not enough to cause problems,” Slackman said.
Planned Parenthood’s announcement drew praise from Kerri McCoy, president of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) of Polk County.
“I think it’s an awesome thing,” said McCoy, the mother of a gay man. “Most people that I know that are transitioning are having to travel, so this is going to make it very easy for people here in our county to do this. It’s more convenient and less time consuming, and I think it really shows some progressiveness in our area, which is amazing to me.”
Spokeswoman Anna V. Eskamani said Planned Parenthood will provide referrals for mental health support and give transgender patients a guide supplied by Equality Florida, an organization that advocates for gay and lesbian rights.
Slackman said transgender patients require one to two years of hormone therapy before undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. Based on his experience in Virginia, though, he said, only a small minority of patients ever have the surgery.
“The problem I had, at least in Virginia, is even if the insurance companies don’t pay for the hormones, it’s a matter of few hundred dollars a year,” Slackman said. “Surgery is tens of thousands of dollars.... The other thing is a lot of patients don’t want to do the surgery. A lot of people feel fulfilled just being on hormones without doing the surgery.”
Most patients remain on hormone treatment for the remainder of their lives, whether or not they have surgery, Slackman said. The Planned Parenthood clinics will not perform sexual reassignment surgeries.
The Lakeland clinic is at 2250 E. Edgewood Drive.
Slackman said transgender people often have difficulties finding doctors in private practice willing to treat them.
“My experience when I was in Virginia is these patients tended to be ostracized quite often by family and friends, by job and employers and even by physicians,” he said. “I had a number of patients who told me not only did their doctor refuse to give them hormones but the doctor would say, ‘I don’t want you in my practice even for a sprained ankle or a sore throat.’ ”
McCoy said she knows transgendered people in Polk County who are now traveling to Tampa or Orlando for treatment.
“This is really amazing to have it here in our backyard,” McCoy said. “I think if they get the word out, they will see probably more people than they think coming through their doors. I know being president of PFLAG, we are seeing more and more transgender people coming out here in Polk County.”
Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida cited figures from the Kaiser Family Foundation showing transgender people often face barriers when seeking health care. A national survey found 28 percent were subjected to harassment in medical settings and 19 percent were refused medical care, according to a Planned Parenthood news release.
The regional Planned Parenthood organization handles more than 40,000 patient visits each year, Eskamani said.
— Gary White can be reached at [email protected] or 863-802-7518. He blogs about tourism at http://tourism.blogs.theledger.com. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.Red Sox manager John Farrell left Seattle last week talking about how difficult it is to manage against the Mariners. Farrell said he spent the entire series trying to figure out the least damaging platoon splits, flummoxed by a team that at the time was carrying an extra position player.
Well, the M’s have played even better since splitting four games from the Red Sox, winning six straight against the Angels and Tigers to complete an 8-2 homestand. Their 15-9 record since the All-Star break is the best in the AL. Their run differential is the best in the AL West and fourth-best in the league. Fangraphs estimates their playoff odds at 37.8 percent.
The Mariners went back to 12 pitchers on Tuesday, but, if anything, their chances of erasing a 1½-game deficit in the wild-card race only seem to be improving. Their schedule is about to ease, and on Wednesday night slumping second baseman Robinson Cano went 2-for-4 with a homer and struggling ace Felix Hernandez turned in his best performance since returning from a right calf strain, allowing one run in seven innings.
Article continues below...
The most amazing part?
It was difficult to see the Mariners making such a push at the nonwaiver deadline, when they were one game above.500, five out in the wild-card race and general manager Jerry Dipoto appeared more in sell than buy mode.
Dipoto sent lefty reliever Mike Montgomery to the Cubs, exchanged one struggling reliever for another when he dealt Joaquin Benoit to the Blue Jays for Drew Storen, then engaged in an apparent salary dump by moving lefty Wade Miley to the Orioles for lefty Ariel Miranda.
Part of Dipoto’s idea was to supplement a farm system lacking in high-end prospects. Yet the GM also tried to leverage the few prospects that he had, making a strong push for Reds shortstop Zack Cozart. And he has continued to aggressively retool in August, making minor deals for right-handed reliever Arquimedes Caminero and switch-pitcher Pat Venditte.
“I’m a big fan of trying to pounce on opportunity,” Dipoto said. “We talked with a variety of clubs about acquisitions that maybe would have been more notable — I don’t want to say star quality, but more household-type names. We also talked about the possibility of moving players out who were more household names.
“In the end, the best moves we could make were holding steady. The idea of moving Miley might have looked like a sell. You could certainly take it for that. But really, there just wasn’t a great fit for Wade here.”
The Mariners also talked about buying and selling relievers beyond the trades they made, failing to get the left-hander they wanted. Cozart would have been an even more significant addition; Dipoto envisioned maxing out in 2016 and ’17, when most of the team’s best players are under contract and likely to sustain high levels of performance.
Cozart, under control through ‘17, fit that plan. Ketel Marte, who was out at the time with mononucleosis, figured to benefit from time at Triple-A. Two other young Mariners, left-hander James Paxton and catcher Mike Zunino, took that route, then returned as meaningful contributors.
Alas, the Cozart trade did not materialize, for reasons that are not entirely clear. The Mariners rank 24th in OPS at shortstop — Shawn O’Malley filled in capably while Marte was on the DL — but no team is perfect.
“We knew when we brought this team together there was going to be a gestation period,” Dipoto said. “They came together so quickly out of spring training. We played great for two months. Then we just had an awful June where nothing went right for us.
“Injuries mounted. We played poorly. But then they caught themselves before they hit the floor. This group has done a great job of just bouncing back. I think it would have been the wrong thing to do to tear it down. Give them a chance.”
It’s funny — the Mariners are only ninth in the AL in runs per game since the break, only eighth in ERA. But for the most part, they’ve played quality opponents who were hot. Their next five series are against the Athletics, Angels, Brewers, Yankees and White Sox — teams that are a combined 40 games under.500.
Drew Storen (Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images)
Dipoto has almost completely overhauled the bullpen, trading for Storen and Caminero and bringing back righty Tom Wilhelmsen, who has once again proven effective for the M’s after bombing with the Rangers. But the biggest revelation, by far, has been rookie closer Edwin Diaz, who has replaced the injured Steve Cishek and performed at a historic level since his promotion on June 4. Diaz’s 58 strikeouts are the most ever by a pitcher in the first 31 innings of his career.
How this all ends, no one knows. But the Mariners, after giving the appearance of a seller, are performing like a buyer. They are more interesting than they were a month ago, more formidable. And their best might be yet to come.MediaMall Technologies, Inc.
If you don't have cable but still want HBO, there's a new option: HBO Now, the network's just-launched streaming service.
However, to enjoy "Game of Thrones," "Silicon Valley" and other on-demand HBO goodness on your TV, the only option is an Apple TV box -- for now, anyway. Apple finagled a three-month exclusive for the new service, meaning it'll be July before you can access it outside the iDevice ecosystem.
Or maybe not. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the PlayOn Workaround.
PlayOn is a subscription service that lets you stream all kinds of Web-based content -- everything from Netflix and Hulu to NBC and TBS -- to all kinds of devices. All you need is a running PC, which serves as the set-top box (after a fashion) and slings all these services wherever you want them to go: Android phone or tablet, Chromecast, Roku box, game console and so on.
Interestingly, HBO Go has long been among PlayOn's offerings, and now the service supports HBO Now as well. What's more, to help cushion that three-month wait time, PlayOn is offering a three-month subscription for $9.99 (total, not per month), a price that includes PlayLater (more on that in a bit).
So here's what happens in a nutshell: After buying the PlayOn deal and installing the client software (Windows-only, alas), you sign up for your one month HBO Now trial (using your own iDevice if you have one, or a friend's if you don't).
Screenshot by Rick Broida/CNET
Then you head into PlayOn's settings, click the Channels tab, scroll down to HBO Now and enter your new username and password. Next, click the Test button to make sure your sign-in works.
Assuming it does, you're all set. If you have a Roku box, you'll just need to install the PlayOn channel. (Here's a full list of other supported devices and how to get set up with them.) You can also use PlayLater to record HBO Now shows for later viewing, either at home or on the go.
After your trial month of HBO Now, you'll be on the hook for $15 per additional month, of course. And after your three months of PlayOn/PlayLater, you'll need to extend your subscription at the regular rate (though the company frequently offers deals on both monthly and lifetime subscriptions).
But assuming you were planning to jump aboard HBO Now anyway, this is an awfully inexpensive way to enjoy it outside the Apple ecosystem -- at least until the three-month exclusive is up.Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth Hacker’s Memory has a Digimon Market
The Digimon Compendium.
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth Hacker’s Memory will have a “Digi-Market” where you can purchase Digimon, the latest issue of V-Jump reveals. The lineup of Digimon you can purchase will change depending on your progression of the story.
The magazine also confirms that Makiko Date (voiced by Masumi Asano) and Gorou Matayoshi (voiced by Masaru Ikeda), both of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Cyber Crime Investigations Unit, will return. A new character named Yuu Nogi (voiced by Yuko Sanpei) will also appear. She is a close friend of the protagonist.
Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth Hacker’s Memory will launch for PlayStation 4 and PS Vita in Japan on December 14, and in North America and Europe in early 2018.
Thanks, Ryokutya2089.Reader Poll
KALAMAZOO --
A group that advocates for the decriminalization of marijuana sees the city of Kalamazoo as fertile ground in its push to liberalize marijuana laws in Michigan. MINORML, the Michigan chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, is beginning to organize a petition drive to push for a local ordinance that would make the possession of small amounts of marijuana the "lowest possible priority" for law enforcement. The ballot language has not yet been drafted, but organizers are hoping to have the issue voted on as early as November. If adopted, Kalamazoo would be the only city in Michigan to have such a law. Ann Arbor has an ordinance that makes it a civil infraction to use or possess small amounts of marijuana. "The government has no right to tell us what we can put in our bodies," said Steven Thompson, executive director of MINORML.
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Organizers will have to submit a total of at least 1,273 signatures of registered city voters to the Kalamazoo city clerk by Aug. 14. The issue would then go before the Kalamazoo City Commission, which would have 14 days either to adopt the ordinance or to put the question to voters. Louis Stocking, 21, of Kalamazoo, is leading the petition drive. "I'm sure we'll get enough signatures," Stocking said. Capt. Joseph Taylor, commander of the Kalamazoo Valley Enforcement Team, which targets illegal drug use in Kalamazoo County, called the proposal "ludicrous." "This is a silly idea," he said. "It's a roundabout way of circumventing the more difficult process of getting marijuana legalized." "We shouldn't be prioritizing which laws we enforce and which ones we don't," Taylor added. "The law is the law." Proposal 1, the new state law that shields people with certain debilitating diseases from criminal prosecution if they use marijuana to treat their conditions, passed in every precinct in the city in November. Marijuana use and possession is still illegal according to state and federal law, however. Taylor said marijuana is a gateway drug. He said the violence associated with marijuana dealing has increased over the past 10 years as drug dealers moved away from crack cocaine and toward marijuana because of the lower criminal penalties. More than half of the drug arrests made in the city are related to marijuana, he said. Greg Francisco, director of MINORML's Southwest Michigan chapter, said Kalamazoo was chosen for the petition drive because it is "a progressive city with motivated activists on the ground." "Anyone who wants to use marijuana can already find it," Francisco said.Inspired by a video of six photographers shooting the same model, Photographers Jessica Kobeissi, Irene Rudnyk, and Ruby James came together to collaborated on their own version of the challenge. Each photographer got the opportunity to choose a location and an outfit for the model before taking five minutes to get their shot.
This challenge forced |
do. “I’ll show you,” she said, gently setting a three-ring binder on the table of her kitchenette. Inside were pictures of an Earthship — a passive-solar house made of recycled materials such as cans and bottles, with dirt-filled tires for its load-bearing walls. May wanted to build one. She had seen four-acre parcels offered for less than $5,000 in Cochise County, Arizona, and planned to make a scouting trip there before starting her next job, hosting campsites in Mammoth Lakes, California. “This is the garden where you grow food,” she said, pointing to another photograph.
After I left Quartzsite, May updated me with text messages as she hunted for land, liquidated the contents of her rented storage unit in Goodyear, Arizona (“I’d just like to throw a match in there, I think,” she had joked earlier), and reunited with Rubber Tramp Rendezvous friends for a pizza party. She sent me a favorite quote she’d found online, praising those who “cut every tether holding you from freedom.”
In early spring, May posted on Facebook a picture of her refrigerator, which was empty apart from a few condiments plus four eggs and half a gallon of milk. She wrote that earlier in the month, when things had gotten tighter, she had made old tortillas into chilaquiles and stale bread into a French-toast casserole. But the photo of her fridge, she explained, was already outdated. “I made it to payday,” May wrote. “So I went grocery shopping and filled it up.”
I last reached May by phone as she worked at Mammoth Lakes. “It’s a lovely day! My campground is full,” she told me. I asked whether she had found a parcel of land yet. She said the acreage in Arizona had proved too remote. “I thought: Nobody’s going to come here. I’d better find land where family can come,” she explained, adding that she had shifted her focus to Julian, California, in the Mojave Desert, west of the Salton Sea. There was a new plan, too. Her daughter would pay for the land and May would build the Earthship. It would be their shared legacy, put into a trust for May’s grandchildren.
May told me she was doing fabulously. “My whole life has been ups and downs,” she said. “The happiest I’ve been is when I have very little.” We talked about her dogs, about how she hoped to refurbish her RV. Before long, though, she had to excuse herself (“Looks like I’ve got a camper coming to my door!”) and get back to work.Starving dog jumps from third storey window and SURVIVES after owners left him to die in apartment
Emaciated pet survives after being abandoned for two months by owners
A starving dog left abandoned for two months has amazingly survived after leaping from a third floor apartment window in search for food.
The emaciated pitbull jumped from the window of an abandoned apartment in New Bedford, Boston, after her owners left her there along with her four-month old puppy.
Animal control officers say when they got into the flat, they found it flea-infested and with faeces all over the floor.
Survived: The one-year-old pitbull dog leapt from a third floor window in search for food after being abandoned for two months
Abandoned: An official said the tenants of the apartment in New Bedford, Boston, had not been seen for two months when the emaciated dogs were found
The one-year-old female dog broke its hip and back leg after leaping from the window, and was only saved thanks to immediate surgery from vets at nearby Cape Cod Vetinary Specialists in Buzzard's Bay, Boston.
The puppy is still recovering from going without food for so long, according to officials.
It is thought the apartment's owners had left the animals on their own without food for as long as two months.
The property manager for the building said the previous tenant had moved out two months before the dogs were found, but had no contact information for them.
Police in New Bedford and Animal Rescue League officials are investigating.
Officials who got into the dirty apartment also found a four-month-old puppy inside, which is now being treated for malnutrition
Surgeons were able to treat the one-year-old dog’s broken bones, but she will require ongoing monitoring in addition to a special feeding program to address the effects of malnutrition.
Animal Control Officer Emanuel Maciel described the apartment, saying: 'It was flea infested. The third floor was flea infested - feces all over the floor.
'Urine spots all over the floor, same thing on the first floor it was devastating to see the conditions these animals were living.'
Jennifer Wooliscroft, director of communications for the Animal Rescue League of Boston, told the Boston Globe: 'We see this too much.
'These dogs are often so resilient and nice when they really have no reason to be nice at all.'
New Bedford Abused Dogs: MyFoxBOSTON.comWe are now halfway through the season and since the December defeat at Fiorentina, Roma finally appear to understand the tactics and the style of play required by Spanish coach Luis Enrique.
The former Barcelona B boss has based his philosophy on possession play with a 4-3-3 formation, favouring attack and slick passing.
After the 3-0 Fiorentina loss where Roma had 3 players sent off (Juan, Fernando Gago and Bojan), the club has started to play some exciting football. They are unbeaten, picking up a 1-1 draw with a weak starting lineup against Juventus and impressive away wins at Napoli and Bologna before the winter break.
After the festivities, convincing performances have come against Chievo, Fiorentina in the Coppa Italia and Cesena last Saturday where Roma were in unforgiving mood hammering their opponent 5-1 with 72% ball possession. In between that Roma had a game abandoned away at Catania, due to poor weather.
This is the formation and the starting XI Luis Enrique used at the beginning of the season.
When Roma go forward they morph into a 3-4-3 formation, push the full backs up to join the attack and ask Daniele De Rossi to drop in as the third centreback and give him possesion so he can instigate the move.
When Francesco Totti is in the starting eleven he likes to drop deep into the midfield and pick up the ball to continue the attack. The two other strikers like to drift in from the wings and play centrally as the full backs drive forward and create attacks from the flanks and deliver crosses.
When out of possession they become a back five, again with De Rossi dropping into defence. Luis Enrique’s Spanish style of football means Roma like to play with a high defensive line but with Nicolas Burdisso or Gabriel Heinze as one of the two centre backs they do struggle against teams who play on the counter and with pace, as was proved with Udinese.
Roma lost that game 2-0 and both of the goals conceded were on the counter attack as Antonio Di Natale and Pablo Armero raced through their backline.
As of last December and with the return to form of Francesco Totti, Roma have embraced Luis Enrique’s tactical ideas and entertained Serie A with some enterprising football.
Erik Lamela has been key to the Giallorossi success over the last two months with his dazzling displays. The Argentinian had to wait for his chance in the team due to injury but had an immediate impact against Palermo, scoring eight minutes into his debut.
The away match with Napoli was typical as he drifted in from both wings in tandem with Pablo Osvaldo and attacked the Partenopei’s brittle and ageing defence. The elegance with which the former River Plate man played was brilliant, bearing in mind his tender age.
He scored the first goal of the game by breaking down the left, running at the Napoli defence causing them to panic and then squeezing his effort under Morgan De Sanctis.
Lamela was again the key man in the recent Coppa Italia tie, interestingly against Fiorentina. He scored two goals and was a constant threat all game, his performance receiving high acclaim from many people around the globe.
Last weekend Roma defeated Cesena and produced a master class of possession based football. This was without De Rossi, out with injury, but who was perfectly replaced by another Argentine newboy, Fernando Gago.
Roma dominated their opponent, scoring three times in the first eight minutes. They controlled the game with quick, slick passing and rarely gave Cesena any time with the ball. Francesco Totti, Erik Lamela and Miralem Pjanic were the three standout players with some intricate one-touch football and clever off the ball movement.
Roma XI against Cesena
The revolution at Trigoria is continuing and the project is starting to gather pace after a slow start. The Spanish style of football in the capital is getting fans talking and after Saturday’s performance, ‘BarcaRoma’ are beginning to turn heads.
For all the latest Serie A news don’t forget to check out the news section of Forza Italian Football.
Join Forza Italian Football on Twitter and Facebook.Eastwood: How Can America Care If DC Doesn't? 7:21 AM ET Fri, 8 Feb 2013
Hollywood legend and Republican supporter Clint Eastwood told CNBC that Washington gridlock is sending the nation racing towards another contentious debt deadline.
"It's almost like they don't give a damn," he said, in a "Squawk Box" interview that aired Friday.
The Oscar-winning director who's also known for his tough-guy roles asked rhetorically, "If they don't give a damn, why did they expect anybody else to?"
With the deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" barely in the rearview mirror, President Barack Obama and Republican leaders are on the clock again, scrambling to compromise on a package to replace the already-postponed automatic government spending cuts due to kick-in next month.
(Read More: Sequester Is 'Terrible, Terrible' Legislation: Rubin)KINGSTON (Reuters) - Caribbean leaders are moving forward with a plan to seek reparations from the former slave-owning states of Europe, according to a lawyer for the island nations.
The Caribbean Community (Caricom) approved a 10-point plan for reparations at a two-day meeting in St. Vincent and the Grenadines that was due to wrap up on Tuesday, said Martyn Day, a U.K.-based lawyer at Leigh Day, who is working on the case.
The Caribbean countries said that European governments in addition to being responsible for conducting slavery and genocide, also imposed 100 years of racial apartheid and suffering on freed slaves and the survivors of genocide.
The former slave-owning states of Europe “have refused to acknowledge such crimes or to compensate victims and their descendants,” according to a statement by Caricom.
The Caribbean continues to suffer from the effects of slavery today, Caricom said.
Caricom’s 10-point plan will pursue a full formal apology for slavery, repatriation to Africa, a development plan for the native Caribbean peoples and funding for cultural institutions. It also seeks to address chronic diseases and psychological rehabilitation for trauma inflicted by slavery, technology transfer to make up for technological and scientific backwardness resulting from the slave era, and support for payment of domestic debt and cancellation of international debt.
The subject of reparations has simmered in the Caribbean for many years and opinions are divided. Some see reparations as delayed justice, while others see it as an empty claim and a distraction from modern social problems in Caribbean societies.
Slavery ended throughout the Caribbean in the 1800s in the wake of slave revolts, and left many of the region’s plantation economies in tatters.
A formal complaint will be presented to the European governments by the end of April, said Day.
“The complaint will undoubtedly go to the governments of Britain, France, Netherlands, and very likely Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,” Day said in an email. “The final decision on this has not yet been made, though,” he added.
Britain’s government is aware of the proposed legal action, according to its foreign office.
“Slavery was and is abhorrent. The United Kingdom unreservedly condemns slavery and is committed to eliminating it,” a representative said, adding that reparations are not the answer. “Instead, we should concentrate on identifying ways forward with a focus on the shared global challenges that face our countries in the 21st century,” the representative added.
Caricom will call for a conference in London during the summer for European and Caribbean nations to discuss the issues. The specific European countries to be invited to this conference have not yet been decided on by Caricom, Day said.
If the complaint is rejected, the Caricom nations will take their individual cases to the International Court of Justice, he added.As the number of vegans in the United States and the world grows, so does the concern about vegan beers. While I’m not a vegan, I do have many vegan friends and try to accommodate their needs accordingly. First, let’s define what a vegan is for those of you who don’t know or may be a bit hazy on the concept. Veganism is a form of vegetarianism in which no animal products are consumed. This means no eggs, dairy, meat, honey, or any product that is made by or derived from an animal. This often extends to other “cruelty free” products that don’t test on animals. Fortunately, most modern beers are vegan. There are, however, exceptions. I’ll break down the obvious ones that are easy to avoid, then I’ll get into the hidden non-vegan beers that are much harder to avoid.
Ingredients
Today’s craft brewers continue to experiment with ingredients to create new and interesting beers. While some items have been used for as long as beer has been made, others are relatively new to the brewing world. Honey has long been used in beer as a way to augment flavor and fermentable sugars. In modern times, there are relatively few beers that use honey. Fortunately, they list honey as an ingredient on the label since it’s considered a special adjunct. Honey is pretty easy to avoid.
Meat is a product that is relatively new to the world of beer and brewing and more specifically, bacon. Bacon is the current culinary craze. You can hardly find a menu without at least one food item augmented with bacon. Now this craze is making it’s way into beers. The most notable beer to use bacon is the Rogue Voodoo Bacon Maple Ale. Right now, Bacon seems to be the most common meat ingredient used in beers, but the brewers are pretty proud of this and label it clearly and prominently. Another meat beer style that has seen a rise in popularity is oyster stouts. These beers are brewed with oyster shells or even the full oyster. I have heard rumor of other meats in beers, including bull testicles for a “Rocky Mountain Oyster” beer. Again, these beers are pretty easy to avoid since they’re clearly labeled.
Another adjunct making a bit of a resurgence is lactose or milk sugar. This was once a popular ingredient used in “Milk Stouts” or “Cream Stouts” in Britain. It’s largely used to add a bit of sweetness to a stout while adding a silky mouthfeel. Lactose is a non-fermentable sugar. This is another easy one to avoid if you stay away from beers called “Milk,” “Cream,” or “Sweet” stout.
Fining and Filtration
While special non-vegan ingredients are pretty easy to avoid, it’s the non-vegan items used in the brewery that can form a hidden danger. The hidden danger lies in how the beer is filtered or clarified. Today, most beers are clarified or filtered via some mechanical method that removes heavy proteins and excess yeast. Centrifuges and filters are the two most popular methods to clarify beer. They are, of course, vegan.
While these modern methods create vegan beers, some of the older methods using odd “fining” items don’t. Finings are items that carry a positive charge. When dropped into beer, they quickly attract the yeast and other particles which carry a negative charge. This allows a beer to clarified very quickly when compared with allowing it to sit for a long time. There are 4 main fining agents used in alcohol production: egg whites (mostly wine), diatomaceous earth, gelatin, and isinglass. Diatomaceous earth (DE) is a mineral formed from fossilized marine alga called diatoms. It is not an animal product and is thus vegan.
Gelatin (in most cases) is derived from cows or horses. It was once popular with US craft brewers due to its cheapness and availability, when compared with isinglass or the large filtration systems the large macro breweries could afford. As the price of filtration units and centrifuges came down and became more practical for smaller brewers to buy, they largely switched over to the more effective and modern methods. At this point in time, gelatin is probably not used in modern craft breweries.
Isinglass is the main culprit and the biggest hidden danger to vegans. Isinglass is derived from the swim bladders of fish. One of the main fish used is the Nile Perch which is harvested from Lake Victoria where it’s an invasive species. There are other fish used from other areas of the world with unknown environmental impact.
Despite the many options available to brewers, many still use isinglass. It’s most commonly used on the British Isles with more traditionally minded brewers, especially producers of unfiltered, cask conditioned ales. Many small craft brewers in the US are still using isinglass for various reasons.
While none of the isinglass or gelatin make it into the final product, it still involves the use of animal products to produce beers in this method. These items are not listed on the label. Your best bet is to email your brewery of choice and ask them directly. Most will be happy to answer your questions. Most are probably vegan. If the brewery doesn’t respond, there is a lot of good information compiled by various vegan groups. Here is a link to Barnivore’s very thorough list of beers and wines.
I hope this helps my vegan friends and blog followers. What are you’re favorite confirmed vegan beers? Which beers do you wish were vegan?
Like this: Like Loading...Laura D’Andrea Tyson is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton. Owen Zidar, a doctoral student in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, was previously a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers and, in 2008-9, an analyst at Bain Capital Ventures.
The centerpiece of Mitt Romney’s tax plan is an across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal tax rates. This cut, along with a few other tax changes Mr. Romney has endorsed – such as repeal of the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax – would reduce federal tax revenue from personal income and payroll taxes by an estimated $3.6 trillion to $3.8 trillion over 10 years.
Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors.
The total is closer to $5 trillion when Mr. Romney’s proposed cut in the corporate income tax rate to 25 percent is included. About two-thirds of this amount would go to taxpayers making $200,000 a year or more – about 5 percent of all taxpayers.
Extending the Bush tax cuts for high-income earners, as Mr. Romney proposes, adds another trillion in lost revenue and increases the share of the benefits going to the top 5 percent. Even if the cost of the Romney tax cuts for the top 5 percent is covered by base-broadening measures, as Mr. Romney promises – but as President Obama and many others assert is mathematically impossible – does it make sense to devote trillions of dollars to lowering income taxes for the top 5 percent? Is this an effective way to create jobs?
Mr. Romney appears to think so. His plan rests on the assertion that lower taxes for high-income taxpayers will increase economic activity and employment – that lower taxes for job creators create jobs and will do so quickly. This assertion, while superficially convincing and ideologically compelling, is not supported by the evidence.
If tax cuts for high-income earners generate substantial real economic activity and job creation, then we should expect to see two things in the data. First, employment growth should be stronger in the years after tax cuts for these earners. Second, parts of the country with a larger share of high-income earners should experience stronger employment growth after national tax cuts for these taxpayers, because the places where they live receive a larger share of the national tax cuts.
What do we actually see after combing through a half-century of economic data? Neither of these predictions is borne out.
The graph below, based on our research, shows the relationship between the cumulative change in income and payroll tax liabilities for the top 5 percent over a two-year period as a share of gross domestic product and employment growth in the two years after the change.
The graph and the regression analysis on which it is based reveal that there is no link between income tax cuts for the top 5 percent and subsequent job creation. (We also examined the relationship between tax cuts for the top 10 percent and subsequent job creation and found the same result.)
The table below highlights three of these tax changes — the Reagan tax cut of 1982, the Clinton tax increase of 1993 and the Bush tax cut of 2003 – and subsequent employment growth. Strong employment growth followed the Reagan cut, but the employment growth following the Clinton tax increase exceeded the employment growth following the Bush tax cut, which was comparable in size to the Reagan cut.
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Job growth at the state level after national tax cuts for high-income earners confirms the absence of a strong link between such cuts and the pace of job creation in the next two years.
The next graph shows no substantial link between tax cuts for the top 10 percent and the pace of job creation at the state level. Employment growth in states with a large share of rich people, such as Connecticut or New Jersey, was not much faster, on average, than it would have been otherwise after the Reagan and Bush tax cuts for the top 10 percent and wasn’t much slower, on average, after the Clinton tax increase on this group.
If there really were a strong link between job creation and tax cuts for high-income “job creators,” we should be able to see the effects somewhere. But we have found no evidence that such cuts lead to substantially faster employment growth at the national, state or even ZIP-code level.
Tax cuts for everyone else are a much more effective path to job creation. Our research found a statistically significant and positive relationship between tax cuts for the bottom 95 percent and job growth at both the national and state levels. The graph below shows the relationship for the national data. Our results indicate that almost all of the stimulative effect of income and payroll tax cuts on job creation in the short to medium run result from such cuts for the bottom 95 percent.
Lower-income taxpayers spend a higher share of their tax cuts. Many of these taxpayers often have more difficulty borrowing money and tapping into their housing wealth than higher-income individuals. These demand-side forces explain why consumption goes up much more after tax cuts for the bottom 95 percent than after equivalently sized cuts for the top 5 percent. An increase in consumption, which still accounts for about 70 percent of G.D.P., fuels increases in demand, and that leads companies to create more jobs. In survey after survey, businesses confirm that changes in demand are the primary determinant of their employment decisions.
Investment also increases after tax cuts for the bottom 95 percent, suggesting that shifting moderately size tax cuts to the bottom 95 percent from the top 5 percent isn’t a zero-sum trade-off between consumption and investment.
Instead, an increase in demand and economic activity because of an increase in consumption also makes investment more attractive, especially in difficult economic conditions.
Over all, our research shows that tax cuts for the bottom 95 percent are much more effective than tax cuts for the top 5 percent at increasing job creation in the subsequent two years.
Other analysts reach similar conclusions. For example, the Congressional Budget Office and Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist, find that tax cuts for lower-income recipients generate larger increases in employment per dollar cost to the federal budget than comparable tax cuts for high-income taxpayers in the short run.
What about the long run? A recent report by the Congressional Research Service found no clear relationship between cuts in marginal tax rates that primarily benefit high-income taxpayers and economic growth and job creation. A recent review by three distinguished academic economists also found no convincing evidence that real economic activity responds materially to tax-rate changes on top income earners, although such rate changes do affect their tax-avoidance behavior.
Cross-country comparisons also do not show a close link between top marginal rates and growth. While these studies don’t find large effects in the long run, we note that these long-run effects are harder to measure and are thus more uncertain.
Nevertheless, if the priority is to create a substantial number of jobs over the next presidential term, evidence from the last half-century strongly suggests that tax cuts for the top 5 percent won’t work. Tax cuts for working families, tax cuts directly aimed at expanded hiring or increases in infrastructure investment would have much more bang for the buck and would cost much less in terms of forgone revenue and deficit reduction in the future.
With elevated unemployment, weakness in Europe and slowing growth in emerging economies, fiscal measures that actually increase economic activity and employment in the near term are required. Our research shows that tax cuts for the rich do not meet this standard."Montreal Island" redirects here. For the island in Nunavut, see Montreal Island (Nunavut)
For the city, see Montreal
The Island of Montreal (French: Île de Montréal, Kanien’kéha: Tiohtià:ke), in southwestern Quebec, Canada, is at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa rivers. It is separated from Île Jésus (Laval) by the Rivière des Prairies.[3][4]
Description [ edit ]
It is the largest island in the Hochelaga Archipelago, and the second largest in the Saint Lawrence River (following Anticosti Island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence). The St. Lawrence widens into Lake Saint-Louis south-west of the island, narrows into the Lachine Rapids, then widens again into the Bassin de La Prairie before becoming the St. Lawrence again and flowing toward Quebec City. Saint Helen's Island and Notre Dame Island are in the Saint Lawrence southeast of downtown Montreal.
Island of Montreal is a part of Hochelaga Archipelago
The Ottawa widens and becomes Lac des Deux-Montagnes north-west of the island. The Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue Canal, between the western tip of the island and Île Perrot, connects Lac des Deux-Montagnes and Lake Saint-Louis. Another outlet of Lac des Deux-Montagnes, the Rivière des Prairies, flows along the north shore of the island and into the St. Lawrence at the northeastern tip of the island. Man has altered the topography of the island significantly, as evidenced by historical maps that name a lake St Pierre in the island.[5]
The island is approximately 50 km long and 16 km wide at its widest point. The area of the Urban agglomeration of Montreal, which includes the Island of Montreal and several other smaller islands, is 499 km².[6] The island of Montreal has a shoreline of 266 km. At its centre are the three peaks of Mount Royal. The southwest of the island is separated by the Lachine Canal between Lachine and Montreal's Old Port; this portion of the island is partially divided further by the Canal de l'Aqueduc, running roughly parallel to the Lachine Canal, beginning in the borough of LaSalle and continuing between the boroughs of Le Sud-Ouest and Verdun.
The island of Montreal is the major component of the territory of the city of Montreal, along with Île Bizard, Saint Helen's Island, Notre Dame Island, Nuns' Island, and some 69 smaller islands. With a population of 2,014,221 inhabitants (22% of the population of Québec), it is by far the most populous island in Canada. It is also the 6th most populous island of the Americas and the 37th most populated island on earth, outranking Manhattan Island in New York City. Montréal and the other municipalities on the island compose the administrative region of Montréal.
The crossings which connect the island to its surroundings are some of the busiest bridges in the country and the world. The Champlain Bridge and the Jacques Cartier Bridge together accommodate 101 million vehicle crossings a year.[7]
Name [ edit ]
Map of New France (Champlain, 1612). "Montreal" is visible on the map next to a mountain in the approximate location. A more precise map was drawn by Champlain in 1632.
The first French name for the island was l'ille de Vilmenon, noted by Samuel de Champlain in a 1616 map, and derived from the sieur de Vilmenon, a patron of the founders of Quebec at the court of Louis XIII. However, by 1632 Champlain referred to the Isle de Mont-real in another map. The island derived its name from Mount Royal (French Mont Royal, then pronounced [mɔ̃ʁwɛjal]), and gradually spread its name to the town, which had originally been called Ville-Marie.
In the Kanien’kéha, the island is called Tiohtià:ke Tsi (a name referring to the Lachine Rapids to the island's southwest) or Ka-wé-no-te. In Anishninaabemowin, the land is called Mooniyaang[8] (a name meaning "the first stopping place" and part of the seven fires prophecy).
Municipalities [ edit ]
Map of the municipalities of the island.
Demographics [ edit ]
Island of Montreal: Population by year 1876 1890 1931 1941 1951 1961 1971 1981 1991 1996 2001 2006 2011 est. 120,000[10] est. 200,000[10] 1,003,868[11] 1,116,800[11] 1,320,232[11] 1,747,696[12] 1,959,180[12] 1,760,122[12] 1,775,871[12] 1,775,846[13]
1,812,723[14]
1,854,442[14] 1,886,481[15]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]They are scanned again, immediately after an officer turns each one, or a few, in. They are scanned again before they are taken from a box in each station house by a supervisor for transport and again at borough headquarters.
“If there is a summons that is missing, at any time, there is an investigation,” and the Internal Affairs Bureau, which investigates police misconduct, is notified, said Deputy Inspector Kim Y. Royster, a department spokeswoman. She said that integrity control officers routinely audit the numbers. “The system picks it up right away” if a summons is missing, she said.
The system was created in response to the growing ticket-fixing investigation. It is unclear why the department did not put it to use sooner.
Photo
When asked if he believed that ticket-fixing could be a widespread or common practice in the Police Department, Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said “it’s certainly not common practice for police officers to engage in such misconduct.”
Of course, all the speculation, and all the layers of security in the new system, are for scraps of paper that nobody wants. The hope is that under the system, no summons can vanish — which is exactly what they have long had a habit of doing, as officers would try to do favors for some who had been ticketed.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he put a great deal of faith in the new system.
“Once it gets into the system, it would be very hard to fix it, get rid of it, because it’s just — it’s too easy to track,” Mr. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program on WOR-AM on Friday. “So, if that practice that’s alleged to have taken place did take place, then at least we’re convinced it won’t in the future.”
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Those were the mayor’s first extensive comments on the investigation, in which a grand jury in the Bronx is reviewing the suspicion that scores of officers fixed tickets. Dozens of officers could face criminal charges, and hundreds more could face administrative charges, according to people with knowledge of the investigation. The grand jury is looking at tickets issued before the new system went into operation.
“There seems to be a lot of evidence that there was a practice that should not have taken place,” Mr. Bloomberg said.
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Much of the inquiry focuses on police-union delegates, who are believed to have acted as conduits for favor requests. The union has fought back, saying that ticket-fixing is a longstanding courtesy, not corruption, and suggesting that over the years many requests came from high-ranking police officials and other notables.
Under the old system, it was possible to discern a ticket’s disappearance, but that would have involved a more painstaking reconstruction. Once the old forms were distributed, someone in each station house was responsible for manually tallying which summons numbers went to which officers.
Officers placed the summonses they issued into a box behind the precinct’s desk officer; now a supervisor does it. If something disappeared, it would have to be discovered manually, “and that would take time,” said Inspector Royster. And the search would begin only “after some report that it was missing.”
An officer can still fix a ticket by intentionally missing the driver’s trial date in court, so that the driver wins by default, something the new ticket-tracking system would not prevent. But officers are leery of such moves because judges can set a second date for a trial, forcing an officer to call in sick two consecutive times, which could raise a red flag or hurt the officer’s performance evaluation.
Officers might also show up and plead ignorance to events that happened months or years earlier, including a driver’s defense, during the hearing. An officer might testify that he had “no independent recollection” of facts that were not outlined in his notes from the traffic stop, said one officer, who insisted on anonymity.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Manchester United legend Andrei Kanchelskis wants to be Derry City’s next manager.
Mirror Sport can reveal the 46-year-old applied for the vacant job yesterday.
Derry sacked Peter Hutton last month and appointed Paul Hegarty as caretaker for the rest of the season.
And Hegarty is the front runner to fill the post on a full-time basis next season, should he want it.
But Kanchelskis is now a shock contender after throwing his hat into the ring.
The Ukrainian wants to break into management in England and sees Derry as a stepping stone.
Kanchelskis’ last job in management was with Latvian side FC Jurmala but he only lasted four months before leaving in November 2014.
Before that he was in charge of Russian sides Ufa and Torpedo-ZIL Moscow.
He was also assistant manager at Russian outfit Volga Nizhny Novgorod.
Flying winger Kanchelskis played for Manchester United between 1991 and 1995.
He was also at Everton, Rangers, Southampton and had a loan spell at Manchester City.
He retired as a player in 2006 after a spell with Russian outfit Krylia Sovetov.Home secretary aims to cut flow of skilled non-EU migrants by 20% a year, but scheme could hit nurses and teachers hard
A new £1,000-a-year immigration skills levy is expected to be introduced on all firms for each skilled migrant they recruit from outside Europe, under a new crackdown ordered by the home secretary, Theresa May.
The skills levy first suggested by David Cameron is part of a package recommended by the government’s migration advisory committee (MAC) that could see the flow of skilled non-EU migrants cut by 20% a year and could hit the recruitment of overseas nurses and teachers the hardest.
The government’s labour market experts say most skilled migrants from outside Europe bring scarce new skills to Britain and are higher paid than their British counterparts, but that there are some jobs – especially in the public sector, such as doctors, nurses and teachers – where they undercut UK salaries by up to £6,000 a year.
They recommend that the squeeze on the recruitment of skilled labour from outside Europe, currently running at 151,000 people a year, should include a sharp rise in the minimum salary threshold for jobs filled from overseas from £20,800 to £30,000.
The package also includes restrictions on what is known as “intra-company transfers”, which would limit their use to senior managers and specialists by raising the minimum salary for visas to £41,500.
May has ordered the crackdown on skilled labour from outside Europe in the face of record net migration figures of 336,000 to Britain in the 12 months to June last year.
She and Cameron asked the MAC to find ways of significantly reducing the current flow of skilled non-EU migrants a year into Britain.
She is expected to endorse the recommendations but has not yet made a final decision. A Home Office spokesman said: “We are grateful to the migration advisory committee for its report. We are considering its findings and will respond in due course.”
The committee said that the package could lead to a cut in skilled migration by 27,600 or 20% of the current flow of skilled migrants from outside Europe each year.
The recruitment of NHS nurses and teachers is expected to be most affected by the recommended changes, along with tech specialists working in software companies.
The increase in the minimum salary threshold to £30,000 would particularly affect nurses on what is known as “tier two” routes under the points-based immigration system. The committee recommends phasing in the changes for nurses and teachers.
The MAC report says the introduction of an immigration skills charge of £1,000 a head on skilled recruitment from outside Europe could raise £250m a year for skills funding, including apprenticeships. The charge would apply for each year a migrant works in Britain, so a three-year |
of people living in between whichever years happen to mark the cutoff for each generation?
And who are we really talking about when we say Millennial? Is it really even a worthwhile task trying to make generalizations about an entire age group? Does a twenty-something daughter of a single-parent trying to eek out an existence in Detroit have that much in common with a twenty-something guy coasting his way through private schools on the back of his parents’ wealth? Is it fair to the vast collection of wildly different human experiences to round them all up based on age demographics, just so we can come up with catchy Internet headlines that attempt to serve up the world in easy-to-swallow factoids?
It also bothers me because I can already see it now, hundreds of years in the future, whoever writes textbooks will do all of their research and they’ll try to speak about life here, the life I’m living, the generation that I’m a part of. And they’ll just keep regurgitating that word, Millennial, and everybody will scratch their heads in confusion, asking themselves questions like, “Why was everybody so dumb back then? Who thought it was a good idea to nickname such a large group of people the Millennials?”
Unfortunately, it looks like this is it, it’s stuck, we’re the Millennial generation. Which is totally not fair. Why do our grandparents get to be a part of “The Greatest Generation?” Just because they beat the Nazis? I get it, they saved the world, they were rewarded with an awesome generational title. Our generation played Nintendo 64, and so we’re the Millennials. Listen, maybe we haven’t earned a cool name, yet, but what happens if the Nazis come back, and our generation somehow rallies to the cause, and we beat the Nazis again? I hope it doesn’t happen, but if it does, I don’t think it’s cool that our grandkids are still going to refer to us as Millennials. By naming us Millennials, all it’s done is basically written off any chance that we might eventually be able to do something great.
I don’t know. All I can say is, if you think Millennial is as stupid as I do, just stop using it. Don’t respond to it, don’t repeat it, just do your best to pretend like it doesn’t exist. Hopefully if enough people sign on, we can at least use Millennial as a dead giveaway, that anybody who uses it doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
Except for this article. I’m using it. But that’s it, I’ve said it for the last time.Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), like many Americans, wants the president to speak clearly about the nature of the enemy we face. Yet, all we’ve gotten from the White House is passionless speeches and circuitous rhetoric about the savagery we’ve witnessed both at home and abroad – San Bernardino and Paris being just the latest tragedies. Hardly do President Obama or other leading Democrats have the guts to name the source of the violence: radical Islam.
Sasse does. In a recent speech on the Senate floor, the senator responded to the White House’s claim that they don’t want to treat these terrorists as “leaders of some religious movement.”
“Mr. President, this is lunacy,” he said. “First, while the White House is insisting that no one use the word ‘Islamic’ or note any connection between the war that we're facing and some subset of Islam—even as the White House insists that no one use the word—their own preferred adjective—ISIL or ISIS—begins with an ‘I.’ Every fourth-grader in America can deduce, without any assistance from Vanna White, what the rest of the word that begins with an ‘I’ is.”
He went on to make the distinction between the larger religion of Muslim and its radical subset.
“We are obviously not at war with all Muslims, but we are at war with those who believe that they would kill in the name of religion. And the White House insist that we muzzle ourselves and not tell the truth.”
Sasses’ speech was so powerful Fox News’ Bret Baier featured it on his program Wednesday night.
Sasse’s overall point: How can we defeat a force we can’t even define?
Tiptoeing around the core of the problem is not going to solve it, nor is the president’s stubborn determination to proceed with a plan that has so far failed. ISIS, regardless of Obama’s naïve belief, is not contained. It is expanding and leaving a trail of blood wherever it goes.
Islamic terror. It’s not hard to say. Perhaps the president can learn to simplify the issue if he goes back to fourth grade.Big Wall Street banks face an uneasy future after U.S. regulators on Tuesday finalized the Volcker Rule, a measure that attempts to curtail big bets on certain financial instruments. But in a potential concession, the banks themselves largely will be responsible for determining whether they're in compliance.
As Wall Street, Washington and the lawyers that advise them digested the rule, investors appeared to brush off concerns that the final version would dent banks’ profitability. Share prices of banks seen as most vulnerable to the rule rose.
Named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the idea began in 2010 as a simple effort to ban short-term speculative trading and investments in hedge and private equity funds by financial institutions that enjoy federal deposit insurance. Over the last few years, regulators had struggled to define what constituted speculation and what was merely the accumulation of financial instruments meant to be sold to clients, such as asset managers or other large investors.
More than 18,000 comment letters to the five federal agencies charged with developing the rule further clouded regulators’ efforts, and the rule became a symbol of whether the Obama administration and financial supervisors in Washington would rein in big banks or succumb to relentless industry pressure at a time when calls to break up the biggest banks appear to be growing.
Officials said the final rule attempts to straddle the line between banning so-called proprietary trading -- trading by banks for their own account -- but preserving big banks’ abilities to hedge their risks and buy and sell securities in order to serve their customers, otherwise known as market-making.
The rule promises unprecedented surveillance of big banks' trading operations, mostly through documentation requirements that force banks to justify trades and strategies and to keep running tallies of whether their activities conform to the rule.
But the establishment of parameters that ultimately will determine whether banks are complying with the rule was left to the banks themselves. The rule also relies on banks to tell regulators whether their trading practices, as they define them, comply with its provisions. Regulators largely will be responsible for double-checking the banks’ work.
“The rule is so conceptual it’s all about the implementation," said Marcus Stanley, policy director for Americans for Financial Reform, a group that represents more than 250 organizations. "The regulators didn’t draw really bright lines for hedging or market-making. This thing is one giant loophole if it’s badly implemented.”
Regulators largely missed the increasing risk in the financial system that preceded the 2008 crisis and the linkages between institutions that pushed many perilously close to failure when markets began to tank. They also failed to spot or reduce risk-taking at JPMorgan Chase in early 2012, when traders led by the so-called London Whale caused the bank to lose more than $6 billion on wrong-way bets.
“No one will really know whether regulators, who have failed so abysmally in the past, have learned from the crisis and will start regulating the banks for real by aggressively enforcing the Volcker Rule,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit group that advocates stringent rules on big banks.
Underscoring concerns that federal regulators largely outsourced the task of differentiating between proprietary trading and permitted activities, Sarah Bloom Raskin, the Federal Reserve governor President Barack Obama has nominated to be deputy treasury secretary, said that examiners from the agencies charged with enforcing the rule “will be leaned on heavily.”
“The proposed final rule has taken the approach of not setting explicit limits, but permitting regulated entities to set those limits through their compliance plans, and then monitoring those compliance plans,” Raskin said. “This emphasis on compliance within firm-chosen limits, rather than absolute thresholds, means that the role of supervisors and examiners and in particular the role of supervisor and examiner judgement and discretion become critical.”
Regulators ban trades that result in a bank’s exposure to “high risk” assets or trading strategies, but they declined to specify what constitutes “high risk,” Raskin noted. That further increases the importance of front-line examiners who would be charged with determining whether banks were violating the provision.
Raskin voted to finalize the proposal as President Barack Obama, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Fed, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. all praised the rule for generally making the financial system safer.
“The Volcker Rule will make it illegal for firms to use government-insured money to make speculative bets that threaten the entire financial system, and demand a new era of accountability from CEOs who must sign off on their firm’s practices,” Obama said.
Business and financial industry groups were more reserved, warning that the rule risks driving up costs for bank customers, investors and businesses that depend on banks for capital. The three Republican commissioners at the CFTC and SEC voted against the rule.
Regulators said the Volcker Rule was toughened in a few key areas from their 2011 proposal. It contains tighter language that now specifies that banks must link trades to specific risks they’re trying to mitigate -- rather than simply being allowed to claim that large batches of trades reduce their risk -- and a requirement that banks' board of directors and chief executives annually certify the effectiveness of their compliance regimes.
The provision requiring banks to specify risks they’re trying to hedge is largely a result of the London Whale episode, in which traders at JPMorgan Chase tried to reduce the bank’s exposure to certain hypothetical losses by taking on outsized risks in other categories that eventually cost the bank billions of dollars in losses and its reputation as a well-managed institution.
The CEO requirement was previously recommended in January 2011 by the Financial Stability Oversight Council, the Treasury Department-led group of financial regulators charged with protecting the U.S. economy from risks in the financial system.
In other ways, the final rule was relaxed from previous versions and earlier recommendations from FSOC were ignored.
For example, rather than solely allowing for banks to trade U.S. Treasuries and some municipal debt for their own short-term profit, regulators expanded the list of permitted securities to include all forms of municipal debt as well as obligations of foreign governments.
Regulators also expanded the list of funds exempt from restrictions that limited banks’ investments in them.
The FSOC recommendation that regulators require banks to measure the amount of trades initiated by their customers relative to trades they initiate on their own went ignored. Instead, regulators asked banks to measure the share of trades involving their customers compared with trading with other counterparties. But the final rule left open the possibility that banks may count other banks as their customers, casting doubt on the potential effectiveness of a measure intended to help determine whether banks are trading to benefit their own bottom lines or for the benefit of their clients.
Banks will have to collect data measuring seven key figures that ultimately will determine whether they’re complying with the Volcker Rule. The measurements begin next year. Banks won’t have to comply with the rule until 2015.
“For everybody -- regulators, advisers, consultants, lawyers and banks -- there is a learning curve with this rule,” said Robert Maxant, partner at Deloitte & Touche who leads the firm’s Volcker Rule efforts. “Once the regulators have metrics to compare across firms, and also examination experience, that comfort and understanding will grow.”
Maxant cautioned that regulators may be more likely to check for compliance only after banks experience big trading losses.
Raskin suggested that the approach favored by regulators may fall short, and that more intrusive oversight may be needed. For example, she said, although the rule specifies that bank employees can’t be paid in a way that encourages prohibited trading, regulators won’t know for sure by relying on banks’ own statements.
“It seems to me that if we’re serious about minimizing financial instability in the context of the Volcker Rule, then we have to engage in some scrutiny of the design of compensation plans and ask ourselves whether various pay arrangements are thwarting the rule’s goals by inducing traders and others to accept excessive levels of risk despite the existence of compliance plans, metrics and CEO attestations,” Raskin said.
Or, as Bart Chilton, a Democratic commissioner at the CFTC put it, regulators need to be “nimble and quick to ensure that what we do today holds up and that the high rollers' room isn’t reopened.”
Officials cautioned that while the rule would prevent another London Whale-type fiasco, it won’t stop what Jeremy Stein, Fed governor, described as “all future trading-related screwups.”
“It is important to keep in mind that the Volcker Rule is not a guarantee that firms we supervise won’t lose a lot of money in their trading operations," said Mark Van Der Weide, the Fed’s deputy director of bank supervision.
The rule doesn’t prevent banks from speculative long-term trading, nor does it limit short-term trading in loans, currencies or other assets beyond certain securities and derivatives, Van Der Weide said. It also exempts what he called “some of the most common forms of securities that banks trade in” -- namely U.S. Treasuries and securities and obligations of government-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In anticipation of the Volcker Rule, which became law in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank reforms, banks already have begun to shutter or rename their proprietary trading units and sell off their stakes in various hedge funds.
Kelleher said that one way in which the public can gauge whether the Volcker Rule is working as intended is to measure the number of traders leaving big banks, the decline in compensation for the traders that remain, and the fall in banks’ revenues from so-called FICC trading, which stands for fixed-income, currencies and commodities.
“This is not a perfect rule, but none are,” Kelleher said. “But make no mistake about it: regulators now own the Volcker Rule.In the 1960s, Walter Keane was feted for his sentimental portraits that sold by the million. But in fact, his wife Margaret was the artist, working in virtual slavery to maintain his success. She tells her story, now the subject of a Tim Burton biopic
There’s a sweet, small suburban house in the vineyards of Napa, northern California. Inside, a family of devout Jehovah’s Witnesses bustles around, offering me a cheese plate. A Siamese cat weaves in and out of my legs. Everything is lovely. Sitting unobtrusively in the corner is 87-year-old Margaret Keane. “Would you like some macadamia nuts?” she asks. She hands me Jehovah’s Witness pamphlets too. “Jehovah looks after me every day,” she says. “I really feel it.” She is the last person you’d expect to be a participant in one of the great art frauds of the 20th century.
This story begins in Berlin in 1946. A young American named Walter Keane was in Europe to learn how to be a painter. And there he was, staring heartbroken at the big-eyed children fighting over scraps of food in the rubbish. As he would later write: “As if goaded by a kind of frantic despair, I sketched these dirty, ragged little victims of the war with their bruised, lacerated minds and bodies, their matted hair and runny noses. Here my life as a painter began in earnest.”
Fifteen years later and Keane was an art sensation. The American suburb had just been invented and millions of people suddenly had a lot of wall space to fill. Some of them – those who wanted their homes to express upbeat whimsy – opted for paintings of dogs playing pool or dogs playing poker. But a great number of others, who wanted something more melancholic, went for Walter’s sad, big-eyed children. Some of the children held sad, big-eyed poodles in their arms. Others sat lonely in fields of flowers. They were dressed as harlequins and ballerinas. They just seemed so innocent and searching.
Walter himself was not a melancholic man. According to his biographers, Adam Parfrey and Cletus Nelson, he was a drinker and a lover – of women and of himself. This, for instance, is how he describes his first meeting with Margaret, the woman now sitting opposite me in Napa. It’s from his 1983 memoir, The World of Keane: “I love your paintings,” she told me. “You are the greatest artist I have ever seen. You are also the most handsome. The children in your paintings are so sad. It hurts my eyes to see them. Your perspective and the sadness you portray in the faces of the children make me want to touch them.”
“No,” I said. “Never touch any of my paintings.”
Walter and Margaret Keane work side by side in 1961. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
This conversation apparently took place at an outdoor art exhibition in San Francisco in 1955. Walter was still an unknown artist. He wouldn’t become a phenomenon for another few years. Later that night, his memoir continues, Margaret told him: “You are the greatest lover in the world.” They married.
Margaret’s memory of their first meeting is quite different.
The centre of Walter’s universe in the mid-1950s was a San Francisco beatnik club, The Hungry i. While comedians such as Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby performed onstage, out at the front, Walter sold his big-eyed-children paintings. One night Margaret decided to go to the club with him.
“He had me sitting in a corner,” she tells me, “and he was over there, talking, selling paintings, when somebody walked over to me and said: ‘Do you paint too?’ And I suddenly thought – just horrible shock – ‘Is he taking credit for my paintings?’”
He was. He had been telling his patrons a giant lie. Margaret was the painter of the big eyes – every one of them. Walter might well have seen sad children in postwar Berlin, but he hadn’t painted them, because he couldn’t paint to save his life.
Margaret was furious. Back home she confronted him. She told him to stop. But something unexpected happened instead. During the decade that followed, Margaret would nod in respectful admiration as Walter told interviewers that he was the best painter of eyes since El Greco. She said nothing. Why did she go along with it? What was happening inside the Keane marriage?
Margaret takes me back to the beginning. It’s true that he charmed her at that art exhibition in 1955, she says. “He was just oozing with charm. He could charm anyone.” But the rest of the conversation didn’t happen. How could it have?
Their first two years were happy, but all that changed the night of the Hungry i. “Back home he tried to explain it away,” she says. “He said: ‘We need the money. People are more likely to buy a painting if they think they’re talking to the artist. People don’t want to think I can’t paint and need to have my wife paint. People already think I painted the big eyes and if I suddenly say it was you, it’ll be confusing and people will start suing us.’ He was telling me all these horrible problems.”
Walter offered Margaret a solution: “Teach me how to paint the big-eyed children.” So she tried. “And when he couldn’t do it, it was my fault. ‘You’re not teaching me right. I could do it if you had more patience.’ I was really trying, but it was just impossible.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Margaret and Walter pose with a selection of paintings in 1965. Photograph: Bill Ray/The LIFE Picture Collection/Gett
Margaret felt trapped. She wanted to leave, but she didn’t know how. How would she support herself and her daughter? “So finally I went along with it,” she says. “And it was just tearing me apart.”
By the early 1960s, Keane prints and postcards were selling in the millions. You couldn’t walk into a Woolworths without seeing racks of them. Luminaries including Natalie Wood, Joan Crawford, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis and Kim Novak were buying the originals.
“Did you see any of the money?” I ask Margaret.
“No,” she says. “I just painted. But we moved to a nice house. There was a swimming pool. Gated. Servants. So I didn’t need to do anything except paint.” She smiles, ruefully. Outside in the sun, Walter was living the high life. “There was always three or four people swimming nude in the pool,” he wrote in his memoir. “Everybody was screwing everybody. Sometimes I’d be going to bed and there’d be three girls in the bed.” The Beach Boys would visit, and Maurice Chevalier, and Howard Keel. But Margaret rarely saw them, because she was painting 16 hours a day.
“Did the servants know what was going on?”
“No, the door was always locked,” she says. “The curtains closed.”
“You spent all those years with the curtains closed?”
“When he wasn’t home he’d usually call every hour to make sure I hadn’t gone out,” she says. “I was in jail.”
“Did you know about the affairs?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t care what he did by then.”
“It must have been lonely.”
“Yes, because he wouldn’t allow me to have any friends. If I tried to slip away from him, he’d follow me. We had a chihuahua and because I loved that little dog so much, he kicked it, and so finally I had to give the dog away. He was very jealous and domineering. And all along he said: ‘If you ever tell anyone I’m going to have you knocked off.’ I knew he knew a lot of mafia people. He really scared me. He tried to hit me once. But I said, ‘Where I come from men don’t hit women. If you ever do that again I’ll leave.’” She pauses. “But I let him do everything else, which was even worse probably.”
“Would he come home from his partying and demand you show him what you’d painted?” I ask.
“He was always pressuring me to do more,” she says. “‘Do one with a clown costume.’ Or: ‘Do two children on a rocking horse.’ One day he had this idea that I’d do this huge painting, his masterwork, to hang in the United Nations or somewhere. I had a month to do that.”
The “masterwork” was called Tomorrow Forever. It depicted a hundred sad-looking, big-eyed children of all creeds standing in a line that stretches to the horizon. The organisers of the 1964 World’s Fair hung it in their Pavilion of Education. Walter felt deeply proud of the achievement. He wrote in his memoir that his dead grandmother told him in a vision that “Michelangelo has put your name up for nomination as a member of our inner circle saying that your masterwork Tomorrow Forever will live in the hearts and minds of men as has his work on the Sistine chapel.”
The art critic John Canaday reviewed Tomorrow Forever for the New York Times: “This tasteless hack work contains about 100 children and hence it is about 100 times as bad as the average Keane.” Stung by the review, the World’s Fair took down the painting.
“Walter was furious,” Margaret says. “I felt hurt that they didn’t want it and were saying nasty things. When people said it was just sentimental stuff it really hurt my feelings. Some people couldn’t stand to even look at them. I don’t know why - just a violent reaction. But so many people really love them. Little children love them. Even babies. So eventually I thought: ‘I don’t care. I’m just going to paint what I want to paint.’”
If you’d asked Margaret back then about her inspiration – which you never would have, of course – she would have shrugged and said she didn’t know. The paintings just flowed out of her. But now, she says, she thinks she understands: “Those sad children were really my own deep feelings that I couldn’t express in any other way. Their eyes were searching. Asking why. Why is there so much sadness? Why do we have to get sick and die? Why do people shoot each other?”
“Why is my husband so crazy?” I suggest. “Why did I get into this mess?” Margaret nods.
After 10 years of marriage, eight of them horrific, they divorced. Margaret promised Walter that she’d keep on secretly painting for him. And she did for a while. But after she’d delivered maybe 20 or 30 big eyes to him, she suddenly thought: “No more lies. From now on, I will only ever tell the truth.”
Which is why, in October 1970, Margaret told a reporter from the UPI everything. “He wanted to learn to paint,” she revealed, “and I tried to teach him to paint when he was home, which wasn’t often. He couldn’t even learn to paint.”
And so on. Walter went on the offensive, swearing that the big eyes were his and calling Margaret a “boozing, sex-starved psychopath” who he once discovered having sex with several parking-lot attendants.
“He was really nuts,” Margaret says. “I couldn’t believe he had so much hate for me.”
Margaret became a Jehovah’s Witness. She moved to Hawaii and started painting big-eyed children swimming in azure seas with tropical fish. In these Hawaii paintings you can see small, cautious smiles begin to form on the faces of the children. Walter’s life wasn’t so happy. He moved to a fisherman’s shack in La Jolla, California, and began to drink from morning until night. He told the few reporters still interested in him that Margaret was in league with the Jehovah’s Witnesses to defraud him. One reporter, from USA Today, believed every word, and they ran a story on Walter’s plight: “Thinking he was dead [Margaret] claimed to have done some of the Keane paintings. The claim, vehemently denied by a very much alive Keane, is in litigation.”
Margaret sued Walter. The judge challenged them both to paint a child with big eyes, right there in court, in front of everyone. Margaret painted hers in 53 minutes. Walter said he couldn’t because he had a sore shoulder.
“And there it is,” she tells me. She points to a framed portrait on the wall of a little girl with absolutely huge eyes, peering out nervously from behind a fence. “I painted it in Honolulu federal court. It has the exhibit number on the back.”
In fact the walls of Margaret’s home are filled with big-eye paintings – children, poodles, kittens. There’s barely an inch of empty wall space.
“That painting is symbolic of her triumph over the lies,” Margaret’s son-in-law tells me as he walks past us towards the kitchen.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amy Adam plays Margaret Keane in Tim Burton’s film Big Eyes. Photograph: The Weinstein Company/Allstar/Allstar/The Weinstein Company
Margaret won the court case, of course. She was awarded $4m, but she never saw a penny of it because Walter had drunk his fortune away. A court psychologist diagnosed him with a rare mental condition called delusional disorder. I ask Margaret if she knows anything about delusional disorder. She shakes her head and says she can’t even remember Walter being diagnosed with it.
“It’s when a person who is otherwise completely normal has a particular delusion they’re absolutely convinced of,” I say. “Quite often it’s a jealous husband convinced his wife is cheating on him. Sometimes the person is convinced that some impostor is taking credit for their genius.”
“I didn’t know that,” Margaret says.
“If you have the disorder it means you truly believe it,” I say.
Margaret thinks. “For a long time I felt very guilty about it,” she says.
“Why guilty?” I ask.
“If I hadn’t allowed him to take credit for the paintings, he wouldn’t have got as sick as he got.”
Walter died in 2000. He gave up drinking towards the end, but you get the sense that he missed those days, writing in his memoir that sobriety was his “new awakening, away from the drinking world of exciting sexy beautiful women, parties and art buyers”. By the 1970s, the big eyes had fallen from favour. Woody Allen mocked them in Sleeper, imagining a ridiculous future where they were revered.
But now, suddenly, there is a kind of renaissance. A Tim Burton biopic, Big Eyes, is about to be released, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. Margaret has a cameo: “I’m a little old lady sitting on a park bench.”
“Was the film distressing to watch?” I ask her.
“It was really traumatic,” she says. “I really think I was in shock for a couple of days. Christoph Waltz – he looks like Walter, sounds like him, acts like him. And to see Amy going through what I went through … It’s very accurate. Then it started to dawn on me how fantastic the movie is.”
Margaret smiles, looking thrilled, and I realise that sometimes a wrong is so great it needs something as dramatic as a major biopic in which you’re the hero to heal the wounds.
• Big Eyes will be released in the UK on 26 December.This Father’s Day, is it time to challenge our assumptions when it comes to parental leave? Derek Rotondo thinks it is. Rotondo, a JP Morgan employee, was denied parental leave because the company presumed his wife would be the primary caregiver for their children. Last Thursday, Rotondo filed a complaint with the EEOC arguing that JP Morgan’s parental leave policy violates state and federal anti-discrimination laws. The complaint alleges that Rotondo attempted to take advantage of JP Morgan’s leave policy, which provides 16 weeks of paid leave after the birth of a child to the “primary caregiver,” but was told both orally and in writing that the policy presumes that the primary caregiver is the biological mother. The complaint was filed “on behalf of all fathers who have previously been eligible to receive paid parental leave from JPMC” and challenges JPMC’s “pattern or practice of discriminating against fathers in the provision of paid parental leave by denying them caretaking leave on the same terms as mothers based on their sex and sex-based stereotypes.” Galen Sherwin, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, told the Washington Post that this case is thought to be the first private sector challenge to a parental leave policy which distinguishes between primary and secondary caregivers. A case filed against CNN, which challenged parental leave policies that explicitly gave preference in giving caretaking leave to biological mothers, was settled in 2015.
Although the EEOC has not yet stated whether it will launch an investigation into Rotondo’s claims, the challenge has firm footing in the EEOC’s 2015 Guidance on Parental Leave, which unequivocally requires gender-neutral parental leave policies, stating that “[while] leave related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions can be limited to women affected by those conditions…. parental leave must be provided to similarly situated men and women on the same terms.” Additionally, as Professor Vicki Schultz of Yale Law School argued to Bustle, the 2003 Supreme Court Case Nevada v. Hibbs already found that anti-discrimination laws could apply to unequal parental leave policies
Not only is gender-neutral parental leave supported by the law, it’s also good policy. Paternal leave policies which exhibit an explicit or implicit preference for biological mothers not only disadvantage men who choose to take parental leave, they also reinforce sex stereotypes, exacerbate the gender-pay gap, and have a disparate impact on LGBTQ+ workers and families.
Despite the notable disadvantages of policies like JP Morgan’s, it is worth mentioning that paid parental leave policies are still a rare benefit for the U.S. workforce. According to Slate, 114 million people receive no paid parental leave, and nine of the top 44 US employers, including Amazon, Walmart, McDonald’s, Marriott, and Nike, provide paid leave only to its highly-paid workers. The good news is that we may soon see significant change in parental leave policies across the country: the New York Times reports that bipartisan talks are in the works for a federal program which would provide paid parental leave to all new parents—including fathers.
Related
© 2019 On Labor | http://onlabor.org/thinking-about-parental-leave-on-fathers-day/Best of Miami®
Best of Miami® 2018
Welcome to your guide to Miami’s best of almost everything. Now let’s roll out the red carpet! On these pages, you’ll discover the top romantic restaurant (Stiltsville Fish Bar in South Beach) and the number one inexpensive restaurant (Ono Poke in — where else? — Wynwood). You’ll learn that Otto Von Schirach has the best Instagram (What, it’s not mine?!, you’ll protest) and that the Gables Corset Shoppe has the coolest lingerie.
Indeed, you’ll discover the finest of more than 300 categories, according to New Times staff and a select group of freelancers.
You will also see how the public voted. This year, more than 9,000 ballots were cast online for Miami’s best. Some of these winners were predictable: Readers chose Zak the Baker as top bakery and Broken Shaker as the first bar of Miami Beach. Pleasant surprises were choices for best karaoke — Let’s Sang at Gramps — and best news anchor: Roxanne Vargas.
Though DJ Khaled is the one who made “We the best” his signature phrase, Miami New Times has provided a guide to what’s best for the past three decades.
#BestofMiami
Illustrations by Alvaro Diaz-Rubio.Filed by on
Always talk about ebooks being pulled or possibly being pulled for library access.
Today, word that one audiobook publisher is suspending the sale of (as of January 31, 2011) audiobooks for library lending via OverDrive and other vendors.
OverDrive partners were informed of this change in a collection development update email.
Here’s the exact wording of what OverDrive partners received:
Effective January 31, 2012, as instructed by the publisher, BrillianceAudio will suspend the availability of all download audiobook titles for library purchase across all vendors. This change does not affect any titles currently in your library’s catalog. You will not, however, be able to add any additional copies.
Brilliance Audio was acquired by Amazon.com in May, 2007. Amazon also owns Audible.com, the popular audiobook download service.
A Few of the Many Possibilities That Quickly Come to Mind
Brilliance Sells Access to Titles via Audible, No Need To Lend
Amazon Will Add Some/All Brilliance Titles to the Their Amazon Prime Program
We have asked Brilliance for a comment and will update if/when we here from them.
See Also: Brilliance Audio Titles in the OverDrive CatalogIn Iowa, two Catholic Worker activists said Monday they had carried out multiple acts of sabotage aimed at stopping the construction of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline, which stretches from North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa and into Illinois.
Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya said that on Election Day last year, the two set fire to five pieces of heavy machinery being used to construct the pipeline. The two then taught themselves how to destroy empty pipeline valves, and moved up and down the pipeline’s length, destroying the valves and delaying construction for weeks.
The two say they are claiming responsibility for the sabotage in order to inspire more to take action. This is Catholic Worker Jessica Reznicek.
Jessica Reznicek: “We are speaking publicly to empower others to act boldly, with purity of heart, to dismantle the infrastructures which deny us our rights to water, land and liberty. We, as civilians, have seen the repeated failures of the government, and it is our duty to act with responsibility and integrity, risking our own liberty for the sovereignty of us all.”
Ruby Montoya: “Some may view these actions as violent, but be not mistaken. We acted from our hearts and never threatened human life nor personal property. What we did do was fight a private corporation that has run rampantly across our country seizing land and polluting our nation’s water supply.”
And that was Catholic Worker Ruby Montoya. The two were speaking in front of the Iowa Utilities Board office. After delivering their statement, the two used a hammer and a crowbar to damage the letters of the Iowa Utilities Board sign in protest of the board’s decision Friday to reject a lawsuit by environmental groups seeking to have the pipeline’s state permit revoked, which would have forced the pipeline to shut down. The two women were arrested Monday for damaging the sign, and are being held on $1,000 bond. Oil is now flowing through the Dakota Access pipeline after the project was greenlighted by President Trump, despite months of massive nationwide resistance against the pipeline, led by the Standing Rock Sioux of North Dakota.The Battle of Khaybar was fought in the year 628 between Muslims and the Jews living in the oasis of Khaybar, located 150 kilometers (93 mi) from Medina in the north-western part of the Arabian peninsula, in modern-day Saudi Arabia. According to Hagai Mazuz, “The Jewish community of northern Arabia was one of the largest ancient Jewish communities in the history of the Jewish people.” [4] For almost a thousand years Jews lived in the oases of Teyma, Khaybar, and Yathrib (later known as Medina), in the northern Arabian Peninsula. According to Muslim sources, the Muslim soldiers attacked the native Jews who had barricaded themselves in forts.[5]
Two ahadith of Bukhari state that the major purpose for raiding Khaybar was to procure food: Narrated 'Aisha: When Khaibar was conquered, we said, "Now we will eat our fill of dates!" (Sahih Bukhari Volume 5, Book 59, Number 547); Narrated Ibn Umar: We did not eat our fill except after we had conquered Khaibar. (Sahih Bukhari Volume 5, Book 59, Number 548). Other reasons are given as well. Muslim sources accuse Jews living in Khaybar of a plan to unite with other Jews from Banu Wadi Qurra, Taima', Fadak as well as Ghafataan Arab tribe to attack Madinah.[6] Scottish historian William Montgomery Watt notes the presence in Khaybar of the Banu Nadir, who were working with neighboring Arab tribes to protect themselves from the Islamic community in Medina who had earlier sent into exile the Jewish tribes for violating the terms of the Charter of Medina and for conspiring to kill Muhammad.[7][8][ |
the Great Spirits….since before elves awoke on the shores of the world and before the sun itself was given birth….it stretches across time and space itself…"
"Time and space."
Satella held his hand tighter and smiled at him.
"Would you like to see?"
"Huh?"
"We can see other worlds if we follow the branches, I've done it before...but...I'd like to do it with you…"
"S-Sure...I'd love to."
Satella and Flugel followed the branches through the tree, but Satella noticed that Flugel was having a bit of trouble as he clutched his head.
"F-Flugel...we can stop if-"
"N-No...it's fine, I want to be with you, okay?"
Then, they saw everything bending into a void...and they ended up in a strange city. They saw people wearing odd clothing, carriages being driven by strange brown colored animals, then-
"Eek!"
Flugel and Satella were slightly startled by a loud sound in the distance. They looked and saw a large tower with what appeared to be a clock, it made loud bell-like sounds.
"A time tower?"
Flugel then noticed they were getting stares by the local residents, so he took Satella and they booked it.
They found themselves in what appeared to be a marketplace, so they decided to enter one of the shops. There they saw many books that interested them, sure they couldn't read it, but Flugel figured he could use a spell to translate it. They thanked the kind store owners and left.
As they made their way back, Flugel could now see the branch where they had come from, Satella nodded with him and soon they ventured back to their old world.
As they were passing through the void, Flugel glanced over and pointed something out.
"Hey look, what is that?"
"Wow...it almost looks like...a new world is being born…"
As they flew past the scene….the image they saw still continued, a large powerful looking hand had an entire spiral of stars and galaxies dance above its palm. Then it slowly began to close it's hand.
Flugel and Satella returned outside of the door and were able to translate the books. One was a love story called "Romeo and Juliet", which Satella ended up loving. The other was a book of star constellations, so Flugel decided to do something with his new knowledge.
"Hey! If I remember correctly, we never gave you a name."
"I was never given one, even by the previous keepers."
"Then how about we give you a name?"
"Oh?"
Satella and Flugel laughed a bit before finally bestowing the ancient spirit his name.
"From now on, you're Petelgeuse."
"Petelgeuse?"
"Yeah, it's the name of a star, known as the Red Star!"
"Red star...I like it!"
Then, Satella told him about the Authorities.
"How many of these Authorities are there?"
"Not that many, in reality there are about...let's say...nine in general, but each of them has a separate category that can be given to someone as well."
"Oh, so it's more like there are eighteen, but they are all related to each other."
"Yup...also they are all derived from the Algol, the original witches from centuries ago were able to get them. In fact, unlike other spirits, Petelgeuse was born near the Algol Tree, that's why he's so different."
"Wow, that really is-"
Then Flugel's face froze when he heard what he almost wished he could ignore.
"S-Satella?"
"Yes?"
"Did you say...witches?"
"Yes. My only friends...other than you of course...are witches."
"...OH MAN!"
Flugel soon demanded to see the witches. Satella was of course nervous about it, saying that only other one she ever brought was Petelgeuse.
"It's fine as long as you're with me...then it should be all good."
Arriving on a grassy hill, Flugel encountered the Six Witches. He was indeed nervous at first, but he somehow actually got along with them.
Minerva seemed to like his desire to making the world a better place.
Daphne loved how he brought his mother's baked goods for her to eat.
Typhon enjoyed playing with him...and also revealed-
"What the? Is that a horn sticking out of your head?!"
"Yup, I'm a half oni! Flu Flu has never seen one before?"
"Nope, that just makes you more interesting!"
"Yay! Tag then!"
Her immense strength sent Flugel flying through the air...forcing Satella and Minerva to chase him down.
"Oops."
Sekhmet didn't have too much of an opinion on him, but was happy that Satella made a friend outside of her usual comfort zone.
Carmilla was quite against him being there, but relented when he promised not to fall for her Authority...mostly because Satella seemed to block his view of her every so often.
As for Echidna...she seemed quite interested in the man. Mostly because he shared a passion of knowledge and wishing to know more and more.
Echidna would laugh and touch his shoulder out of actual joy.
Unbeknownst to the two of them, they were being watched from a good distance away by Satella.
They continued visiting the tea party which was at least once a month.
Flugel and Satella sat under a lovely tree that overlooked the tea party. Satella nuzzled close to Flugel...he then looked into her vibrant eyes passionately...he leaned in and kissed her.
Their kiss lasted a good few amount of seconds.
They removed each other from the kiss, as Satella happily cried into his arms.
"F-Finally."
"Hm?"
"I have someone who loves me...I'm not really alone…"
"And as long as I'm here...you won't be."
He helped wipe away her tears with his thumbs.
Satella and Flugel just looked up at the bright blue sky up above.
"Our life together starts right here and now, Satella."
"Yes."
Unknown to them a platinum haired girl was watching them from the distance, smiling as she did.
"Oh how perfect."
Ironically, a few months later, Flugel had to leave to the capital for a better education, but promised Satella he would visit often.
Satella understood and gave him her blessings.
"Come back...please…"
"Anything for you."
They gave one last goodbye kiss and Flugel was on his way.
Flugel eventually rose through the ranks of magic and tactical genius, even becoming almost as powerful as the Magrave. He would send letters to Satella, telling her of his progress. She was always delighted to receive them, cherishing them as if they were his treasures.
But...the letters stopped coming, and Satella became anxious. She became quite annoyed. She became afraid…
"Are you frightened of his intentions?"
"...Who is there…?"
Emerging from the nearby shrubbery was a girl that Satella had not seen in years.
"P-Pandora…? But last time…I saw you...you left with your witch teacher Morgana."
"Indeed, but she has since passed and I have now received the Authority of Vainglory."
"So you're the new witch?"
"Yes. Now tell me my dear, what is troubling you?"
Satella quietly told her of the man she fell in love with and how he stopped sending letters.
"Now I unserstand, this Flugel has been quite the endearing man."
"Yes...I hope...that we can truly stay...for-"
"-It's too bad he might be cheating on you."
Satella's face froze as Pandora glanced at the panicking girls face.
"N-No….Flugel would never do that! He said he...loves me...he-"
"-Hasn't there been signs? Maybe, you just ignored it? Maybe, it was too painful for you to think about?"
Unknown to Satella, was that Pandora was now invading her memories and changing them to fit her own agenda.
Satella saw Minerva patting Flugel...now she was cupping his cheek.
"Stop it."
Satella saw Sekhmet whispering something into Flugel's ear...now she was kissing his cheek.
"No please, don't."
Carmilla was peeking over Satella's shoulder to look at Flugel...she then licked her lips at him.
"No more! NO MORE!"
Echidna and Flugel were talking at the table, when they slowly got their faces closer-
"STOOOOOP IT!"
Satella fell to her knees and was crying intensely.
"No...I don't want to lose Flugel...so why? Why would he want to leave me?"
"...Maybe because you are not special in his eyes?"
"Special?"
"Echidna is very intelligent, Minerva is very strong and Carmilla is very lovely. And I'm sure there are many women in the capital that would peek his interest."
"...!"
"So why not peek his?"
Pandora brought out a single black mass from her behind her.
"That's…"
"Yes, the Witch Gene of Envy. I believe this will help in your endeavors."
"But...I don't know if I'm compatible...:"
"Oh well then."
Pandora began moving away making a fake unconcerned face while twiddling the mass on her fingers.
"I guess you're alright with losing your precious Flugel then."
"Ah wait…!"
Pandora stopped and Satella quickly walked over and held out her hands.
"I'll do it."
"Excellent."
Satella took hold of the Witch Gene and took a deep breath. The Witch Gene absorbed into her slowly...she breathed in and out. Took a deep sigh-
"AGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!"
Veins protruded out of her face and blood was spat out of her mouth, she held her chest tight as she began to cry out in pain.
"Looks like it was bad reaction...still…"
Pandora quietly walked away as she glanced back at Satella, dark energy flowing out of her very body.
"I am interested to see what comes of this."
Pandora disappeared and left the ailing Satella to her pain.
"Help me...someone...Fortuna...Petelgeuse...Bellatrix…"
She called on the names of her sisters and the spirit who was her first friend.
Then to the one person she could rely on…
"Flugel...Flugel...my love...the only person I will ever need! PLEASE! HELP ME!"
Satella raised her head as she screamed to the very heavens.
"FLUUUUUUGEL!
Word quickly spread of a half-elf witch that attacked anything that got near her. She absorbed the other witches powers and became a force of unimaginable strength.
"Love me…"
An entire army, ten thousand strong, were sent from Vollachia to deal with her...none of them made it back alive.
"Love me...Love me…"
Odglass and Muspel tried to take her on...but failed and were pushed back.
"Love me...Love me...Love only me…Only me..."
Roswaal's original father Zoroaster Mathers and a contigency army of mages battled her in the skies over the Gusetko mountains...only to all be killed, their bodies falling from the skies above.
"ONLY ME! NO ONE ELSE! LOVE ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!ME!ME!ME!ME!ME! LOOOVE!"
A flock of dragons related to Volcanica tried to stop her, but were all ripped to shreds by two thousand Unseen Hands.
"LOVE ME...FLUGEL...FLUGEL...WHERE ARE YOU...WHERE IS MY FLUGEL…?"
Elves. Onis. Orcs. Knights. Mages. Every species imaginable. Every class imaginable.
All were absorbed by her.
"I LOVE YOU."
Killed by the Witch of Envy.
Flugel's town was one of many destroyed by her, his mother and father were crushed into paste by her. The other villagers driven mad by her miasma and killed each other.
Flugel saw it.
A baby. Torn in half and left to be eaten by insects.
"BLUAGHH!"
Flugel puked and puked. He cried and cried. He screamed and screamed.
"Why?! WHY DID THIS HAPPEN?!"
Behind him, his two allies quietly watched as their comrade The Great Sage Flugel weeped at the sight before him.
Volcanica, his dark grey skin matching the smoke rising into the sky. His four limbs crotched down, watching it all. His bright fire colored eyes looked over the destruction.
"We were too late. She seems to be heading east now."
His fearsome appearance countered his noble spirit. The two horns that went back casted a shadow over the man below him.
"We really need to hurry this shit up. We can't keep being behind that witch any longer."
Reid said this as he scratched the back of his neck, while holding onto the sword he had gotten help creating. The Dragon Blade Reid. It was indeed quite the example of his ego naming the sword after himself.
Flugel dried his tears and floated over to them.
"We need to hurry...she's heading to the Augria Sand Dunes."
"...Hey, isn't that where the Witch of Gluttony died?"
Flugel held back more tears as he remembered his old friend.
"Yes...and I think that is where we can finally stop her."
Volcanica spread his winged arms wide, their wingspan easily dwarfed the two men below him.
"Then let us make haste!"
Reid jumped up on the dragon's back, while Flugel floated up and stood next to the Master Swordsman.
"Are you okay with this?"
"Hm?"
"You know...we can't let her live right-"
"-WHEN THE TIME COMES WE'LL DECIDE WHAT TO DO."
"...Whatever you say."
The three continued flying towards the destination where the final battle was to occur.
"Finally, you...have come to...be with me…!"
Flugel had a magical barrier up, as countless Unseen Hands were trying to break through.
Flugel could see the Unseen Hands due to his time in contact with the Algol Tree and his unique "attribute" that let him escape certain effects of other Authorities. She pushed him back as the very ground caved in from the pressure. Satella was covered in a ominous dark visage that covered her entire body, except her mouth. Which was smiling with such joy.
"Flugel! You have come! To me and only me!"
Volcanica flew over the clouds and opened his mouth wide, a white orb formed in front of his jaw, then it glowed and shot a vicious storm of fire. It engulfed both of them and everything around them...the flames stretched for miles around.
Luckily, Flugel had his barrier up.
Unluckily, Satella was protected by her black mass.
"Leave us alone…"
The fire was put out and hundreds of Unseen Hands blasted up and chased around Volcanica.
Reid decided to enter the fray and sliced away at the black mass surrounding her body. Then he saw an opening and struck...only for Satella to actually to block it with a kick.
"Stubborn ass woman!"
"Go away…"
Reid was suddenly hit by a powerful blast of air and was sent flying for several yards...then his feet kicked off the sandy ground and he blasted back to face off once against the witch.
He jumped into the air and concentrated, his sword began to glow bright blue and he sliced downward, the resulting impact sent a pillar of light high into the sky.
As the dust cleared and Flugel jumped back from it...Satella emerged from the sand cloud and her eyes narrowed as she looked at them.
"Flugel...STAY AWAY FROM FLUGEL! HE'S MINE! NO ONE ELSE'S!"
Satella encased her right arm in what appeared to be Unseen Hands and something else. The two other looked up and saw Volcanica had summoned his orb light again, but this time fired a pinpoint accurate beam down towards Satella. The beam split up as it made contact with her arm, the other two quickly jumped out of the way as the stray beams shot out in different directions.
They cut mountains in half.
Set forests on fire.
Boiled rivers.
All in all, chunks of this very world were affected by that one blast.
"Get away from us...Leave us alone...Flugel is mine...AND THIS WORLD IS MADE FOR US!"
Several Unseen Hands caught Flugel off guard and wrapped him up.
"Shit! Flugel!"
Reid tried to slice away at them, but suddenly he had to dodge something that sliced the very air in front of him. It wasn't wind magic for sure.
Flugel was dragged towards Satella...he then aimed his palm towards her.
"Al Gamma!"
A giant boomerang made of light shot out, it missed her...but it spun around and hit her in the back, clearly cutting her in half.
"It's alright...Flugel...I still love you…"
"Oh no."
He then saw she was quite fine, as if nothing occurred at all.
She tightened her grip on him and pulled him close, they were now face to face.
Volcanica was still trying to dodge the Unseen Hands as he looked down at the situation.
"No! This is going bad fast!"
Reid fighting a shadowy clone of Satella that had arm blades, as they traded blows the sand underneath them was sent flying up into the air.
"Fuck! Fuck! Get out of my way!"
Petelgeuse the spirit; summoned earth spikes to try and stop the crazed mob from a nearby village from attacking the others.
"Please! Satella-sama! Please cease this! Please!"
Satella brought Flugel in closer...and as she did, he saw as clear as day she was crying her eyes out. She covered her face as she wept, her tears hitting the sandy ground beneath them.
"I'm so sorry...So sorry...I hurt so many people...my...my sisters must hate me...your family...my friends…."
"Satella…"
"But...But I did it…"
She then moved her hands away from her face...revealing a hideous grin plastered on her face.
"I did it all for you…"
"No…"
"For you...Only you. To you. My love. My everything. My first. My last. My Flugel!"
"Satella! Please stop-"
"-If the world wants you I will crush it. If someone needs you, I will take them away! No one needs you but me! ME! ME! You and me…"
She quickly brought him in and gave him a passionate kiss, one filled with hot lust for him. However as she did this, Flugel only shed tears.
As she let go of the kiss, she licked his cheek and rubbed his hair.
"Now...we can go...far away...to a place where we can live in peace…"
She turned around and began opening a portal. The very space warped behind her. She laughed happily, clapping her hands, as she jumped up and down.
"Look! Look! Remember all those trips to that other world we went on?! Remember?!...Remember?...Now we can live there together!"
"Please...Satella, I love you! But I beg of you to please stop!"
"Now then, we can live together….forever! And if they get in our way...then I'll get rid of them too...no one deserves you but me…! Only me...Envy…"
She raced off heading towards the void, her pursuers trying their best to catch up to her, but to no avail.
Flugel freed himself from most of the Unseen Hands using Minya blades, but one was now dragging him by his leg.
"Agh! AHHH!"
"NOW! NOW! WE'RE TOGETHER! FOREVER!"
"SATELLAAAAAAAAAA!"
She smiled insanely as she was about to go through.
"Looks like you could use some help there chum."
Out of nowhere, a huge sonic boom blasted out of the void and zoomed past Satella, then whatever it was, grabbed Flugel and got him a distance away from her.
Reid and Volcanica were shocked to see something move so fast.
As Flugel shook his head he looked up and saw a strangely dressed man wearing a metal helmet with wings.
"Who...are you?"
"Hello there sir, the name is Jay Garrick, though people in my world call me the Flash."
"F-Flash?"
Jay helped Flugel up as they looked each other up and down.
"Those are some odd robes you have there. Are you some sort of magic user?"
"...?!"
"Don't be too tongue tied now. It's alright, we have a magic user on our team. He's one heck of guy too."
Satella glared at them as she summoned more Unseen Hands.
"Who are you...Who are you…?!"
"I get the feeling this young lady, is the cause of all this mess. It's a shame, she is quite pretty."
Satella roared as she let loose her Unseen Hands, but Jay took a deep breath as he began to run. Flugel fell on his behind as he watched Jay run at incredible speed, with streaks of yellow and orange electricity following him. Every one of the Unseen Hands couldn't catch him, making Satella howl in frustration.
"DIE! DIE! JUST DIE! LEAVE US TO OUR LOVE!"
"Funny way of showing love, miss."
Using his super speed, he would kick some sand up in the air as he ran, letting him see the outlines of the Unseen Hands as he continued running at breakneck speed. Satella was about to slice the air, but a huge cosmic blast shot Satella away, then as tried to get up she was then shot with a huge blue beam...everyone recognized it as magic.
Satella stood tall glaring at her new foes.
Volcanica and Reid got behind Satella as they also readied for battle.
And in front of the Witch, emerging from the void she opened...
"Your tampering with the laws of physicality has lead to an event that has been brought to our attention."
"...Go away…"
"I'm afraid we can see that we must aid these individuals in stopping you. By the lords of chaos and order, we shall see you defeated."
Dr. Fate and Stargirl emerged from the void, floating above them all. Jay stopped right in between Volcanica and Reid. He raised his fist up and yelled.
"JSA! Let's go!"
Atom Smasher.
Blue Devil.
Liberty Belle.
Alan Scott the Green Lantern.
Cyclone.
Black Lightning.
Dr. Mid-Nite.
Sandman.
Obsidian.
Citizen Steel.
S.T.R.I.P.E.
Hourman
Jakeem Thunder.
Hawkman.
Together, this large alliance between worlds, formed under the slightest of moments went to battle against Satella.
Satella screamed as she released over two thousand Unseen Hands in every direction.
Flugel was panting for air as the battle was now over...but he was also holding back tears. He looked over and saw the Evil Sealing Stone, inside was a slumbering Satella.
Now trapped inside with the help of Reid, Volcanica and Dr. Fate, this would make it impossible for her to escape out into the real world...but she was still alive.
Reid put a hand on Jay's shoulder as he looked down sadly at the cost for the climactic battle.
"Rest well good friends."
Maxin Hunkel, Libbey Lawrence, Paul Dugan, Jakeem Thunder and Hank Heywood were dead.
Killed in a battle to save a world they didn't even know existed. But they were heroes, and that was what heroes did.
Stargirl was crying as Blue Devil tried to comfort her. The rest of them were looking over their corspes, injured greatly, but able to say some prayers for them.
Reid gave his condolences, in a rare move of humility. Jay thanked him and looked over the area. Even as a desert, the place looked to be clearly the aftermath of a major battle. In the distance, there were plumes of smoke.
"Goodness gracious, I have never faced anything so powerful in my life."
"That Witch of Envy was really something. I hope that sealing stone keeps put."
Dr. Fate floated over to speak the truth of the matter.
"As long as nothing breaks it and it continues to consume,'mana' from the atmosphere, it shall keep her at bay."
"Can't help but feel that she can still cause a problem."
"Yes, this world must make sure to set up some protection for it. While this place offers little mana, it is still a desert. So you all must make sure to guard it."
"...But she's still alive?"
"...Unfortunately. Even with the sacrifices made, this Satella, still lives and could still cause havoc in this world. So do your best to keep her sealed."
Flugel looked over the stone sadly, in his mind he wished he could have done something different to save the woman he was in love with.
"Flugel Nova."
"...! Oh, Fate-san."
"A word please."
The two of them let the others go over their own plans as they spoke in private.
"Are you serious?"
"Yes...this spell will alter the memories of everyone on my team and on this plane of existence."
"But...they'll forget the witches."
"Only those who were close to them will remember."
"And all this destruction? All this pain and loss?"
"...Satella will be blamed for all of it."
"But...it was Pandora! She forced her! She took my letters...she confused her and-"
"-That is not of my concern."
Flugel furrowed his brows at him.
"I'm sorry. But in the end, this world will remember the destruction had here. So imagine we erase the memories of her existence...what would explain all this death and devastation?"
"...That's…"
"If the relations between the kingdoms are as bad as you say...then their new reformed memories would result in outright blame being placed on each other. This would lead to a World War. Would you prefer that instead?"
"...It's not fair."
"For order and chaos to be balanced...sometimes life must be unfair. Again, I'm sorry."
"No...I understand."
As the other worlders were exiting the void...Fate nodded to Flugel he then touched the Algol Tree Branch that was in front of them. letting Fate know where to touch as well, and firmly grasped it.
Dr. Fate used the entirety of the magic given to him by the Lords of Order, while Flugel used his connection to the Algol and his access to the Witch Gene of Gluttony to cause the desired effect.
Minus themselves, Volcanica, Reid, and a small select few...everyone's memories were altered.
For the Justice Society, the members who died were killed by a rogue alien from another dimension...And for the entirety of Flugel's world, all the devastation they faced was blamed solely on Satella.
"Farewell, I hope we never have to meet again."
The three nodded at Dr. Fate as the void closed in front of him.
The battle ended.
Flugel got to work on creating the Pleiades Watchtower to keep hold of everything and protect the Sealing Stone...but he felt some guilt for what he did to everyone's memories. So he created the Chamber of Memories and using the Unseen Hands he obtained, he created a star that would help grant wishes. Still, he couldn't just let anyone get to it.
So designed it in mind to let only someone with knowledge of the "other world" he visited so many times with Satella, to get by.
With that, he got an apprentice that would help him...a young girl named Shaula.
She would happily help him with his work and even began to hang out with him outside the tower.
She would have long talks with Volcanica about the world and the Algol Tree, learning that he was spawned near the tree thousands of years ago.
She would train in combat with Flugel, though his rough teaching methods made her a bit scared of him at times. Flugel would chastise him for it.
Flugel continued his work, even when he noticed his body didn't age as fast with the use of mana. He knew one day his time would come and that he would perish.
He needed someone to protect the Algol Tree. He remembered how Satella lost the ability to access it from her corruption by the Witch Genes...so now it would fall on another.
Bellatrix's daughter would obviously be the next to be chosen.
So...Flugel taught Petelgeuse how to commit a spell he learned from Echidna's archives.
"A spell to transfer yourself into another's body."
"But the person would cease to exist?"
"Get willing subjects, they'll give themselves to you. We just need you stick around to protect Bellatrix's daughter."
"And how?"
"...I have to start something."
That was the day Flugel started the Witch's Cult...he lied to members and told them that Belltrix's daughter would actually be Satella's shell and a way to bring her back. To protect her at all cost.
Studying the Book of Knowledge, he had copies made to twist destiny, using ink made from branches of the Algol Tree. He needed to do this...Satella needed to rest at peace.
Even if unknowingly, Pandora took advantage and began corrupting other members...and alongside Hector, they created a more vicious sect.
Flugel made Shaula protect the tower, no matter how long it took.
"But will you come back?"
"...Yes, someday I will indeed return."
He gave Shaula a hug and made his way out of the tower…
"How will I know it's you?"
"...Give me a whiff, then you'll know."
He left Shaula to guard the tower as he continued venturing out to find out what else he could do.
He eventually decided to run away from this world. He gave his goodbyes to Volcanica, to a bedridden Reid, Petelgeuse and to his other friends.
The last place he went to was the tree he planted near the highway towards the capital. He smiled at it...thinking how he put the thing there so that one day he could propose to Satella there under it's massive frame.
"I guess it's time."
He decided to leave the world, opened a void and left.
However, that was when Satella chased after him.. in an attempt to grab him, she accidentally brought Yamada Hoshin to their world. In essence, beginning an never ending cycle.
Though he escaped to the other world, he noticed that the friends he met so long ago in the battle against Satella...were nothing but comic characters in his new home. He made a quiet life for himself in the city of Hokkaido and tried to live his life to the fullest...but he couldn't forget Satella. No way he could.
So when his body was old and tired, he summoned himself back to his original home and tried to find his old friends.
But as he wandered the forests near his home, he found a man with an odd haircut ear some hodded men.
"...Flugel?"
"...Oh, I see...Petelgeuse."
Flugel recognized him instantly and sat on a rock as they discussed the state of the world. They joked, argued and even cried a bit. He coughed loudly and scratched his chin.
"So...is Fortuna, alright?"
"Yes, Elior Forest is still standing. Everyone is quite fine."
"...And Bellatrix?"
"...She passed away."
"I see….how tragic…"
"...They did have a child! We're protecting her even as we speak!"
Petelgeuse got teary eyed.
"...Name?"
"From what I heard...her name is Emilia."
"Oh...what a….wonderful name….."
"Flugel?"
"...Satella….let's go walking...-"
"-...Flugel."
Flugel passed away.
Petelgeuse mourned the death of his friend. He swore he would keep his promise to protect Emilia. To prevent the Algol Tree from being misused...and to not allow the Authorities in his body to be misused.
Then of course, as if the cruelty of the world was not enough. Pandora stole pieces of his body and began creating her Sin Archbishops with her captured Witch Genes residing in him.
All...except Pride. It was not found.
Petelgeuse only being able to save the Witch Genes of Sloth.
Something that would haunt them…
Flugel's spirit wandered around a bit...but it saw dark hands reaching out for him...something that delighted him, but also terrified him to no end. So his spirit fled back to the new world. It was losing it's corporal body...until it heard a baby crying.
"Sh-should I?"
It looked down at the baby crying from it's birth….then he decided it.
"I...I have to live...if...someday I see her again. I want to have a body doing so…"
The spirit raced to the window where the newborn was.
"Yes, I need to live so I can one day...see them all again…"
The baby had the affinity for it.
"Poor unfortunate soul...I am sorry...but I have to do this. I CANNOT DIE YET!"
Flugel began his over two hundred years of possessing newborns, just to keep himself alive. He did this again and again.
"Son, can you come here?"
"Sure, grandpa."
A tall muscular young man sat next to his ailing grandfather. He coughed and coughed as he looked up and smiled at him.
"Taikichi-kun, come and listen to a story."
"S-Sure."
The hazel eyed young man listened to his grandpa's obviously senile story of him being a man called Flugel, who was from another world and all the insane things that happened to him.
"You should've written that down as some form of story. Could've been a movie, even."
"Heh, maybe so."
Taikichi left him be as he went to get some snacks.
Taikichi wandered the streets outside of his home in the suburbs of the city, yawning as he contemplated the story.
"So detailed though...grandpa should've been a writer."
Then his vision became blurry so he rubbed his eyes…
"Man, must have somethin' in my-"
When Taikichi opened his eyes, he found himself in a strange city. Filled with carriages, odd animal people and architecture he saw in books about spanish colonial days.
"Huh?"
He fell backwards as he ran through the alleys and streets.
"What the hell is this?! THE FUCK IS HAPPENING!?"
He then thought about the story…
"No...NO! He was telling the truth?! No! NO!"
Taikichi soon ran into some thugs and got into a fight. There and then he lost his left arm. He killed his assailants. Getting the attention of some shady people...he was captured and taken away to be a coliseum fighter.
"Name?"
"N-Nomura Taikichi…"
"...Meh, that's a lame ass name...got something else for us?"
Taikichi remembered how his grandpa was alway interested in stars...so he decided to pick one.
"Al-ALDEBARAN."
Aldebaran's life in this new world had started.
Flugel's spirit was searching the city for his new host. He had just died moments before his grandchild disappeared.
He found the host he was the most suitable with.
He entered the young baby...then it happened.
"Wait. What is this?"
Flugel found he had no control over the boy. He tried with all his might, but simply could not do anything.
"Why?"
The parents of the child looked down at him and his vision became boxed in, like he was watching a movie, that was getting farther and farther away.
"Why?...WHY?! WHY?! WHY?!"
Flugel now found himself in a dark void looking up at a speck of light...unable to do a thing...then he realized it.
"Oh no."
Unlike the other world they once encountered, this world was a parallel one. One that had people with their alternate selves here. Two sides of a coin. Some lived elsewhere, like another country...but here at this very moment, Flugel accidentally possessed his alternate self. Disrupting the magic spell he used for hundreds of years. He was now trapped. Inside this child...
A newborn named Natsuki Subaru.
Flugel now became trapped in this body, unable to do a thing...and so he stopped trying, stopped speaking...stopped thinking.
Satella lost her strength trying to get him back, instead getting his grandchild who she saw value in. With her permission, she gave him a sub trait of the the Authority of Pride. Allowing him to relive a certain amount of time over and over again.
"Love you...still…"
She wanted him, begged for him…
"When I gain enough energy for it...then I'll find you…"
She now knew what to call him, his new name…
"Subaru...Subaru...NATSUKI SUBARU…"
And in less than eighteen years, she would bring him back.
"I Love you."
Subaru coughed loudly as he gripped his chest, his tears stopped as he looked up at Al….No, Taikichi.
"Do you remember now?"
Al was carefully putting his helmet on as his hazel eyes narrowed down at Subaru.
"Do you remember all the people you've fucked over now?!"
"...I…"
Could it be true?
Could his love for Emilia...only have been Flugel's remaining devotion for Satella?
Could his love for Rem….been a remnant of Flugel's desire to not be left alone?
Could the care he gave to Beatrice….be left over feelings of friendship for Petelgeuse?
Could his friendship with Bruce….been only scattered recollections of his encounter with the other heroes from so long ago?
Could any of his feelings have ever been real?
Who was Natsuki Subaru? Was he Flugel? Was he both?
Who was he?
What was he?
Then in the reaches of his mind, he was tumbling down an endless void of despair. Out in the void, hands made of shadows, or maybe even darker than that, reached out to pull him further. He was giving up, he was going to accept.
"Thank you Subaru, |
can barely stand to watch his mother’s manic determination take its toll. Since Ched’s arrest, she’s been mired in depression, losing sleep, overeating, and spending long hours on the computer. When she speaks, she drags her words in a spiritless monotone. There’s a concussed quality about her, as if someone has punched her hard in the face.
“If Ched did get deported, my mom would probably move to Cambodia because she really loves him,” Javonni says.
At 15, he’s only started to think about college prep. He now faces the grim possibility that he won’t finish high school in America.
The prospect is so daunting the family rarely discusses it.
The big blunt hammer in the toolbox
As far as the U.S. government is concerned, second chances are reserved for citizens.
Immigration authorities believe that since so much of the world desires entry to America, it’s a shame to shelter criminals while more deserving applicants are turned away. Take the Dreamers, who were brought into the country by parents, who know no other life and have committed no crimes.
Yet refugees, as permanent residents, enjoy greater safeguards than those who entered the country illegally, says ICE spokesman Shawn Neudauer. Each case is calculated on a host of factors, including family hardship.
On November 23, some 50 friends and family members of Ched Nin surrounded Jenny as she led a prayer outside the Rice County Courthouse. They filed in from the rain in a tidy rush, packing a second-floor courtroom.
Ched entered in handcuffs, his hair speckled with more white than in the photos hanging throughout his house.
An attorney made his case: When Ched pleaded guilty in the 2010 shooting in order to get a shorter sentence, he didn’t know he was sacrificing his immigration status in the process. Otherwise, he would have fought the charges.
Moreover, the Minnesota Supreme Court recently ruled that BB guns were not the same as true firearms, resulting in overturned convictions across the state.
The point wasn’t to argue that Ched was innocent, but that there were extenuating circumstances to the severity of the fallout. The judge would need time to weigh his decision.
As Ched was led from the room, a bailiff motioned the family into the hall. Whereas the Sherburne County Immigration Detention Center offered only video visitation, the Rice County Court allowed Jenny and the children to share 10 minutes with Ched in a holding room.
“We were all just crying and hugging and kissing,” Jenny says. “He still had handcuffs so he couldn’t hug us back. And they wouldn’t let him kiss us. But everyone was just kissing his face. I think we spent the whole time just hugging, because no one had been able to touch him for almost three months.”
Free by any means
The tireless wives of the Minnesota 8, with little experience in protest or public speaking, spent the fall staging rallies in front of the ICE field office at Fort Snelling, Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office, Congressman Keith Ellison’s office, and the Minneapolis Urban League. They attended every march for Jamar Clark and Philando Castile in support of those who would show up for them.
In November they traveled to Washington, D.C.,to meet with California Congresswoman Judy Chu, a proponent of immigrant protections. Then they met with Cambodian Ambassador Chum Bunrong, who has the authority to issue the travel documents for deportation — or withhold them.
The U.S. Supreme Court allows ICE to imprison deportees for up to 180 days. If the Cambodian ambassador produces papers within that frame, the Minnesota 8 will be jettisoned from places unknown, the exact location hidden to prevent families from last-ditch rescue missions.
But if the documents are not delivered in time, the men must be released.
In 2002, the U.S. and Cambodia signed a repatriation treaty in which they agreed to “act in a spirit of mutual cooperation.” There are no real repercussions if either party decides to ignore the deal.
When the wives of the Minnesota 8 appealed to Ambassador Bunrong, the ambassador assured them that he would try to help keep the families together, says Hoeun Hach, executive director of the International Khmer Assembly (IKARE) in St. Paul.
IKARE, which champions Cambodian genocide survivors, introduced the families to Bunrong at the risk of alienating other Cambodians.
The last time a large wave was deported from Minnesota was in the early 2000s. Nobody protested then. The families retreated in shame. Survivors of the Khmer Rouge had little sympathy for the sons stupid enough to get themselves sent back.
“Those who were not involved in the deportation... say let them go because they are criminals,” Hach says. Even now, many hesitate to support the Minnesota 8. He suspects this stems from the Buddhist notion that life is a sea of misery. The point is to seek enlightenment to escape it.
The difference now is that the families aren’t backing down.
The second time is not a charm
Sokha Kul carries a coil of worry in the hollow of her gut. Meek and mild-mannered, she agonizes over finding the words to express her private thoughts. It’s just as well, because Sokha doesn’t have much time for reflection.
Her husband, Sameth Nhean, 34, has been imprisoned for five months.
Sokha works six days a week to support their three children. The couple used to alternate day and night shifts so one would always be at their St. Paul home with the kids. Now, 13-year-old Cianna and 10-year-old Arson must look after themselves until twilight. Four-year-old Nautica is offloaded to an elderly grandfather whose patience for rearing young children expired long ago.
Sokha met Sameth 11 years ago at a party. Conversation came naturally. The two started hanging out. She didn’t really expect to fall in love, Sokha says, but for one thing.
She’d been raising Cianna alone when they began dating. Then two, the girl envied her cousins who had fathers. She wanted to know if Sameth was “daddy.”
Embarrassed, Sokha shushed the girl. But Sameth said “daddy” would be just fine. He’s treated her as his own ever since.
When Sameth was 19, he got into a fight with his then-girlfriend. They’d both been drinking. She wanted the keys to the car, but he wouldn’t let her have them. During the struggle, Sameth grabbed a knife and held it to her neck. She was nicked twice on the chin. He was convicted of second-degree assault.
Fifteen years later, he may be sent to Cambodia for those few menacing moments. Sokha and her children have decided to follow.
Though Cianna can only weep at the prospect, brother Arson, whose bloodshot eyes contradict a fixed smile, says he would do it for dad.
Only the wives of the Minnesota 8 can understand her pain, says Sokha. She tends to avoid the topic of Sameth’s deportation. Which makes it all the harder to explain that Cianna’s biological father was deported to Mexico, the reason the girl never knew him.
“My family knows this might be my second time,” Sokha says. “I don’t want to go through it again, but then I guess it happened for a reason.”
Fatherless children
Jill Srisawat always wanted that princess wedding. She was willing to wait to get it just right.
Graduating from dental school was more pressing. So Shorty, her boyfriend of 14 years, would cook, clean, and take care of their daughter while she studied, his income keeping the family afloat.
Jill hoped that graduation would bring a stable job. But Shorty’s arrest forced her from part-time to double shifts. To avoid losing the house, she spent 14 hours straight on her feet, adjusting jaws as a dental hygienist.
Relatives take turns looking after Leala. But the elders can only help so much. The week after Shorty’s arrest, his mother became so depressed she was rushed to the hospital for an emergency blood transfusion. His 88-year-old father, a former freedom fighter who carried arms alongside American soldiers, cannot intellectually comprehend his son’s situation.
A small respite came when Jill met Shorty at the federal building in October to register a marriage certificate. They hoped that marriage to a U.S. citizen would help his case. Leala got to hug her dad for the first time since he’d been taken.
It’s not difficult to see how Shorty’s absence is affecting the young girl. In a school assignment titled “My Feelings,” Leala wrote: “I feel sad when my dad doesn’t take me to the zoo and the park. I feel afraid when my dad is gone. I feel excited when I jump into a swimming pool! I feel frustrated when I can’t put my shoes on. I feel happy when I see my dad.”Sony Offers Up PSVR Image Drift Solution (Update)
Update: Sony has issued a clarification to PlayStation LifeStyle and mentioned, “DualShock 4 does not have anything to do with the PS VR’s headset drift.” This message isn’t on the support site, but will be updated to reflect it soon.
Additionally, Sony has said that “The support site said that you shouldn’t have DS4 plugged in, since the cable can obstruct the light bar for VR tracking. That is indeed true, but again, has no effect on the actual tracking of the PS VR headset itself.”
Hopefully, this helps clear up a few things.
Original Story: There has been a lot to be impressed about with PlayStation VR, mainly due to it having quite the impressive launch lineup, but Sony’s virtual reality headset hasn’t been without issues. The major malfunction that users have run into has to do with the PlayStation Camera’s tracking, and how it can sometimes be inconsistent with how it picks up controllers and the headset itself. In fact, one common issue has the entire picture drifting to one side.
Thankfully, Sony is aware of the PSVR image drift issue. Here’s PlayStation’s official suggestion on how to fix it courtesy of their website:
If your DualShock 4 wireless controller is connected to your PS4 system with the charging cable, this can sometimes interfere with the PlayStation Camera’s view of the light bar. Play wirelessly to stop this issue. Recommended distance from camera for play is approximately 1.5 m – 2.0 m (5 – 7ft).
Place the camera in a vibration-free location.
Adjust the height, direction, and angle of the camera.
Play directly in front of the camera.
If players follow those instructions, then the PlayStation VR image drift issue should be reduced if not solved outright. It’s pretty disappointing that something as simple as a charging cable can cause such a major tracking issue, but at least the solution seems easy enough to implement. It’s really the one big bummer on what is otherwise a really well made headset.
Let us know in the comments below if you’ve encountered PS VR image drift, and if these suggestions have helped you out any.
(Source: Power Up Gaming)I’ve been re-writing/copying the same JS to deal with adding/removing nested attributes for far too long. On a project I recently started, I was fortunate enough to stumble across patbenatar/jquery-nested_attributes. This jquery plugin makes handling nested objects a cinch.
The simplest usage looks like this:
1 2 3 $ ( " # container" ). nestedAttributes ( -> bindAddTo: $ ( " # add_another" ) )
In the above example, #container refers to a DOM element whose immediate descendants are considered to be sets of nested attributes. When the user clicks the link referenced by #add_another the plugin automatically clones a set of fields and appends to the DOM.
In case you need a bit more flexibility, there are a slew of options available:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 { collectionName : false, // If not provided, we will attempt to autodetect. Provide this for complex collection names bindAddTo : false, // Required unless you are implementing your own add handler (see API below). The single DOM element that when clicked will add another set of fields removeOnLoadIf : false, // Function. It will be called for each existing item, return true to remove that item collectIdAttributes : true, // Attempt to collect Rail's ID attributes beforeAdd : false, // Function. Callback before adding an item afterAdd : false, // Function. Callback after adding an item beforeMove : false, // Function. Callback before updating indexes on an item afterMove : false, // Function. Callback after updating indexes on an item beforeDestroy : false, // Function. Callback before destroying an item afterDestroy : false, // Function. Callback after destroying an item destroySelector : '.destroy', // Pass in a custom selector of an element in each item that will destroy that item when clicked deepClone : true, // Do you want jQuery to deep clone the element? Deep clones preserve events. Undesirable when using BackBone views for each element. $clone : null // Pass in a clean element to be used when adding new items. Useful when using plugins like jQuery UI Datepicker or Select2. Use in conjunction with `afterAdd`. }
In my case, I am using select2 to provide some fancy select elements. The only problem was select2 wasn’t playing nice—I couldn’t unbind select2 from the select element and as a result pressing the “add another” link made the form unusable. After a quick iteration with the plugin’s author on github, I learned about the $clone option. You can use $clone to pass in a “clean” element that will get appended to the DOM when the “add another” link is pressed.
To take advantage of the $clone option you just have to get a copy of your DOM element before binding any other JS to it:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 clone = $ ( '.nested-object-fields:first' ). clone () $ ( ".container" ). nestedAttributes ( bindAddTo: $ ( ".add-another" ) $clone: clone afterAdd: (el) ->... )
Deleting items is just as easy. I got tripped up by having a hidden field for _destroy. You don’t need it! You just need to have an element with "destroy" as the class. When this element is clicked the plugin automatically adds the _destroy hidden field for you.
I can’t imagine an easier way to manage nested attributes. Thanks, @patbenatar, for an awesome plugin.Video
Tired of living life only in the digital sphere, designers in Chicago founded Post Family, an designer collective and "family" of friends that that values hands-on creativity.
After their busy digital days at work, they share an industrial space in the outskirts of Chicago, where they work with their hands.
The analogue experience of letterpress, screen-printing and woodworking provides a welcome break from the digital designing they do at their day jobs.
At the same time, members of the Post Family say the two experiences are more alike than they are different. Being able to work in both worlds, they believe, makes the members of the group stronger designers overall.
"We believe that digital design itself is craft. A web site is crafted. Having your arms in both worlds, digital and analogue, is extremely important," explains one of the members, Scott Thomas. Also known as "Simple" Scott, Mr Thomas was the national design director of the iconic Obama campaign in 2008.
Call it a return to the 19th century guild model of the arts and craft movement - or a kind of Andy Warhol's Factory. Many artists and musicians of the Chicago scene swing by all day and night.
For the BBC, they show off some of their vintage equipment, such as a Chandler and Price letterpress made in Ohio in 1888.
"Communication hasn't changed that much," says Mr Thomas. "Whether you are using Twitter, whether you are using Facebook, you'll still see letters next to letters, words next to words and sentences next to sentences."
(Produced by Anna Bressanin, Camera by Ilya Shnitser)The coverage of the bloodshed in Egypt elides one crucial element regarding the role of the United States in the tragic mess: Plenty of stateside businesses are making money off the mayhem.
Lockheed Martin. Raytheon. General Dynamics. Anyone familiar with the American military-industrial complex knows the big players in the game. What’s less known is that these companies don’t profit only by keeping America stocked with obsolete Cold-War-era weaponry. They also reach across borders to keep the United States locked into relationships that further fatten their bottom lines. Egypt is a prime example.
Trapped
Despite the August 15 announcement of U.S. withdrawal from joint military exercises, and whispers about aid “reprogramming” from Congress, the prospect of serious and immediate reductions in military aid to Egypt are slim.
Egypt’s value as a geopolitical asset—control over the Suez Canal, playing nice with Israel, its leadership role within the Arab world—dictates that the tanks must keep rolling and American influence must be maintained, even as the body counts grow. But the Pentagon’s largesse doesn’t come solely from its desire for influence and access in the world’s most important energy-producing region— however much that may weigh on the minds of policy-makers.
No, there are more simple motives at work: greed and job security. Not news, but the details deserve a closer look, starting with the numbers.
By the Numbers
– Percentage of Egyptian weapons procurement budget paid for by the U.S.: 80%
– Percentage of total US foreign military aid that went to Egypt in 2011: 25% (to Israel: 60%)
– Tax dollars Egypt receives in International Military Education and Training (IMET): $1.9 Million
– Tax dollars going to weapons manufacturers yearly since 1987 to arm Egypt: about $1.3 Billion
But that’s not all. Egypt can sign multi-year contracts with American defense contractors that go well beyond the $1.3 billion figure Congress appropriates outright. These deals are based on the assumption that Congress will continue the appropriation, year after year. The U.S. has already signed more than $8.5 billion worth of contracts between Egypt and American defense manufacturers— $2.2 billion more than Congress actually approved.
The most lucrative deal of them all: U.S.-Egyptian coproduction of a battle tank, the Abrams M1A1.
Initial cost: $1.329 billion (Pentagon contract figures are routinely highballed to Congress so as to secure funding well beyond the cost of the final product. In this case, the DoD press release announces the 1.3 contract but chances are the final cost will be lower.).
Chief recipients: General Dynamics of Sterling Heights, Michigan; Honeywell International Incorporated of Phoenix, Arizona; and Allison Transmission Motors in Indianapolis.
Details: In 1988, the US entered a deal in which a percentage of the tank’s components would be shipped to Egypt for assembly. The remainder came prepackaged from American defense manufacturers. In 2011, the latest increment in the co-production program was finalized and the number of tanks built under it rose to 1,130.
More and more deals. For the years 2009-2010, the Institute for Southern Studies lists 37 separate deals between the DoD and American defense contractors related to Egypt. These include deals for weapons, communication devices, logistical support, computer hardware/software, and in-country equipment repair—all bought and paid for by the Pentagon.
Provider companies include not only weapons-makers, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, but also household brands that Americans would recognize from television commercials, like Goodrich, Caterpillar, OshKosh, Michelin and US Motor Works.
One deal on that list stands out in particular. In 2010, Lockheed Martin and the Egyptian military reached an agreement for the purchase of 20 F-16 fighter jets valued at $213 million. Just how did the Egyptian military get such a deal?
Enter the Lobbyist.
In 2007, the government of Egypt hired a handful of Beltway power brokers with thick Rolodexes. Chief among these was Tony Podesta, president of the Podesta Group and brother of Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta.
Egypt also sought out former representative Bob Livingston (R-LA) of the Livingston Group and former representative Toby Moffett (D-Conn), chairman of the Moffett Group. With Tony Podesta, the three formed a joint venture known as the PLM lobbying group in October 2007. By 2009, all three had registered with the Department of Justice (DOJ) as foreign-agent lobbyists for Egypt.
The agreement resulted in payment of $1.1 million per year to facilitate American corporate and government contacts with the Egyptian government.
By 2010, the PLM group had facilitated at least 279 contacts on military issues. According to ProPublica, the bulk of these deals occurred when PLM “accompanied delegations of Egyptian military officers to meet members of Congress, administration officials and representatives from defense contractors.”
As it turns out, PLM had cash to gain on both sides of the deal. Among the Podesta Group’s clients at the time were BAE Systems, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin. The Livingston Group hawked Raytheon’s wares. This is all in addition to the healthy roster of lobbyists each contractor maintains in-house.
The Stranglehold
Members of Congress have a substantial incentive to keep the appropriations flowing, no matter what bloodshed occurs: If they were to abrogate those deals, the government would be liable for civil suits from weapons makers demanding compensation for lost profits.
“General Dynamics and its subcontractors alone have thousands of employees in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, manufacturing kits of tank parts that are to be shipped to Egypt for assembly. If the program were ever cut, that’s thousands possibly of people out of work—plus family, friends, loved ones, local retailers and a whole host of other pissed-off voters in those districts, which are not-so-coincidentally presidential swing states.”
If Congress cut off the flow of money, blue-collar jobs would be lost in districts across the country. And defense behemoths would think twice before sending a big fat check to key committee members come re-election time.
In other words, big business interests dictate that the aid can’t end, even if policymakers, stricken with moral qualms, wanted it to. And they have plenty of reasons to try and stop—starting with the image problems associated with Egyptian civilians being slaughtered by soldiers wielding weapons that might as well be stamped “Made in USA.”
Don’t expect the big media to cover anytime soon these lucrative Stateside business deals that facilitate bloodshed and anti-American sentiment in Egypt. After all, if big advertisers like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas get offended, they might pull some of those ads you see on cable channels night after night.
And here’s one news flash you surely won’t see on an upcoming Meet the Press: General Electric– owner of NBC and its news divisions– was just awarded a $14 million contract to service eighteen F110 fighter jet engines for the Egyptian Air Force.
[box]WhoWhatWhy plans to continue doing this kind of groundbreaking original reporting. You can count on it. But can we count on you? We cannot do our work without your support.
Please click here to donate; it’s tax deductible. And it packs a punch.[/box]
“Correction (8/26): This article originally said there were 107 employees of General Dynamics and affiliated subcontractors in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. It has been updated to include a much more expansive total number of workers, after it was brought to our attention that 700 people work in the General Dynamics plant in Lima, Ohio alone. The original total came from a 2012 Bloomberg article on the M1A1 production partnership. The editor and reporters for that story have not replied to requests for comment. (Hat tip to Mike Ferner of Veterans For Peace)”
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Our Comment Policy Keep it civilized, keep it relevant, keep it clear, keep it short. Please do not post links or promotional material. We reserve the right to edit and to delete comments where necessary. Related printIf Quentin Tarantino loved a certain movie so much that he named his own production company after it, you might immediately get at least a hunch on what kind of a film we’re talking about. John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder, the 1977 revenge thriller written by Paul Schrader and Heywood Gould, is a blood-drenched exhilarating ride which gives its best, and mostly succeeds, to illuminate the dark state of mind and the inescapable feelings of alienation and loneliness of Vietnam war veterans returning home only to find their families, friends and community seem extremely foreign to them. The film’s protagonist, played by William Devane in what must be the highlight of his career, returns to the United States after years of captivity and struggles to lead a normal civilian life. When his family is murdered by a criminal gang eager to seize the silver coins the government granted him for his service, the man teams up with his equally malfunctioning Vietnam friend (young Tommy Lee Jones) and sets out to exact his ruthless, shotgun-blazing revenge on his foes. After subtly building the atmosphere and carefully developing its characters, in the second half of the film Rolling Thunder becomes a violent revenge film culminating in a massacre in Mexico.
As we said, the screenplay was written by Paul Schrader, enjoying the blissful fallout of his former projects like The Yakuza, Obsession and Taxi Driver, but after Heywood Gould was brought in to do a polished rewrite, the project slipped out of Schrader’s control and, according to Schrader himself, his vision was significantly altered. Instead of a film about fascism, they simply made a fascist film, Schrader wrote. Regardless of his dissatisfaction and the change in tone fueled by Gould’s writing, Rolling Thunder nevertheless remains one of the most impressive films of the era. Tackling the delicate and often inspiring themes of post-Vietnam war depression and alienation, featuring a lead character tragically sliding off the railway of life, Flynn’s film inevitably conjures Taxi Driver in our minds, which can never be a letdown due to the sheer brilliance of Scorsese’s film. Rolling Thunder is definitely worth your time.
A monumentally important screenplay. Dear every screenwriter/filmmaker, read Paul Schrader’s original draft screenplay for Rolling Thunder [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
“You could see Rolling Thunder as a more overtly actionful companion piece to Taxi Driver,” Schrader said. “The critics seemed keen to dismiss it as ‘lightweight’ or ‘mindless,’ but Rolling Thunder was able to explore things we didn’t touch on in Taxi Driver—the flashbacks to Devane’s time in captivity, for example. And the scene where Devane ask his wife’s new fella to tie him up the way the Viet Cong used to, I don’t think that’s something you’d get in your standard ‘mindless’ action movie.” Concluding with a gun fight that is every bit as compelling as Taxi Driver‘s denouement, Rolling Thunder‘s content upset everybody from preview audiences to the studio that bankrolled it, 20th Century Fox. “Fox were so disturbed by the violence,” Schrader said. “They’d seen films like Taxi Driver and were aware that motion pictures were moving in that direction, but when they saw what they’d paid for, they couldn’t get rid of Rolling Thunder quickly enough.” In the end, the film was picked up by Roger Corman’s bargain basement American International Pictures. —The author of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull discusses cult favourite Rolling Thunder
Also scripted by Schrader, Taxi Driver’s Southwest-set twin brother, Rolling Thunder, reached drive-ins in 1977. Revised by Heywood Gould and directed by no-frills genre utility man John Flynn, the final product has been effectively disowned by Schrader, who dismisses it as a ‘fascist film’—though those are the words of the arrived artist, with reason to deny downmarket ties. Schrader has preferred to discuss Taxi Driver’s other influences, the Diaries of a Country Priest, an Underground Man… and Arthur Bremer, the assassin who shot George Wallace, an incident echoed when Bickle haunts the public speaking engagements of presidential hopeful Senator Palantine. Marrying grindhouse seediness to auteur virtuosity, Schrader and Scorsese introduced a cinematic sick-soul sordidness previously ghettoised to Times Square fleapits to a wider public—literally taking the viewer inside some of those fleapits, like the long-defunct Lyric Theater on 42nd St. A nerve was struck: “Are you talkin’ to me?” Bickle famously asked and, for many, Taxi Driver was. —How to tell a true war story: from Taxi Driver to Cutter’s Way
JOHN FLYNN: OUT FOR ACTION
by Harvey F. Chartrand
In several interviews, superstar director Quentin Tarantino has praised Rolling Thunder, a powerful revenge drama—now considered a classic thriller. How did critics and the public respond to Rolling Thunder when it was first released in 1977?
JF: We almost got killed when we previewed Rolling Thunder in San Jose! People were shocked by the extreme violence, especially the scene where a hand is ground up in a garbage disposal unit. Paul Schrader’s script was reworked by a very fine writer—Heywood Gould. Back then, they were priming William Devane to be a big movie star. He is a wonderful actor, but he never became a star. Tommy Lee Jones was sensational in this picture. Rolling Thunder was his breakthrough film. Linda Haynes was extraordinary. Today, she is a legal secretary in Florida. I saw her when I was shooting Scam there in ‘93.
We shot Rolling Thunder in San Antonio, Texas, in 31 days. We knew we were doing something fairly bold. The producer, Lawrence Gordon, told me to shoot the garbage disposal scene like open-heart surgery, make it as bloody as I possibly could. So I did. When we submitted Rolling Thunder to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) for a rating, we expected deep cuts, but the censors passed uncut one of the most violent movies in the history of film. Rolling Thunder was given an R rating! Fox wanted to cut out all the violence and release Rolling Thunder to 42nd Street theatres, so Larry Gordon took it to Sam Arkoff at American International Pictures. Arkoff bought it from Fox and released it almost uncut. He made one little trim in the garbage disposal scene. —John Flynn: Out For Action
Tommy Lee Jones, Williams Devane, and screenwriter Heywood Gould all give their thoughts on Rolling Thunder.
Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder. Courtesy of Everett Collection; MGM Home Entertainment.
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EmailHowever, it is the prices which have been paid for players lower down the food chain which have surprised Keane.
The Republic of Ireland assistant manager admitted his surprise at some of the figures which have been paid this summer, with Paris St Germain forking out a staggering £200million for Neymar and preparing to invest heavily once again in Monaco's Kylian Mbappe.
Roy Keane has claimed former team-mate Ryan Giggs would be worth £2billion in today's "mind-boggling" transfer market as clubs rake in massive fees for "average" players.
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He said: "It's mind-boggling, the figures that are out there - especially for the average players. If ever there was a time to be a professional player it's now. Average players are going for £35million. My goodness.
"I don't really analyse it too much, but that's the market place at the moment. There aren't many top players out there. The really big players are going for big money and it's filtering down now.
"When average players are going for £30-40million, it does make you scratch your head. But if the clubs are prepared to pay that, then it's not the players' fault."
Keane, of course, played in Sir Alex Ferguson's all-conquering Manchester United side alongside the likes of Peter Schmeichel, Jaap Stam, David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Ruud van Nistelrooy, as well as Real Madrid star Cristiano Ronaldo, who cost Real Madrid £80million when he left Old Trafford eight summers ago.
Asked what Van Nistelrooy would cost now, he replied with a smile: "Ruud would certainly be worth in the market now probably a billion."
"David Beckham?". "A billion." "Ryan Giggs?" "Two billion."
Asked further how much he himself might cost nowadays, he answered: "£3.75million, I think."
Unusually, most members of the current Ireland squad are settled at their clubs and there is little prospect of late rushes to complete deals as Keane and manager Martin O'Neill prepare for Saturday's World Cup qualifier in Georgia and the clash with Group D leaders Serbia which follows it in Dublin next Tuesday.
The management duo are contracted until the end of the campaign and although there have as yet been no talks over a further extension, Keane, who was recently linked with the Israel job, much to his own surprise, remains relaxed.
He said: "A lot depended on how results were going to pan out, but it's been great. The journey has been fantastic.
"It's gone pretty quickly. I'm still enjoying the job and I'm as hungry as ever to try to win football matches and bring success to Ireland. It's been great and long may it continue.
"It's great to be back in the working environment. We have all had a good break, but when football is in your blood, it's in your blood and you look forward to these challenges.
"If we're here for another three years, fantastic, but of course results will dictate that, no doubt."
Keane still retains an ambition to manage in his own right once again, but insists he has imposed no time-frame on that.
He said: "I've got a lot of strengths, I would like to think, as a footballing person, but what I can't do is see into the future - which might be a good thing.
"This idea of what might happen to me in the future is irrelevant. I have just answered a question earlier, 'Are you enjoying the role here?'. I am very happy and the whole focus is on the game on Saturday.
"Whatever happens next week, next year, tomorrow, it doesn't really matter."
The trip to Tbilisi is a gruelling one, but Keane is convinced the players will arrive in top condition.
He said: "That's part of the challenge of being a modern footballer. But we're on a private plane, it's not torture - not like it was years ago."
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For Dr. Sarah Perman, it is not enough for a cardiac arrest patient’s heart to work properly again. “What we care about is not just survival to when they’re discharged from the hospital,” she said, “but neurologic recovery at discharge.”
While a medical resident, Perman once cared for an elderly cardiac arrest patient. The attending team felt that the patient would have a grave prognosis. Their quick conclusion surprised Perman, who “started to learn that there was some generalized hesitancy” in treating cardiac arrest patients who have chronic heart conditions or do not initially respond to a defibrillator. The patient’s relatives still wanted the doctors to try everything they could, so they started therapeutic hypothermia, which was a success. After cooling the patient’s body temperature and a period of rewarming, the patient was revived and could go home.
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A nurse attends to a patient during a simulated emergency.
Dr. Perman, now an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado, and her colleagues found that lowering the body’s internal temperature can help preserve neurological function for cardiac arrest patients with heart rhythms that do not respond to defibrillators. This controlled cooling is called therapeutic hypothermia, or TH, which is versatile enough to be carried out within ambulances and emergency rooms. Medical responders can cool the chest and limbs with ice packs or thread a catheter carrying cold saline through their patient.
Coauthor Dr. Benjamin Abella said most research and treatment effort has been placed on patients with shockable rhythms. With so little data on patients with nonshockable rhythms, hospitals are hesitant to use this therapy.
The American Heart Association estimates 530,000 individuals suffer cardiac arrest per year in the United States. For every minute a patient does not receive treatment, survival decreases by 7%.
“The human body has no real good mechanism to come back from a cardiac arrest,” said EMT Elizabeth Watkins. During cardiac arrest, the heart stops pumping blood and oxygen throughout the body. This is especially bad news for the brain, as cerebral fluid can also build up and put pressure on the brain. Death can result in minutes.
Defibrillators can restore shockable rhythms, while other rhythms are nonshockable and do not respond to electrical activity. Without treatment, survival chances for nonshockable patients are slim—as low as 10%.
Dr. Benjamin Abella explains how therapeutic hypothermia can aid recovery in patients with nonshockable heart rhythms.
TH can help preserve the neurobiology of comatose patients that have a pulse. This sort of corporeal refrigeration slows down the rate of cell death and acid build-up in the brain. Two landmark trials in 2002 endorsed TH for patients with shockable rhythms. This treatment, as Dr. Perman and her team found, could also benefit people who may not initially benefit from a defibrillator.
Drs. Perman and Abella’s team gathered data from 262 adult patients with non-shockable rhythms and paired them on characteristics such as age. “You have to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples,” Dr. Abella explained. Half of the patients had received TH, the other half did not.
The researchers were especially interested in how well neurologic function was preserved after TH, and so they then compared each patient’s recovery through a Cerebral Performance Category (CPC) test. This widely used |
clip as an “epic takedown” of the president, instantly catapulting the teen to renown. Additionally, Rand Paul’s campaign was happy to broadcast the fact that the youngster had endorsed the Kentucky senator’s bid for the White House.
Then came the first big change on the part of Pearson. He switched his all-important endorsement from Paul to Ted Cruz during the summer, which caused a degree of controversy. It is true that grown men got very upset that a now-13-year-old changed his position on who’s the best person for the highest office.
Cruz’s campaign soon embraced Pearson and anointed him the head of Teens for Cruz.
In September, the teen made headlines again when he released a video excoriating Obama for believing Ahmed “Clock Boy” Mohammed’s story that he was only accused of bringing a prank bomb to school because he’s a Muslim. Conservative outlets, including The Daily Caller, touted the clip and Pearson for issuing an epic takedown of the situation.
But the young Ted Cruz supporter pushed his luck too far when he falsely claimed Obama blocked him on Twitter over the fracas. Glenn Beck’s The Blaze brought that fact to light, and soon after Pearson’s star power began fading.
In early November, it was announced that Pearson was no longer associated with the Cruz campaign. On the day after Thanksgiving, the African-American teen made his fateful decision that he no longer wanted to be associated with conservatism due to the ideology’s supposed inability to deal with racial issues.
He cited the shooting of Laquan McDonald for his change and soon began tweeting supportive messages to notorious Black Lives Matter organizer DeRay Mckesson. It’s pretty funny for Pearson to have an ideological revaluation over conservatives’ handling of race when those same right-wingers were gobbling up the young adult’s take on racial affairs.
However, the changing views of CJ Pearson isn’t the crux of the story. It is entirely normal for a 13-year-old kid with little experience and much to learn about the world to change his mind on various subjects. Especially when they’re in the public spotlight and receive unprecedented attention for those said views.
What’s the real issue here are the many conservatives who decided it was a good idea to make Pearson a public face of the Right. Teens are of course entitled to have opinions and voice them if they’re so moved to do so. What’s not right is for grown adults to pretend that their opinions should be considered the work of a leading pundit. Or even worse, try to make money off that young person’s profile.
This young man, sadly, isn’t the first time something like this has occurred. Jonathan Krohn earned a coveted speaking spot at the 2009 CPAC and wrote two books sharing his thoughts on conservative philosophy all by the age of 15.
But when he turned 16, he shed the conservative talking points and announced he was no longer on the Right. He soon began writing for outlets like Mother Jones and Salon.
Pearson’s story strongly resembles Krohn’s. The one difference is that it took him a few months rather than a few years to decide he was no longer a conservative. Pearson didn’t even last long enough to win a speaking spot at CPAC — which he likely would’ve received if he hadn’t renounced his past positions.
What both Krohn and Pearson’s stories reveal is an ideology that’s all too willing to make itself look stupid. There’s no greater way to say you’re not serious than to promote kids too young to have a drivers license as serious political thinkers.
Young people are bound to change their minds on things. They lack experience and there’s a lot of things they just don’t know or understand. While it may be cute to have a 12-year-old spout off like Rush Limbaugh before a camera, it’s plain dumb to give them a slot at CPAC.
Maybe conservatives have internalized the liberal line that they’re just a bunch of stuffy, old white men and they’ll take any voice that breaks the stereotype. Or maybe conservatives feel they need a silly gimmick to sell their ideas.
Either way, those on the Right need to stop making pint-sized pundits into movement stars. They all have the same ending and the same string of embarrassments.
Follow Scott on TwitterThe astonishing total emerged five years after Scotland’s most senior planning officials warned the countryside was in danger of becoming a “wind farm landscape”.
The rapid expansion in turbine numbers came after Alex Salmond’s government set a target of generating the equivalent of all Scotland’s electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020.
Many communities complained of being “saturated” with turbines but the new strategy laid the ground for another wave of development by setting an even more “challenging” target.
It committed Scotland to generating the equivalent of half its total heat, transport and energy consumption from renewable sources by 2030. In 2015, the proportion stood at only 17.8 per cent, meaning this figure would have to be almost trebled in only 15 years.
Scottish Government analysis underpinning the target said installed renewable electricity capacity must almost double from 9.5GW in June this year to 17GW, taking into account increased demand from drivers switching to electric vehicles.
Mr Wheelhouse told MSPs: “We expect onshore wind to play a growing and invaluable role in our transition to a low carbon future.
“The support and investment frameworks for onshore wind have fundamentally changed, just as the technology is also changing – with moves towards larger, more efficient turbines which have made onshore wind highly cost effective.”
Pressed about the impact of the expansion on wild land, and whether he recognised the concerns of local communities, he insisted that important landscapes would be preserved “as best we can.”
Mr Wheelhouse said wild land now has some protection in the Scottish planning system but added that he did not want its presence to be a “barrier to the development of sensible projects in good locations.”
But Alexander Burnett, the Scottish Tories’ energy spokesman, said the figures “further prove the SNP’s obsession with wind farms” and argued more developments must only be allowed “with the consent of those living in the area.”
He added: “The fact that there are hundreds more being built or awaiting construction is therefore alarming, and many communities will understandably be concerned about the impact this will have.”We drove north for two days, to arrive at a place that existed almost entirely for one reason: To facilitate the capture and, often, consumption of wild fish. The folks who run the facility make a living providing shelter, food, boats, fishing tackle, easy access to a fishing license, and they can be hired as guides. The whole point is to locate, capture, butcher, cook, and eat the fish. The fish themselves have little say in the matter.
And while talking to the people there we got a lot of advice as to how to find and capture the fish, and offers were made to assist with the butchering and culinary preparation of the piscine prey. After a bit of final preparation and a few final words of advice, we were ready to go fish hinting.
“Except for those, fish,” the woman we were talking to said, pointing towards a particularly long dock extending into the vast lake, one of the largest lakes in North America. “Don’t catch those fish.”
“Why?” I asked perplexed.
“We named them,” she said. “You can go down and look at them, the fish that hang out at the end of that dock. A couple of Northern Pike. Don’t catch those fish.”
“OK,” I said. And off we went in the other direction to catch some different fish. I figured there were about 200 million fish of a pound or more in size in this particular lake. We could skip the ones with names.
For many decades, probably for over a century, there has been an observable, measurable, increase in global surface temperature caused by human greenhouse gas pollution. For the first several decades, this increase is a clear trend, but a mild one, and there is a lot of up and down fluctuation, with periods of several years of decrease as well as increase. Then the upward trend becomes stronger, and some time around 1970 it becomes virtually relentless, going up a good amount every decade. But still, there are fluctuations in the curve.
What causes these fluctuations? Several things. The total amount of CO2, the main greenhouse gas causing this heating, has been going up during this period without stopping. Because CO2 added to the atmosphere stays there for a long time, so even if the amount released into the air by burning fossil fuels varies, there is always an upward trend. This causes the general increase, and it is why the increase in the last 50 years or so has been stronger; more CO2 has been released each year more recently.
There are large scale interactions between the ocean, which is also heating up, and the atmosphere and sea surface, the latter being what is measured in graphs of “surface temperature.” These fluctuations are decades long, and influence the degree to which the surface is warm vs very warm. There are shorter term ocean-air interactions such as La Nina (periods when the ocean is taking in more heat) and El Nino (periods when the ocean is pumping out more heat).
As the Arctic has warmed, it has been less icy, and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere have been less snowy, so there has been less sunlight reflected away, another source of fluctuation. Also, since we are talking about the Arctic, there are fewer measurements there so the traditional curves showing global warming have not included increased rates of warming there to the degree they should. Some of the fluctuations in the surface temperature curve are caused by this kind of bias, a shifting bias (because of relatively more warming in under-sampled areas) in the data set.
Humans and volcanoes make dust. Humans used to make a lot more dust before environmental regulation required that factories and power plants clean up their act. There are varying amounts of widespread low level volcanic activity and the occasional enormous eruption. This dust affects the surface temperature curve, and the dust varies quite a bit over time.
If the earth was simpler … a rocky surface, no ocean, no volcanoes, no vegetation (and thus no wildfires as well), but a similar atmosphere, changes in the amount of CO2 or other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere would be reflected in changes in surface temperature much more smoothly. If that was the case, the amount of variation in energy supplied by the sun would probably be visible in the curve (that factor is so small compared to the other factors that it is very hard to see in the actual data). The curve on the simple earth would probably jiggle up and down a bit but there would be relatively smooth.
If you look at the temperature curve, you can see periods of greater or lesser upward change in temperature. You can even name them. I decided to do this. I chose common baby names, half male and half female, giving male names to the periods with slower increase, female names to the periods with faster increase. It looks like this:
In recent years, in what is at the root a corporate funded, and rather nefarious effort to delay addressing the most important existential issue of our time, climate change caused by human greenhouse gas pollution, science deniers have come up with their own name for one of the fluctuations in the ever increasing upward march of global surface temperatures. They call it “hiatus” (aka “pause”). The purpose of naming this part of the curve is to pretend that global warming is not real. It looks like this:
I am not impressed. And neither should you be. This is like those fish at the end of the dock. Except for the fish it is an affectation of a few people having fun, whereas with the science deniers it is a bought and paid for attempt to cause another hiatus, a hiatus in taking action to save our future.
There is a new study, the Nth in a spate of studies looking at the “Hiatus,” that asks experts on trends (economists, mainly) to look at the surface temperature trend as though it was something other than surface temperatures (they were told it was global agricultural production), to see if they identify the hiatus.
They don’t.
The study is by Lewandowsky, Risbey, and Oreskes, and is “The “Pause” in Global Warming: Turning a Routine Fluctuation Into A Problem For Science. It is here.
The abstract:
There has been much recent published research about a putative “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. We show that there are frequent fluctuations in the rate of warming around a longer-term warming trend, and that there is no evidence that identifies the recent period as unique or particularly unusual. In confirmation, we show that the notion of a “pause” in warming is considered to be misleading in a blind expert test. Nonetheless, the most recent fluctuation about the longer-term trend has been regarded by many as an explanatory challenge that climate science must resolve. This departs from long-standing practice, insofar as scientists have long recognized that the climate fluctuates, that linear increases in CO2 do not produce linear trends in global warming, and that 15-year (or shorter) periods are not diagnostic of long-term trends. We suggest that the repetition of the “warming has paused” message by contrarians was adopted by the scientific community in its problem-solving and answer-seeking role and has led to undue focus on, and mislabeling of, a recent fluctuation. We present an alternative framing that could have avoided inadvertently reinforcing a misleading claim.
John Abraham, at the Guardian, has written it up.
The authors show that there is no unique pause in the data. They also discuss biases in the measurements themselves which suggested a slowing in warming that actually did not occur once the data were de-biased. Finally, they reported on recent work that displayed a common error when people compare climate models to measurements (climate models report surface air temperatures while observations use a mixture of air and sea surface temperatures). With this as a backdrop, the authors take a step back and ask some seemingly basic questions.
Speaking of John Abraham, he just sent me this new graphic based on the latest surface temperature measurements. This is a good moment to have a look at it:Macedonian Prime Minister and the leader of of the ruling VMRO DPMNE, Nikola Gruevski announces to journalists that his Government will propose to Macedonian parliament early parliamentary elections in Skopje, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, 30
Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski has said he expects support from Greece and Bulgaria for the decision for the start of Macedonia's EU accession talks.
"I expect that Greece, being the oldest EU Member State in our region, as well as a confirmed friend of enlargement, will back the decision on starting Macedonia's EU accession talks in December, thereby providing a decisive political contribution to the the revitalization of the European integration perspective of the the entire Balkan region. Macedonian nationals expect the same from Bulgaria," he stated, as cited by the Bulgarian telegraph agency (BTA) and dnevnik.bg.
"Our desire is to walk the path to EU membership together with Greece. With a great deal of determination we initiated a number of concrete steps to extend bilateral cooperation and mutual trust," Gruevski noted.
"Nobody wants more than Macedonia to have the last obstacle in our path to European and Euro-Atlantic goals removed," Gruevski emphasized, adding that Macedonia wished to fast-track talks with Greece under the aegis of the United Nations as much as possible.
He argued that history had shown that blockades and the lack of a compromise approach had never led to the resolution of certain bilateral issues, unlike European and Euro-Atlantic integration.
Speaking about regional cooperation, Gruevksi highlighted that Macedonia would continue to maintain good relations with all its neighbors, adding that the cooperation with Bulgaria was of particular importance for the country.
"But we must leave history to historians. The declaration from 1999 remains a good framework for the future development of relations. We have established a rich legal framework of bilateral contracts which should contribute to the improvement of relations and the strengthening of cooperation on concrete projects of practical interest to the citizens," the Macedonian Prime Minister declared.
"Civil society and the media on both sides must play an important role in encouraging mutual understanding and respect," Gruevski reasoned.Most people are familiar with sonic booms, even if they don’t know exactly how they work. NASA explains that air reacts like a fluid to objects that are moving faster than the speed of sound. This speedy object rapidly forces surrounding air molecules together, causing a wave-like change in air pressure that spreads out in a cone called a Mach cone, like the wake of a boat. As the shock wave passes over an observer on the ground, the change in air pressure produces the sonic boom.
Previous research suggested that light could also produce a similar cone-shaped wakes, called a "photonic Mach cone," reports Charles Q. Choi at LiveScience. But they had no way to test the idea. Now, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed an ultrafast camera that can actually catch the light boom in action.
Choi reports that optical engineer Jinyang Liang and his colleagues fired a green laser through a tunnel filled with smoke from dry ice. The interior of the tunnel was surrounded by plates made of silicone rubber and aluminum oxide powder. The idea was that, since light travels at different rates through different materials, the plates would slow down the laser light, which leave a cone-shaped wake of light.
Using an ultrafast camera, scientists successfully imaged the scattering of light in different materials. Credit: Science Advances
Though clever, this setup wasn't the star of the study—it was the “streak” camera that the researchers developed to capture the event. Choi reports that the photography technique, called lossless-encoding compressed ultrafast photography (LLE-CUP), can capture 100 billion frames per second in a single exposure, allowing the researchers to capture ultrafast events. The camera worked, capturing images of the light cone created by the laser for the first time. The results appear in the journal Science Advances.
“Our camera is different from a common camera where you just take a snapshot and record one image: our camera works by first capturing all the images of a dynamic event into one snapshot. And then we reconstruct them, one by one,” Liang tells Leah Crane at New Scientist.
This new technology could open the door to some revolutionary new science. “Our camera is fast enough to watch neurons fire and image live traffic in the brain,” Liang tells Choi. “We hope we can use our system to study neural networks to understand how the brain works.”
In fact, LLE-CUP may be too powerful to watch neurons. “I think our camera is probably too fast,” Liang tells Kastalia Medrano at Inverse. “So if we want to do that, we can modify it to slow it down. But now we have the image modality that’s miles ahead, so if we want to reduce speed we can do that.”
The technology, Liang tells Crane, can be used with existing cameras, microscopes and telescopes. Not only can it look at the functioning of things like neurons and cancer cells, Crane reports, it could also be used to examine changes in light in objects like supernova.Media playback is not supported on this device Watch: Evra kicks fan in head before match
Patrice Evra has left Marseille by mutual consent and been banned from Uefa competition for the rest of the season for kicking one of his own fans.
The former Monaco, Manchester United and Juventus full-back, 36, is banned by Uefa until June 2018, the same month his Marseille deal would have ended.
Having played in the Europa League group stage, Evra would not have been able to play for another side in Europe this season even without his ban.
He was fined 10,000 euros (£8,829).
Evra aimed a kick at a fan next to the pitch before a Europa League game with Vitoria Guimaraes on 2 November.
The France defender joined Marseille in January 2017 from Juventus, where he had spent three seasons following his departure from Old Trafford.
"By mutual agreement, Marseille and Evra have decided to put an end to their partnership," said a club statement. "The player's contract is officially terminated with immediate effect."
French newspaper L'Equipe reported that Marseille supporters had been jeering Evra for about half an hour while the players prepared for the game with Vitoria Guimaraes, which the Ligue 1 side lost 1-0.
The player had gone over to the fans to talk to them, but the situation escalated.
Evra, who was named as a substitute for the game, was dismissed before kick-off so Marseille were able to begin the match with 11 players.
During their Ligue 1 win over Caen on 5 November, some Marseille fans unfurled a banner that read: "You thought you were above the institution OM and its supporters. We don't want you wearing our colours. Evra get out."
What has been Marseille's reaction?
Marseille president Jacques-Henri Eyraud in a statement on the club's website:
Today there is great sadness at the club, above all for Patrice Evra, who well understands the consequences of his actions and is no longer able to undertake his passion at Olympic Marseille, and for the Olympic Marseille supporters, who have been stigmatised by the irresponsible behaviour of a handful of fans.
Despite this incident, we are determined more than ever to demonstrate on and off the field that we are driven by the highest individual and collective standards.
How it happened
Named as a substitute, Evra begins warming up with his team-mates before the game
The former Manchester United left-back appears to be the target of songs and abuse from the crowd for about 30 minutes
Evra approaches the Marseille fans, about 500 of whom had travelled to Guimaraes
He volleys a ball towards the crowd, but some of his team-mates come over and look to calm the defender down
Evra climbs over the billboards and looks to confront spectators who have come towards the front of the stand
The 36-year-old returns to the pitch, but a group of fans approach the billboards and Evra appears to kick one of them
Evra is led away to the substitutes' bench, but is sent off by the referee and watches the game from the stands
Analysis
Julien Laurens, French football expert speaking on the BBC's Euro Leagues Podcast
The original problem was when he went to Guimaraes for the match, 500 Marseille ultras were the first ones into the ground. You could hear everything they were saying, and they started chanting about him, saying he was rubbish, 'we don't want you at the club', because he has been poor recently.
He lost his place in the team and he took it badly as a former captain. Then they started to wind him up, saying'stick to your Instagram videos' etc. There were no racist chants at all, a bit of abuse, but then Evra thought it was a good idea to kick a ball at the Ultras, which wound them up further.
You don't do 28 hours on a coach to Portugal to insult a former captain, it was stupid. But it was also stupid for him to respond in the way he did. He has been insulted throughout his whole career. For him to respond in the way he did was quite stupid even if you understand the anger and frustration.A A
SEATTLE - Notorious serial killer Gary Ridgway has been transferred to a high-security prison in Colorado, Andrew Garber with the State Department of Corrections said.
Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, was transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary near Florence, Colorado on May 14, 2015, according to Garber.
"As part of standard correctional practice, the department constantly evaluates and reviews the overall safety and security of our operations, and makes decisions regarding the housing of offenders accordingly," Garber said Saturday.
It is unclear why Ridgway was transferred, as the Department of Corrections does not comment on offenders and their circumstances.
Ridgway, 66, pleaded guilty to killing 49 women in King County. He was spared the death penalty under a deal with King County prosecutors to cooperate in the search for bodies, and was serving a life sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary.
The ADX super-maximum-security prison in Colorado has a regime of solitary confinement for prisoners that are exceptionally dangerous. The prison is nicknamed the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," and also holds Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.Bengaluru: Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs the right scientific advice to turn his vision to reality and should also start mission-mode projects, feels India's Bharat Ratna-winning scientist CNR Rao.
In an interview, he speaks on Modi's science policy and on religion, intolerance and Mother Teresa's sainthood. Excerpts of the interview:
Q) Do you think Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a good vision for science?
A) He is definitely a man with vision, there is no question that he wants to do something, we hope he will not only use good advice and all the wonderful ideas he has. He is obviously a doer when you listen to him; there is nothing
wrong in what he says. What he says is perfect. Except that, we have to do many of those things.
Q) You have been the advisor to several Prime Ministers; the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister is
currently defunct? Do you think Prime Minister Narendra Modi is getting the right scientific advice?
A) Well, I do hope our Prime Minister will find the right people for the right advice because no one person or no one ministry can handle the large problems of either science or society. Using science, we have to solve pressing problems of poverty while competing with rest of the world. One also has to do frontier blue-sky research. If all these things India has to do then PM Modi needs to know what the priorities are, how do we proceed what do we work on. I do hope he will get the right advice and get some kind of a group of people to advise him, I do hope and pray that he will do that.
Q) How can Prime Minister Narendra Modi help support more science?
A) Modi should help good institutions with minimum funds that will not denude them from the basic effort that is going on. Small amounts of funds Rs 10-20 crores were cut off in the past. Modi should also fund simple small science in a big way like for diseases, for new energy technologies and new advanced materials.
Selective but major funding is required. In my own life most of the good funding I had was from somewhere else where, not from India. It is very unfair that India has not done that.
Modi should employ mission mode for some areas, long ago we had mission mode for technology solutions, like better
quality seeds, safe drinking water, like mission for eradicating illiteracy, like getting rid of malaria. Mission
mode projects are what Modi should start. India needs 5-6 major missions that will help the poor people of India and the society as a whole.
Q) What can you tell us that will make young people embrace science?
A) Science is the foundation of all societies,particularly India where we have so many problems to solve and so much to look forward too. I think without science and higher education as a base I do not see how India can become a leader in the world. India has to use science.
Q) You are a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, there is this recent issue of Mother Teresa being made into a Saint, how do you justify miracles and science and what do you tell the Pope about it?
A) Pontifical Academy has nothing to do with the Pope in this way, Pope deals with the church and the church has made her a saint. Pontifical Academy does not deal with Saints.
Q) Do you believe in miracles?
A) No, I do not believe in miracles. One in thing general I will tell you, in India there is confusion between religion, faith, superstition and science. Faith everybody should have one thing or the other, like if in science you must have faith in the laws of physics.
Faith is something everybody should have. If somebody has faith in philosophy or God, I have nothing against it;
however, it should not give rise to superstition. Even Einstein said nobody could be without faith. Religion also you can have any religion, but do not mix it up with other things in life. Faith has nothing to do with believing in things that cannot happen against the laws of physics.
Q) So, you are saying religion and science should not be mixed up?
A) No, they should not be mixed up. India is study in contrasts, find your own balance, if you go to any extreme and become a radical and become against everything, they also [become] terribly intolerant. One needs a balance in dealing with these things.
Q) So do you think India is becoming intolerant?
A) No, India is not becoming intolerant. [Some] intolerance is there in society; fortunately, a majority of
Indians are tolerant.
PTI
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.[V3.3.3] Patch Notes
<< Back Published on Tuesday, 11 February 2014 12:21
Dear Heroes,
There will be a Game Client Patch v3.3.3 on Wednesday, 12 February 2014, 0700 hrs - 1159 hrs (GMT +8).
Game Service will be unavailable during this time. Players are advised to logout before this time.
*Downtime may be extended without prior notice due to unforeseen circumstances.*
New Avatar:
Temperance New Avatar:
Diligence New Avatar:
Osiris
New Avatar:
Sphinx New Avatar:
Anunnaki Repulsor
New Avatar:
Horus
Version 3.3.3
== New Content ==
- Added new Prisoner Alt Avatar: Temperance
* The Sin of Gluttony is perhaps the most insidious, as even wanting too much Virtue for oneself can lead to a detour from Sol's light. The Codex Solaris states: "No virtue can be sustained if the seeker lacks self-control." These words of Sol force the embodiment of Temperance to walk a tightrope of self-restraint, honor, and abstention, clutching his own bonds in fists of rage. Even his control has limits, however, and when the injustice becomes too much to bear he shatters his restraints to bring the full force of Sol's vengeance upon his enemies.
- Added new Nomad Alt Avatar: Diligence
* Diligence is the 6th Virtue, representative of the continual striving of betterment through persistence and hard work. A general in Sol's army ravaged by heavenly battles, but determined to continue fighting at the call of the Blind Prophet, the spirit of Diligence embodied Newerth's Nomad, who found his way to Jeraziah's palace in Caldavar by following a divinely arranged trail of stars.
- Added new Electrician Alt Avatar: Osiris
* The merciful Osiris has watched all living beings of Newerth suffer during these endless wars, and he has concluded the only hope for mankind is to return to the land of the living and bring about a massive cleansing—a lethal flooding of life force—that will take man back to his origins so he may be reborn and begin anew.
- Added new Draconis Alt Avatar: Sphinx
* Since the beginning of time the World Tree has been protected by many guardians, each called forth by Gaia to combat the prevalent dangers. With the daemons stopping at nothing to destroy the Tree, Gaia is sending all of her forces to the front lines. The Sphinx once prowled with the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a human, but the current Hellbourne threat requires a significant upgrade. The haunches and hide have been reforged as impenetrable obsidian, the wings sheathed with armor, and the face transformed into a fierce creature who incinerates enemies of the World Tree with the energy of creation.
- Added new Doctor Repulsor Alt Avatar: Anunnaki Repulsor
* Believed to have built the pyramids before the creation of man (as a slave race for the gods), Annunaki Repulsor traverses the landscape in his pyramid-shaped spaceship, awing man and beast alike who have no concept of such a machine. Sensing disturbance after the fall of man, he descends from his throne in heaven only to find his race of human slaves being slaughtered by a new breed of demon summoned from a plane unknown to the collective of gods. Furious at the horde for attempting to overtake his creation, he vows to restore order by taking matters into his own hands.
- Added new Zephyr Alt Avatar: Horus
* Horus is the son of Isis and Osiris, previously known throughout the world as one of the most prominent Egyptian gods. In Newerth, he is reincarnated on the mortal plane as a large peregrine falcon, as he was often depicted in ancient Egypt. As master of the skies, and all that resides between Newerth and the heavens, he has control over the wind, and wields a tremendous amount of power as he flies over the new world, seeking followers to increase his diminished strength.
- Added new Andromeda Alt Avatar: Andromeda (POGS)
* The POGS avatars are here! These high definition skins will be released one-per-patch and will be available via the store, Plinko, or both, depending upon the region.
== General ==
- On-Demand Match Replays
* Players can now request match replays to be uploaded on-demand using the "Match Stats" interface and clicking the "Request Replay" button to initiate the request. When the upload completes a notification will populate in the notification history and the match replay will be available to download.
* Midwars and Riftwars match replays can now be requested and uploaded on-demand.
* During the transition to the new on-demand match replay system replays may be temporarily unavailable.
- Repicking
* Gold penalty reduced from 350 to 150 (Rift wars remains unaffected)
- Bots now control their illusions in an intelligent way. Code by Darkfire!
- Fixed a bug where bots would not realize a rune was taken
- Easy bots no longer get runes
- In the tutorial, your Demented Shaman buddy no longer takes your runes
- Fixed an issue where bots would stop moving if they had an invalid item
== Hero Balance ==
Berzerker
+ A quality of life improvement for the Berzerker. Mark for Death will now be usable while attacking and moving without interrupting your actions.
- Mark for Death: Cast time lowered from 100 to 0, no longer interrupts actions
Gemini
+ Elemental Force has had its armor penetration and movement speed benefits reduced. Gemini was being too heavily rewarded in his damage output for high durability strength builds. We want his Armor Penetration to be an option but we found that the power of it was leading to one dimensional peak output builds.
- Elemental Force: Strength required per Armor Penetration increased from 18,16,14,12 to 22,20,18,16
- Elemental Force: Agility required per Movement Speed increased from 5,4,3,2 to 6,5,4,3
Lord Salforis
+ We're pushing Salforis's concept of counter healing to be much more usable throughout the game. Mors Certissima's mana cost has been reduced but the healing portion has been increased, allowing for more sustainability when used in conjunction with Dark Lord's Presence. The Undying has had its cooldown, mana cost and damage significantly decreased. The Undying has always been intended to combat high regeneration and healing. With the large reduction in cooldown, Salforis will have it much more frequently for its team fight and ganking uses.
- Mors Certissima: Mana Cost lowered from 90,100,110,120 to 75,80,85,90
- Mors Certissima: Range increased from 500 to 600
- Mors Certissima: Cast action time lowered from 250 to 100
- Mors Certissima: Impact delay increased from 500 to 650
- Mors Certissima: Health Regeneration increased from 20% to 40%
- Undying: Cooldown lowered from 120,100,80 to 60,45,30
- Undying: Mana Cost lowered from 150,240,330 to 100,150,200
- Undying: Initial Damage removed, Damage per Second lowered from 30,50,70 to 25,40,55 (Total from 410,700,990 to 300,480,660).
- Undying (Staff of the Master): Duration increased from 12 seconds to 18 seconds.
Moon Queen
+ We feel that the large amount of free auxiliary damage that Moon Queen was receiving allowed her to build strictly defensive items making her extremely difficult to deal with in fights. We want there to be more of a decision when building offensive or defensive items so we've toned down some of her stats to also reduce the late game effectiveness of her aura and illusions.
- Agi gain lowered from 2.8 to 2.4
- Multi Strike: Damage reduction per bounce increased from 35,30,25,20% to 40,35,30,25%
The Chipper
+ The Chipper has received an additional benefit to Focus Buffer encouraging more selfless uses. Focus Buffer will now restore mana to The Chipper whenever damage is absorbed. We want The Chipper himself to experience the benefits of Focus Buffer when casting on allies, creating more incentive for teamwork.
- Focus Buffer: Restores half the damage absorb as mana to the Chipper.
- Focus Buffer: Cooldown lowered from 20 seconds to 15 seconds.
The Gladiator
+ Showdown has had its duration increased, lowering the harsh level requirement The Gladiator experiences in the early game to enjoy the combined uses of Pitfall and Showdown.
- Showdown: Duration increased from 1,2,3,4 to 2,3,4,5
Vindicator
+ Vindicator's concept of anti-caster is being emphasized. We've given him an increase to his utility that will help both his roles as carry and support. Brain Drain is getting a notable power increase stealing an increased amount of Int, limiting enemies' mana pools while also granting the Vindicator damage benefits. Glyph of Silence will now additionally slow and Perplex enemies when triggered, giving the Vindicator more defensive uses for clever placement and positioning. Lastly, Final Chapter will automatically trigger Glyph of Silence to enemies in range of the glyph, giving Vindicator an additional combat use for his ultimate.
- Brain Drain: Int drain increased from 3 to 3,4,5,6
- Brain Drain: Int drain duration increased from 25,30,35, |
’t appear to be a credible issue, as the state can’t even find enough volunteers to serve as witnesses.
Five of the eight men scheduled to die have filed clemency petitions. Hearings on the petitions are scheduled in the 30 days prior to their scheduled executions ― a window normally blacked out, lawyers said. Attorneys further argued they are restricted to one hour to present evidence supporting clemency for each client, instead of the normal two.
Arkansas may be racing to thin out its death row before its supply of the lethal injection drug midazolam expires in April. The controversial sedative has become increasingly hard to find due to legal challenges and execution-averse drugmakers that refuse to sell to correctional buyers.
Drug and legal experts critical of midazolam say it’s less reliable than sodium thiopental in inducing the deep, coma-like state they say is necessary to avoid a cruel and unusual execution. Midazolam has been blamed for botched executions in Arizona, Ohio and Oklahoma, where the prisoner remained conscious throughout a potentially agonizing death.
The Washington Post via Getty Images A vial of midazolam, the first in the three-drug lethal injection protocol used in states like Oklahoma, Ohio and Arkansas.
Death warrants typically allow condemned prisoners and their legal teams about four months’ notice. The Arkansas schedule is sparking a flurry of legal challenges.
“Certain issues don’t become ripe until the execution warrant is issued,” Baich explained. “For instance, if the client is incompetent, that issue can’t be raised until there’s a pending execution date.”
Issues related to clemency also can spark appeals, for example, if witnesses come forward to recant testimony or jurors disclose misconduct during the trial.
“As things get closer to the end, people become more aware” of the looming execution, Baich said. “They read about it in the media and they realize the finality of it and may be more willing to come forward.”
The state argues a rapid pace of executions is a benefit to corrections staff. State secrecy laws shield details, so it’s unknown who participates and what training they have if something goes wrong.
Halperin and others decry this secrecy, saying it’s bad for prisoners and for the public.While international attention is focused on the threat posed by the ZAPAD 2017 military exercises being conducted by by Russia and Belarus along the borders of the Baltic states, Latvia's armed forces on September 9 identified a more imminent, clear and present danger to national security: mushroom pickers.
As LSM recently explained, the attraction of the mushroom is powerful at this time of the year, sometimes luring Latvians, siren-like, into deadly situations.
And no situation could be more deadly than the middle of a live-fire exercise on the shooting ranges at Adazi base just outside Riga.
Unfortunately the pristine forest is ideal for fungal growth, and not just in the boots of soldiers running through combat drills there. Mushroom pickers have been known to evade perimeter security measures on the vast range in search of hidden treasure, risking life, limb and the effectiveness of the military exercise itself if it has to be suspended due to mushroomers popping up in the middle of the combat zone.
In a series of tweets, the armed forces politely suggest that mushroomers would be better off choosing "safer places", preferably places without the danger of high explosives and 7.62 mm ammunition flying about.
Sēņotāj! Ādažu poligonā intensīvi notiek militārās mācības ar kaujas munīciju. Aicinām sēņošanai izvēlēties drošākas vietas — NBS (@Latvijas_armija) September 9, 2017
Atrašanās Ādažu poligonā rada draudus dzīvībai un veselībai, un traucē militāro mācību un vingrinājumu norisei! — NBS (@Latvijas_armija) September 9, 2017
So if you go mushrooming, remember the tell-tale signs of a safe picking location:
1) Are there signs saying "NO ENTRY! MILITARY ZONE! DANGER TO LIFE!"
2) Are there explosions happening?
3) Is there the sound of gunfire?
4) Are there lots of people speaking foreign languages, in uniform and/or tanks?
If you can answer "Yes" to any one of these questions, you should probably be mushrooming somewhere else. And if you can answer "Yes" to all of them, you may possibly have also wandered across the border into Russia and are actually part of the ZAPAD exercises.Saturday's reported deal comes after week-long negotiations with RIM in a bid to have the device conform to Saudi laws.
Saudi Arabia is RIM's biggest Middle East market with about 700,000 users.
Security concerns
Though the Blackberry ban was supposed to be enforced from Friday, users said they only experiended disruptions for about four hours during the day.
The brief Saudi shutdown came five days after the United Arab Emirates announced it would block Blackberry email, web browsing and messaging services in October if RIM did not comply with "local laws".
in depth Focus: Behind the Blackberry ban Inside Story: Banning Blackberry
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, announced earlier the US will engage in technical discussions with the UAE to avoid a Blackberry ban.
India, Lebanon, Algeria and Indonesia have all raised similar national security concerns about their lack of access to Blackberry data.
Blackberry information, such as emails and text messages, are stored in encrypted form on servers in Canada, where the manufacturer RIM is based.
Philip Victor, a data security advocate, told Al Jazeera that RIM and the foreign governments concerned need to find a way to rework the balance between privacy and accessibility.
"How do we ensure the bad guys aren't using it for purposes that could harm the country?" he said.
RIM shares rose 3.5 per cent to $54.93 on Saturday after the Saudi deadline to shut off its messaging service lapsed, Bloomberg reported.
Shares in the company made a rebound after they slipped on Thursday by $1.2, or 2.2 per cent, to $52.2, on the Nasdaq Stock Market.Fox News host Tucker Carlson said former interim Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile was engaging in "the greatest spin [he's] ever heard" after she claimed she passed "things" along to assist not only Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE but also Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE and Martin O'Malley.
The conversation turned to Brazile's role in passing along town hall debate questions to the Clinton campaign on two occasions during the primary season as revealed by WikiLeaks email dumps in 2016 shortly before the election.
"Tucker, WikiLeaks sought to divide us. These were active measures where you got to see the things I gave to Hillary; you never got a chance to see the things I gave to Bernie or Martin O'Malley," Brazile told Carlson.
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"You know what, I’m totally happy, you bring those and I will put them on the show anytime," Carlson replied.
"What I sought to do, Tucker, was to ensure that we had these issues on the table, and I made sure that our candidates — I didn't want them blindsided," Brazile added later in the interview. "That's what I admitted to."
"That’s the greatest spin I’ve ever heard. 'I didn’t want them blindsided.' That’s so good. You should do this for a living! That is hilarious," Carlson said, laughing.
At several points of the interview, Carlson and Brazile acknowledged knowing each other on a personal level. At one point, each worked at CNN while Carlson was the co-host of the debate program "Crossfire."
Town hall debates hosted by CNN were held on March 6 and March 13, 2016. On both occasions, WikiLeaks dumps of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails revealed Brazile, while at CNN, sent questions to the campaign.
"From time to time I get the questions in advance,” she wrote Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri at the time.
CNN issued a statement after the WikiLeaks dump in October of 2016 insisting it "never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate."
The network also said it was "very uncomfortable" with the revelations. Brazile was told she would not be welcome back at the network after her tenure as DNC chairwoman ended.
In an excerpt from her new book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE in the White House," Brazile explains how she was tasked with investigating the DNC after hacked emails suggested the Clinton campaign fixed the nomination.
“By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart,” Brazile wrote, referring to Clinton's main opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
The book was released on November 7.We can now deliver a high quality, 16-episode webseries tackling mental health issues using the power of video games.
We'll keep you updated along the way, and I cannot wait to show you what we create.
We are a health promotion charity in Australia and New Zealand, which means your contribution is tax-deductible. Every cent goes back into our nonprofit work, connecting mental health resources with video games and technology. This project is just one of our many activities. Find out more, and become part of CheckPoint's future today.
Two thirds of people never get the help that is available, because it is too expensive, too stigmatised, or they simply do not know about it.
What if we could change that? Research shows that people are much more likely to use the internet to look up their symptoms and try to help themselves, than they are to go to a doctor. We want to help these people to understand what they’re going through, find the resources that are right for them, and let them know - you are not alone.
A high quality, 16-episode webseries about mental health and video games.
That's up to 160 minutes of premium, evidence-based, potentially lifesaving information which is catered specifically to you - the player.
By showing your support, you'll have exclusive access to a whole bunch of resources and incentives that we just simply can't offer to everyone.
This includes early access to every episode, HD files of the entire series, and your own copy of the soundtrack (composed by talented YouTuber DeanCutty specifically for CheckPoint), pins, prints of the artwork commissioned for the series by the incredible Toby Allen, and credit recognition. We're also very excited that we can offer our backers the chance to actually BE part of the series itself, to contribute to its direction and become immortalised in the project.
Season 1: Mental Health Essentials
These episodes would contain vital education about each condition, with interviews with special guests who have lived experience (developers, content creators, and more).
The goal is to raise awareness, and connect with people where they are.
Depression and anxiety are so common that they are getting two episodes each. This lets us get more in depth on the physiology of these (often debilitating) illnesses, to create something that's informative and also relevant to our audience.
The season also focuses on professional aspects of mental health for those in the industry - an area that has been sorely missing in the past. It would highlight how to recognise common problems, the benefits of employee engagement, as well as how to - and why we should - represent mental illness more appropriately in games.
These are issues we already speak about at conferences, and the persistent feedback we get everywhere in the world is that there needs to be more of this! We can't afford to go to every conference so we want to create something you can access whenever and wherever you need it, that you can share with colleagues, and will rewrite the culture in this industry.
Featuring...
I first became familiar with Dr. Jennifer Hazel’s work after watching her presentation from the 2017 Game Developer’s Conference entitled “Invent a Game, Reinvent Yourself.” As someone who not only plays video games, makes video games, and dealt with a nasty panic disorder, the presentation spoke to me – and it’s something I wish I’d seen back in 2001, when I was going through the worst of it.
Feelings of shame, fear, and helplessness are all too common among those suffering from mental health issues; often, it makes taking that first step towards seeking help incredibly difficult. Easy to access resources, such as this video series, are often invaluable in helping people get past that initial hurdle, and as such, can be life-changing (if not outright lifesaving).
Having since met Jennifer and spoken with her at length, it’s safe to say she’s incredibly passionate about her work and dedicated to making people’s lives better. I hope you’ll consider supporting her project, and I hope this series will encourage people struggling with mental illness to seek the help they need.
Season 2: Using Games for Good
Unfortunately there is still a significant stigma around mental health issues, but we feel that with accurate and empathetic representation, this can change.
CheckPoint writes articles exploring character psychology - what makes them tick? How have their experiences shaped who they are? What really is going on inside their mind? Not only does this break down stigma by highlighting mental health in context, but it is also helpful to those who recognise their own vulnerabilities in a cherished hero.
The second part of the stream would look at the work being done to use games for positive purposes. We'll explore the current research, discussing psychology, safety and more.
If we achieve our funding goal, we will have enough money to create 16 episodes. Each would be completely free for anyone to view, all over the world, at any time.
If we charged for the resources we want to make, it would prevent the most vulnerable people from being able to access them. That's why we've come to Kickstarter.
This is a unique opportunity for you to be part of something that could change lives. As a reward for being awesome, caring about mental health, and contributing to a game-changing project, you can pick from rewards that range from pins to prints to getting your name in the credits.
The Extra Stuff Just For Backers
You can check out the reward tiers on the right. We have tried to reduce costs so we can focus on creating the best series we can for you, but we have managed to get some great incentives!
Think of your closest loved one - it could be your friend, family, partner, child. Now think about them experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety. They could be unable to leave the house, or find themselves out of work, losing friends, for a health problem they never asked for. For a lot of people, this is something that is all too real.
In 2017, depression topped list of causes of ill health. Over 26 percent of all Americans over the age of 18 meet the criteria for having a mental illness. Within 20 years, mental illness is predicted to become the leading cause of disease worldwide.
Courtesy of the World Health Organisation
Around the world, almost one million people die due to suicide every year, and it is the third leading cause of death among young people.
This is a crisis, and one that we can change, together. We believe that this series could open to door to other opportunities which could help people.
Every year at PAX Australia, we do a panel called “More Than A Game: Playing For Mental Health and Wellbeing”. Every year at PAX Australia, that panel is packed out with the most engaged audience we’ve ever seen. We even did live research and found overwhelming results - 81% of our 400 strong audience believed games had helped them psychologically.
You - the gaming community - REALLY want to talk about mental health.
It’s clear to us this is a vulnerable population and one that deserves the right to mental wellness. That community inspired us to do what we do here.
Gaming has been a source of friendship, comfort and social belonging for many people. There is plenty of evidence to suggest games could have benefits for wellbeing:
Games are changing the world in all sorts of ways. Let's harness that.
CheckPoint are in a totally unique position to pioneer this space. We’re run by both mental health professionals and game developers, who each have years of experience in the fields contribute to the company.
Our main activities include:
- Digital Mental Health Promotion
We have a feature-rich website full of information about mental health, links to useful resources, detailed discussions of apps and games for wellbeing, and heaps more. We create and freely distribute publications which anyone can download, to help with stress and distress, and get the most out of life. Recently we launched our 3-Step Thinking Hack Pack for free.
The CheckPoint Series is one of our digital mental health promotion programs, and will add to our existing range of activities which aim to educate, raise awareness, and assist in help-seeking for people all over the world.
- Community Services
Our programs include Game Therapy, Convention Wellness, Playing It Safe, and more.
- Games Industry Services
We lead workshops for workplace wellbeing, consultancy to guide mental illness representation, and public speaking at events. We have spoken at IndieCade as the Keynote, and at GDC 2017, where our talk was voted top 5 in the Advocacy track and our speakers got a 97% approval rating.
- Research
We are currently recruiting participants for our study, "Exploring the Psychological Benefits of Video Games". Please take part!
More Testimonials
With your support, we will continue to grow, making our mission sustainable and feasible. As a non-profit, every cent we receive goes back into the company to deliver our activities. We have to abide by strict audit conditions, so you can be reassured that everything donated through the Kickstarter goes directly into the project we’re advertising. And if you're in Australia, your pledge counts as a tax-deductible gift as we have DGR-1 status.
Our values for spending the funds:
Scripting is done entirely in-house by our own team. No consultancy fees required!
We are working as much as we can with organisations who do pro-bono work, to align with our socially conscious cause.
We will feature diverse voices and be as inclusive as possible in our series.
We truly believe that this should be relevant to the gaming community, and so are working within it with all our contributors.
Thank you so much for your time and for your attention, for anything you can give, and for any way you can contribute. We are always blown away by the support we get everywhere we go, and it validates every day we continue on our mission.
Thank you.
References for Mental Health Data:
If you or anyone you know needs help:
Lifeline on 13 11 14
Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800
MensLine Australia on 1300 789 978
Suicide Call Back Service on 1300 659 467
Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36
Headspace on 1800 650 890
We are proud to be Kicking It Forward to hopefully promote a future mental health initiative.Filmmaker George Lucas has proposed a 224-unit affordable housing complex at Grady Ranch.
Representatives of the “Star Wars” billionaire’s Skywalker Properties, calling plans for rental housing that accommodates seniors and local workers a “magnificent gift” to Marin County, said Lucas intends to pay for the entire project himself, without federal, state or other grant aid.
“The unique thing about this is George is financing it 100 percent,” said Gary Giacomini, former county supervisor and an attorney for Skywalker. The situation will leave Lucas in charge, and not grantmakers, while eliminating red tape associated with subsidized housing, Giacomini noted, saying units can be set aside specifically for teachers, local workers or anyone else who meets income guidelines.
Reaction to the latest plan for Grady Ranch was mixed, with Supervisor Damon Connolly citing worries about “the cumulative impact on the entire area” of a cascade of development proposals that can “literally and figuratively change the landscape in Marinwood and Lucas Valley.”
But Supervisors Judy Arnold and Steve Kinsey sounded optimistic notes, with Kinsey calling it a “wonderful opportunity.” Arnold noted that affordable housing is in short supply in Marin and “in this case we have the opportunity to be more creative.”
A plan that will be submitted to the county Community Development Agency this week calls for 120 two- and three-bedroom workforce residences in one four-story cluster and two two-story clusters on the site, and 104 one- and two-bedroom residences for seniors in a four-story cluster, as well as four parking garages. None would be visible from Lucas Valley Road.
The proposal includes a community center and pool, terraced gardens, an orchard and a “micro farm” or community garden, and a barn. It limits development to a 52-acre tract of the 1,039-acre ranch, 800 acres of which already have been dedicated as open space. Zoning allows as many as 324 dwellings on the site.
The architect for the project is Robert W. Hayes of Sausalito, a designer who won acclaim for his Toussin Senior Apartments affordable complex at 10 Toussin Ave. in Kentfield. The project is being coordinated and managed by PEP Housing of Petaluma, which developed Toussin as well as affordable housing complexes at 13 sites in Petaluma, among other projects.
Who would qualify?
Mary Stompe of Novato, executive director of PEP Housing for the past decade, said regulatory controls will be filed with the county ensuring affordability of the residences, with targets set so that workforce housing applicants earn less than 80 percent of median income, and senior renters falling somewhere between 30 to 60 percent of the median.
Aside from meeting income level requirements, renters must clear “an extensive background check” that includes a review of criminal and other records, as well as interviews with former landlords, Stompe said, adding her organization maintains a tight grip on tenants.
“We all are very proud to be part of this,” Giacomini said. “This will provide 224 families with places to live, and you’ll drive by and not be able to see anything.”
“It’s a huge public gift and I am confident the public will embrace it,” Stompe added. “We’re providing homes for teachers and others in the county.”
“The standard naysayers will be hanging around, but an awfully lot of people will support it,” Giacomini added. “We will have a healthy public process but it will not be one-sided,” he said. “There will be in-depth scrutiny.”
If all goes well, the development could break ground in 2018 and be completed the next year, Giacomini said.
Thomas Peters, CEO of the Marin Community Foundation, called Lucas’ plan an “extraordinary offer” that underscores the filmmaker’s commitment to the housing needs of the vibrant workforce that drives the region’s vitality.
Latest chapter
The latest chapter in the Grady Ranch saga unfolded two years after the foundation bailed out of a plan to join Lucas in developing affordable housing at Grady Ranch. Peters said at the time that after extensive study, the “considerable cost” of a $120 million to $150 million affordable complex of from 200 to 240 “beautiful and environmentally sensitive” dwellings was too daunting despite “the generous land offer by Mr. Lucas.”
When the foundation departed, Angelo Garcia, president of Lucas Real Estate Holdings, pledged to “start immediately to engage in discussions” with developers identified during the foundation study. These included PEP Housing. “George Lucas feels that affordable housing is necessary so that people who are important in this community such as teachers, home health care workers and nurses don’t have to live outside Marin,” Garcia said then.
Brian Crawford, head of the county’s Community Development Agency, noted the site and adjacent areas are targeted for residential development by county land use regulations.
A Lucas studio project was approved by the county in 1996, but when the filmmaker finally decided to proceed four years ago, he consolidated buildings and required new permits. A lawyer for neighbors opposed to the plan threatened to sue and disclosed that state regulatory agencies had concerns about a $70 million creek and watershed improvement planned by Lucas. The filmmaker, then in talks to sell his Lucasfilm enterprise to Disney, walked away, saying he could not afford more delay, and backed development of affordable homes.
Stompe noted the Skywalker Properties housing plan for Grady Ranch does not include a watershed improvement element.Disclaimer: I do not own RWBY
Cover Art Credit: mojojoj27827860
Qrow woke up to a scene that he was all too familiar with. One he had been in too many times before.
A pounding head, laying in a bed that he didn't remember falling asleep in, staring at a ceiling he was not familiar with. Thankfully, It was still nighttime.
Groaning, he attempted to get up out of the bed, only to be stopped by an unfamiliar weight pinning him against the sheets. Looking down, he noticed another person wrapped around him.
"Winter?" He whispered, looking at the woman who was cuddled up next to him, sleeping soundly. A smile graced her face, something he had rarely ever seen in his time around the normally cold and serious woman. Her lack of clothes had him asking himself questions until he noticed that he was in the same predicament.
Suddenly the memories of the previous night came flooding back to him. He had gone to Atlas after seeing his niece wake up, to get information about the current situation from Winter. Like normal he had been drinking, and then she had started yelling about his drinking. He yelled at her to stop bugging him. They got into a fight and then one thing had led to another, someone kissed someone else, and the next thing he remembered they were back at her place in Atlas.
"Yeah, I'm going to deal with this… anytime that isn't now." He murmured, trying not to wake the woman next to him. He did his best to gently untangle Winter's arms from around him so he could get out of bed. Finding success, he got up and stretched his arms far above his head until he heard the popping of his shoulders. The cold air that touched his body as he left the warmth of the bed raised goosebumps all over his skin and he felt a shiver go up his spine.
Letting out a satisfied sigh he looked back to the bed to make sure that he had not disturbed the sleeping woman. A frown took his face as he looked back at her, lying on the bed. The woman's white hair had fallen over the right side of her face, and a frown had replaced the cute smile that had previously adorned her face. Her arms had snaked their way around herself. She was shivering.
As Qrow looked at her, guilt washed over him. Sighing, he walked over to the bed and pulled the blankets over her exposed body. "Seems like even the ice queen doesn't always like the cold." As soon as Winter's shivering stopped the smile reappeared on her face as she pulled the blankets closer to herself, an unconscious moan escaping her lips "Hmmm, Qrow..." Her voice was full of bliss, and a hint of sensuality as she said his name.
A small chuckle escaped his lips as he stood back up, and began looking around the room. The pale moonlight coming through the large wall sized window to his right lit the room up enough for him to make out the vague details.
He was surprised that the room belonging to the daughter of one of the richest families in the world looked so bland. There were literally no decorations in the room other than a few pictures of Winter and her sister, and one of her and General Ironwood that were all placed on a single large dresser along the left wall of the room. He made note of the fact that there was not a single picture of her parents. Next to that was a large body length mirror. On the other side of the dresser was a set of double doors. Upon closer inspection he found it was a large walk in closet, though it was surprisingly empty for its size. "I guess Winter isn't one for fashion."
Her bed was just as simple as everything else. A simple king-sized mattress, with a small white bed frame pushed up against the back wall of the room. Across from the bed was a single door that he assumed was the way out of the room and into the rest of the house. One glaring detail did stick out to him about the whole room though.
"Why does everything the Schnee family touch have to be white?" He thought while shaking his head. "I swear it's almost like they have a fetish for the damn color."
Feeling like he had explored the room enough Qrow decided that maybe now was a better time to leave than any. "Leaving before Miss cold-hearted and steely-eyed wakes up is probably the best course of action to take at the moment." Looking around the room, Qrow slowly began to gather the scraps of clothes that were thrown randomly around the room.
After getting dressed in his normal outfit, Qrow ran his hands through his hair and let out a sigh. He did a quick run-down of his things to make sure he was not missing anything.
"Weapon?" his hand reached behind his back and lightly patted the large collapsed scythe on his back. Check.
"Flask?" patting his coat pocket he felt the metal liquid container give a subdued clink in response. Check
"Ring?" Feeling around his right hand he made sure everything was in place before he proceeded.
"And most importantly necklace." Reaching up around his neck Qrow felt around for the cross necklace that he always wore. A slight panic overcame him when he didn't feel it in it's usual place.
"Where is it!?" he frantically began looking through every pocket that he had. Checking multiple times over and over in search of the piece of jewelry before accepting that it was not on his person. "Oh come on! Of all the things for me to fucking lose."
His self-chastising was interrupted by a voice coming from behind him. "Leaving so soon Qrow? Is that really any way to treat a lady?"
Turning around, he saw that Winter was now awake. She was sitting up in her bed with the sheets covering her chest as she looked at him, an amused smirk on her face. The one ice blue eye that he could see stared at him questioningly, as if she were awaiting his sarcastic retort.
"Where is my necklace?"
Her smirk quickly left her face as she realized that he was not going to be throwing an insult at her like expected. "What necklace?"
"Don't act like you don't know what I am talking about Ice Queen, my cross necklace that I always wear. Hell, you were playing with it last night!" His voice was laced with annoyance as he began looking around the room for the precious piece of jewelry.
Winter was slightly surprised with how well Qrow seemed to remember last night. "Wow, you actually remember? I guess you were not as drunk as I thought you were. I thought I was going to have to explain everything to you once you got up." Her chuckle only served to annoy Qrow further.
"Look Miss Specialist, are you going to sit there pretty and naked and keep teasing me, until I find the damn thing and leave or are you going to get up off that pretty ass of yours and help me look?!" He glanced at her as he finished looking under one of the pillows on the bed. He hadn't meant for it to sound so hostile, but right now he didn't really care.
He could tell that Winter was shocked by his outburst. Rarely had he ever seemed so serious or angry in her presence. Normally he was a drunk mess with a constant barrage of sarcastic remarks and jokes. The only other time he could think that she had seen him like this was the meeting they had at Beacon a little over a week ago, and the anger had been directed at the General during that meeting, not her.
"Ummm….um sure…I'm…I'm sorry for teasing you." She stammered an apology as she removed herself from the bed. She began walking over to her dresser to pull out some casual nightwear for herself to wear.
Qrow tried his best to not look at her as the beautiful naked woman walked away from him, sadly his resolve failed him as stole a few glances at her as she walked away from the bed. "Damn, the woman really does have a nice body." His eyes wandered up and down her form as he noticed every curve that her well toned body offered, taking a few seconds longer than he should have admiring her backside. "You going to look for your necklace, or are you just gonna keep staring at my ass like you didn't see enough of it last night?"
Doing his best to shake the blush off his face he continued his search for his lost necklace.
"Maybe it fell by the door to the hall when we came in." After another 5 minutes of searching Qrow was getting frantic. He had checked everywhere he could think of twice, if not three times already, and there was no sign of it.
"God damn it." He muttered under his breath as he took a seat on the edge of the bed. He faced the window and looked at the shattered moon that hung in the sky as snow slowly fell from the sky during the Atlesian winter night.
Qrow always loved looking at the moon, something about the way it would go from being shattered to whole throughout the months was enticing to watch, and it was such a nice way to think.
"Hey, tall, dark, and brooding." Looking behind him her saw Winter standing there. She had put on a simple white t-shirt that hung loosely on her body and some baggy white sweat pants. "Seriously, it is ok for you people to have some other color than white in your life."
She was looking at him with a neutral expression on her face. Her hair was pulled back into its normal bun, one side of her hair still falling over one of her eyes. The other shining blue eye looking into his bright red ones. She had one of her hands on her hip and the other held out in front of her in a fist. "Is this it?" She opened her hand and out feel a tiny cross attached to a thin metal chain.
A smirk took to his face as he looked at her. "Yeah, it is… Thanks Ice Queen." He reached for the necklace, but as he was about to grab it she snatched it back into her hand, and pulled it away from him. His smirk quickly became a frown as he glared at her. "Oh, real mature Ice Queen."
"Mature? This coming from the grown man who tried to walk out on a woman he slept with. The same man who also still uses nicknames? Not to mention you have a drinking issue." She spat back at him as she took a seat on the bed next to him.
He could only snort at her response as he turned his nose at her. She glared at him in response. "If you really want this back then I want to know something first."
Rolling his eyes at her he groaned in annoyance. "Look, I don't have time for this. Please give me back the necklace."
Her piercing eye seemed to turn an icy shade as her eyebrows fell into a scowl. "You really expect me to let you walk out of here like nothing happened Qrow? You expect me to act like we didn't just sleep together?"
"Well I was hoping so, yeah." As soon as the answer left his mouth he swore he saw a flash of sadness in her eyes as her scowl faltered for a fraction of a second.
Her eyes closed as she sighed. "I can't believe I actually expected anything different." Shaking her head before looked at the necklace in her hands. "Well no, I am not just going to let you walk out of here. You are going to answer something for me before I give this back to you."
Qrow rubbed his eyes, trying his best to get rid of the hangover he was feeling. Taking out his flask he unscrewed the cap and took a long drink of the vodka that he had inside. The liquid burned down his throat, and the throbbing in his head started to subside. He realized that the only way out of the situation was doing what Winter was asking of him. "Alright, alright you win. What is it you want to know Ice Queen?"
Once again she was glaring at him. Her eye looking into the blood red eyes of the man sitting next to her. She sighed before she began talking. "Alright, two things actually. First why the hell do you drink so damn much?" She held up the necklace and hung it in from of his face again. "Second…. Why is this so important to you?"
Qrow sighed, reaching back into his pocket he fished his flask back out, and began to unscrew the top, just as he was about to open the top, the flask was snatched out of his hands.
He shot a dirty glare to woman next to him. "You get this back when I hear the stories. Just like the necklace."
"Bitch," He mumbled under his breath.
"Hmm?" Winter raised an eyebrow at him. "I'm sorry, what was that?"
The throbbing was slowly returning to his head. Rubbing his temples, he turned to look back out the window at the moon, the snow fluttering down outside made for a beautiful image as it seemed to fall in the foreground of the moon.
"Nothing, at least you are making this easy on me...It is the same story essentially." Qrow rubbed his facial hair as he thought about where to start.
"The necklace was… Well it was a gift." His eyes moved up to meet Winter's. Her face had gone from smug to looking genuinely interested in the story that was about to be told. "It was a gift from my old partner, and the leader of my old team. Her name was Summer Rose." He paused as he thought about what he should say next.
"Did you love her?" His eyes shot up to meet hers, a surprised look |
el. Reverend Beecher never refuted the story. Mark Twain would later call Beecher’s silence “a hundred-fold more of an obscene publication than that of the Woodhulls”, adding that he felt sure the nation would eventually realise that “there is fire somewhere in all this smoke of scandal”.
The judge ordered a bond of $8,000 and committed Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin in lieu of bail to the Ludlow Street jail, with a hearing on the case scheduled for two days later.
Ludlow Street jail held an inmate population mainly accused of civil offences, most of whom could and did pay for better treatment there. It was also known as the “alimony club”, owing to the fact that it held a large number of delinquent husbands on charges of non-payment.
When the sisters arrived, the warden received them as if they were coming for tea, and graciously ushered them into his office. Press accounts say they appeared cool and collected, and “no womanly exhibition of tears was visible”.
Inside the warden’s office, the sisters met with Howe. He had formulated a plea that there was no basis for an obscenity charge because everything in the Weekly articles (and worse) could be found in Shakespeare or the Bible. This defence would also be used in obscenity cases in Britain, notably 15 years later in 1888’s landmark censorship case Regina v Vizetelly, when the trial of the publisher of English translations of the “obscene” novels of French author Émile Zola rocked the literary establishment.
On Sunday 4 November, the sisters received a crowd of visitors in their cell, including numerous reporters and family members. Among them were their parents, Reuben “Buck” and Roxanna “Roxy” Claflin, two opportunists who might have been invented by Mark Twain. Buck was a conman and literal snake oil salesman, peddling a brew consisting of alcohol and opium as a cure for cancer. Roxy was a German immigrant, an illiterate follower of spiritualists who set herself up as a fortune-teller. She bore 10 children, six of whom lived to maturity. She and Buck had followed their daughters to New York a few years previously, once their offspring made a fortune, and Woodhull felt she had no choice but to take them in. Roxy had caused irreparable harm to the family fortunes when she had forged Tennie’s signature on a blackmail letter to Cornelius Vanderbilt earlier that year, which caused him to cut off all further financial assistance to the sisters.
A more welcome family visit came from Zula Maud, Woodhull’s adored daughter from her first marriage (at age 15) to Channing Woodhull. Zula was by this time 11 years old, and received much unwanted attention from the press as she made her way into the prison. Also on the visitor’s list was Victoria’s second husband, Colonel James Blood. It is a matter of some dispute as to whether they ever married but Woodhull claimed they did, in St Louis in 1865, before the couple moved to New York together. Once there, they divorced and lived together as a defiant act in support of their shared free‑love beliefs. The evidence suggests they each took lovers but were friends and close collaborators. Some historians believe that he was the author of most of Woodhull’s speeches and articles, or at least a major contributor, together with their mutual friend, the self-styled “individualist anarchist” Stephen Pearl Andrews.
The most eagerly awaited visitor did not appear at Ludlow Street: Woodhull’s primary source for the Beecher article – the cuckolded husband. Theodore Tilton was apparently out of town, on the campaign trail for the Democratic candidate Horace Greeley. Another blow came when the Sun reported that the suffragette leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had always been a loyal supporter of Woodhull, was quoted as saying: “Mrs Woodhull’s statements are untrue in every particular.” It began to dawn on the sisters that they might be spending more time in their cell than they had originally supposed.
On the morning of election day, 5 November 1872, Susan B Anthony went to a polling station in Rochester, New York and became the first woman in America to successfully insist on exercising her right to vote. She chose to cast her ballot for President Grant – whose Republican party had made much of its willingness to listen to women in the runup to the election.
Two weeks later, Anthony would be arrested and tried for illegal voting, but she had made her point. Meanwhile, candidate Woodhull went back to the hearing room at the circuit court with her sister. When they arrived, they learned that a federal grand jury had already met and indicted them. They were remanded back into custody.
Woodhull’s eventual share of the popular vote is undocumented (possibly because some of the polling stations discarded any ballot papers that favoured her) but we know that she did not carry any states, and therefore won no electoral votes. Grant easily won a second term by a large margin, and Greeley died a few weeks after the election.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin in the front row, with fellow suffragists in 1910. Photograph: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images
The sisters were released on bail a month after their arrest, and exonerated of obscenity charges the following June, when the judge ruled that existing obscenity legislation did not apply to newspapers. But Woodhull’s American career was over, and although she hung on for years as a lecturer and reformer, and continued to publish her weekly paper, she suffered from perpetual ill health and scant resources. She eventually left Colonel Blood and, together with her sister and her grown children, she emigrated to England. There she started a reforming newspaper, The Humanitarian, and threw her support behind the British suffragette movement. By the turn of the century, both she and Tennie would marry wealthy Englishmen and retire from the public gaze. Woodhull ended her long and colourful life in 1927 as the mistress of an English country house in Worcestershire. A year later, British women won the right to vote.
Woodhull’s accuser, Anthony Comstock, was outraged by her acquittal in the Beecher case but used it to build new support for stronger obscenity legislation. He travelled to Washington in the wake of the trial and was instrumental in drafting new and more comprehensive censorship legislation – which became known as the Comstock law.
History has reduced Woodhull to a footnote – a curiosity more than a contender – but, despite her penchant for melodrama, she was correct about her contribution: she set a vital precedent.
Thousands of Woodhull’s suffragette sisters continued to fight against political bigotry, nominating a woman through the Equal Rights party for subsequent elections and sending members to polling stations on voting day to attempt to insist on their rights. Progress was slow, but by 1917, the suffragist Jeanette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress, as a Republican representative for Montana, one of the few states that had agreed to allow women to vote. By 1918, women had won the right in 40 states, but with Rankin’s advocacy, the constitution was amended in 1920 to mandate universal female suffrage. Laura Clay, a southern Democrat, was placed on the presidential ballot that year. But restrictive rules and escalating campaign costs in subsequent years slowed the cause, and there were no more female presidential candidates in the running until 1964.
Today, a total of 313 women have served in Congress and two female candidates have been major party nominees for vice president: Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and Sarah Palin in 2008. Since Woodhull’s pioneering campaign, other third parties have nominated 21 more female presidential candidates – including this year’s Green party candidate, Dr Jill Stein. Finally, 136 years after Woodhull’s arrest, we may soon see Hillary Clinton carry her baton forward into the White House.
As night fell on election day in 1872, Woodhull closed her campaign – from prison – with a prophetic letter to the editor of the New York Herald, which showed that she was very well aware of what she had begun:
To the public I would say in conclusion they may succeed in crushing me out, even to the loss of my life: but let me warn them and you that from the ashes of my body a thousand Victorias will spring to avenge my death by seizing the work laid down by me and carrying it forward to victory.
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.BERLIN (RNS) — Martin Luther is such a towering figure in German history that it’s no surprise Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich exploited his name whenever it could.
Most visitors to events in Germany marking this year’s 500th anniversary of the Reformation, however, probably didn’t expect to find an exhibition setting out just how extensively the Nazis used Luther to justify their anti-Semitism and nationalism.
To dramatize the connection, the exhibition “Luther’s words are everywhere … ” is located in the Topography of Terror, a central Berlin museum about Nazi repression methods that was built where the headquarters of the Gestapo secret police and SS paramilitary force once stood.
The caption under a portrait of Luther in the Nazi propaganda weekly Der Stürmer, reproduced on a panel at the exhibition, comes right to the point. Calling him a “fighter against the Jewish spirit in the Christian Church,” it says: “Dr. Luther is one of the greatest anti-Semites in German history.”
READ: Blessing robots: Is a technological reformation coming?
Another panel shows a poster urging Berlin Lutherans to vote for the pro-Nazi “German Christians” in local church elections in July 1933, only months after Hitler came to power. At the top are both the Christian cross and the swastika, which is called the “hooked cross” (Hakenkreuz) in German.
“We merge Christ’s cross with the hooked cross,” it declares. Dripping with Nazi terminology, it says Christianity should have nothing to do with anything opposed to the German people and their race.
The title of the exhibition comes from a 1937 quote by the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Luther’s words are everywhere, but twisted from truth into self-deception.” Bonhoeffer was executed as an anti-Nazi conspirator one month before World War II ended in 1945.
Kurt Hendel, professor emeritus of Reformation history at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, said the Nazis saw Luther as a hero because of his virulent 1543 treatise “On the Jews and Their Lies.”
“They very clearly used Luther’s writings that had all this anti-Semitism in them to support their cause,” he told RNS, noting the treatise called for Jews to be expelled from German cities, synagogues to be burned down and rabbis forbidden to preach.
“Luther is particularly tragic in this sense” since he had rejected anti-Semitism in earlier writings, Hendel said. But Luther always believed Jews should be converted and he gradually lost patience when they did not embrace Christianity.
The reformer’s 1543 treatise was all but forgotten for generations until 19th-century German scholars included it in what is known as the Erlangen edition of his complete works. “It’s through that reality that Hitler and his supporters knew about it,” Hendel said.
The Nazis marked the 450th anniversary of Luther’s birthday in November 1933 with a nationwide “German Luther Day,” in which the main speaker praised Luther’s “ethno-nationalist mission” and called for “the completion of the German Reformation in the Third Reich.”
The following year, they celebrated the 400th anniversary of his groundbreaking translation of the Bible into German for, as they put it, “a healthy people committed to their own kind.”
In 1938, Hitler’s propagandists highlighted the fact that the infamous Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) of Nov. 9-10 — when Nazis burned synagogues and smashed the windows of Jewish-owned shops, leaving more than 1,000 synagogues ablaze or smoldering — fell on the reformer’s birthday.
“On November 10, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany,” wrote Martin Sasse, the pro-Nazi Lutheran bishop of Thuringia state. “The German people must hear the words of this man, the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.”
Citing this pamphlet in its review of the exhibition, the Berlin tabloid newspaper B.Z. said: “This instrumentalization must not be ignored amid all the hero worship in this Luther year.”
READ: Study up: A Reformation anniversary reading list
The exhibition also documents the Third Reich’s crackdown on the Confessing Church, the Protestant minority that opposed Nazism, and the government’s hand in helping to build or renovate more than 1,000 Protestant church buildings during the Nazi period.
Thomas Albert Howard, professor of humanities and history at Valparaiso University in Indiana, said the first two Reformation centennials were strictly religious, but interpretations of Luther changed in the 19th century.
“This is where you get the two major strands,” he said. “One is the liberal Luther, whose reforms are seen as leading to progress and the modern age, and the other the nationalist Luther, whose Bible translation helped shape the modern German language and identity.”
By the 400th anniversary of his birth in 1883, the ceremonies exuded “a worrisome and pungent nationalism” that continued when Imperial Germany marked the 1917 Reformation centennial during World War I.
Although many German Protestants supported the Nazis, Howard recalled that not all church leaders agreed.
“The German Protestant church was split in two between the ‘German Christians,’ who were more sympathetic to National Socialist ideals, and the Confessing Church — typified by people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer — who were very critical of the marriage of Christianity and Nazism,” he said.
“The Nazis wanted to instrumentalize the church — they weren’t gung-ho about Martin Luther per se.”
Despite his anti-Semitic writings, Luther couldn’t be called a Nazi either, Hendel insisted.
“He was not a Nazi anti-Semite, he was a religious anti-Semite,” he said, explaining that Luther opposed Jews not as an ethnic group but because they refused to convert.
Hendel stressed that Lutheran churches have since firmly rejected Luther’s anti-Semitic writings and asked for Jews’ forgiveness.
“However, anti-Semitism is still well and alive, as we see in our own time now with the neo-Nazi stuff and Charlottesville and all those kinds of reality,” he added. “We have to be very critical.”
(Emily McFarlan Miller is a national reporter for RNS based in Chicago. She covers evangelical and mainline Protestant Christianity. Tom Heneghan in Paris contributed to this article. Reporting from Germany on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation was made possible in part by funding from the German National Tourist Board.)Congratulations to relatively new "intellectual magazines" The New Inquiry and Jacobin: the New York Times thinks you're both worthy of coverage! Well, not equally so. The 20-something female founders of The New Inquiry were deemed "literary cubs" in a November 2011 Styles section profile, while Jacobin, the brainchild of 23-year-old Bhaskar Sunkara, was featured on the Books page this weekend.
Back in 2011, the paper described The New Inquiry's co-founder Rachel Rosenfelt as "young, Web-savvy and idealistic." She wore "a black sweater, miniskirt and combat boots." Her cohorts donned "untucked oxford shirts and off-brand jeans" and, shockingly, "despite the fact that everyone was young and attractive, no one seemed to flirt or network" at a staff meeting. Imagine that!
Overall, the magazine's founders came off as intelligent but also naive; The New Inquiry was "a scrappy online journal and roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts for desperate members of the city's literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment." I'm a fan of The New Inquiry now, but I didn't know much about the magazine when I read about it in the Times back in November 2011. I'll be honest: I was turned off by the profile. Based on the piece alone, the editors came off as pseudo-intellectuals who were full of themselves and playing dress-up.
Here are some excerpts from this weekend's article on Jacobin:
It has also earned Mr. Sunkara, now a ripe 23, extravagant praise from members of a (slightly) older guard who see his success as heartening sign that the socialist "brand" - to use a word he throws around with un-self-conscious ease - hasn't been totally killed off by Tea Party invective.
"I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21," he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. "Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful."
His multitasking work ethic hardly shows signs of flagging.
Sunkara sounds (and is) young, but also deserving; not so much "scrappy" as unapologetically wise beyond his years, a man to keep on our radar. What do you think he was wearing?
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On Twitter, a number of The New Inquiry's contributors and fans said they were happy that Jacobin was profiled, but were upset by the gendered coverage. A few pointed out that The New Inquiry wasn't the only female-founded magazine to be delegated to the Styles section; a recent piece on The American Reader also fixated on the founder's stunning looks and wardrobe. (Sample line: "Sometimes there is cat-eye makeup. Sometimes there is not.")
It's bullshit to pretend (as NYT social media editor Michael Roston is arguing) that there's no difference between being profiled on the Books page and on the Styles page. There's a massive difference. Books reporters don't typically focus on what their subjects are wearing or whether they enjoy flirting. They don't typically profile their subjects in a slightly patronizing manner, as if they were not founders of an exciting new publication but extras on Girls.
This is not to say that fashion is less important than literature. But The New Inquiry and The American Reader are not fashion magazines. The lead Styles section story this weekend was about Jenna Lyons, executive creative director of J. Crew; the lead Books story was about a New Yorker writer's investigation into Scientology. Why did editors decide that only the female-founded magazines had more in common with Fashion Week than critical thinking?
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Roston tweeted that "more people probably read Styles" and all criticism was "trolling" because "concern with 'gender' presumes that Styles is only for the ladies, and is thus taken less seriously. It isn't." Rosenfelt's argument — she pointed out that "lots of minor biases and thoughtless decisions add up" and tweeted a Vida link detailing gender discrimination in the literary world — is more convincing. She's right, and those who go out of their way to deny that are part of the problem.The Pew Research Center's Global Views on Morality poll showed that Spain was the least homophobic country of the 40 surveyed.
A total of 55 per cent of Spaniards described homosexuality as "morally acceptable," while 38 per cent said that it was "not a moral issue." Only 6 per cent felt that homosexuality was "morally unacceptable."
The least tolerant countries were Ghana and Russia, where 98 per cent and 72 per cent of those surveyed deemed homosexuality "morally unacceptable".
The poll — which did not include the traditionally gay-friendly nations of Scandinavia — also looked at public opinions on issues including extramarital affairs, abortion, premarital sex and gambling.
Despite its conservative Catholic background, Spain has been a progressive leader in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights in recent years.
In 2005, it became the third country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.
Earlier this month, the country became the first to announce plans to open an old people's home specifically for the LGBT community. It also allows adoption by same-sex couples, and equal access to IVF and surrogacy for all couples and individuals.
Don't miss stories about Spain, join The Local on Facebook and Twitter.The disgraced former IMF chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn looks likely to face trial in France for "aggravated pimping" despite a ruling by prosecutors that the case should be dropped.
Magistrates investigating the so-called Carlton Affair - allegations of hotel orgies with prostitutes in France, Belgium and the United States - decided today to overrule the state prosecutor and send Mr Strauss-Kahn for trial.
Both the prosecution and Mr Strauss-Kahn, 64, can appeal against the ruling. If they fail, the former IMF chief and French finance minister will finally face a trial for sexual misconduct after a series of failed prosecutions or out-of-court settlements in other cases.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
DSK is one of 13 people, including a senior police officer and two businessmen, who were sent for trial yesterday for "aggravated pimping as part of a group" for their alleged part in organising hotel orgies. A more serious accusation of "conspiracy" was dropped.
Under French law "pimping" can mean any action, paid or unpaid, which assists an act of prostitution. It is not suggested that Mr Strauss-Kahn was paid but that he helped to organise the parties with a series of telephone text messages.
Frédérique Baulieu, one of DSK lawyers, said yesterday that her client had committed no offence. She accused the investigating magistrates of trying to enforce their own "moral" judgements, rather than the letter of the law.
It is unusual, but not unprecedented, for investigating magistrates to overrule the decision of the state prosecutor. The former President Jacques Chirac was convicted in 2011 on corruption charges which the prosecutor had wanted to drop. The investigating magistrates insisted that the trial should go ahead.
The "Carlton affair", named after a hotel in Lille in northern France, is the only criminal accusation remaining against Mr Strauss-Kahn. Charges that he sexually assaulted a hotel chamber-maid in New York two years ago came to nothing. He settled a civil action by the maid out of court.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowLisa Dillman of the Los Angeles Times reported on Twitter this afternoon that the Los Angeles Kings have extended qualifying offers eight restricted free agents, which allows the team to retain their rights as they continue to negotiate contract extensions with them. Interestingly, Keaton Ellerby was not extended a qualifying offer and will become an unrestricted free agent on Friday.
Stefan Legein and David Kolomats also did not receive qualifying offers.
LAK does qualify: Martinez, Clifford, Lewis, Nolan, Muzzin, O’Neill, Bodnarchuk and Jones. #KINGS — lisa dillman (@reallisa) July 2, 2013
Kings did not qualify Ellerby, Kolomatis or Legein. — lisa dillman (@reallisa) July 2, 2013
Ellerby, a 24-year-old left-handed shot who often played on the right side to accommodate an injury-affected Los Angeles blue line, recorded three assists and a plus-5 rating in 35 games after joining the Kings in a February 8 trade with the Florida Panthers. The 10th overall pick of the 2007 NHL Draft was acquired for a fifth round draft pick after appearing in 125 games with Florida from 2009-12.
Legein, 24, was acquired along with a sixth round pick from Philadelphia in October, 2011 as the Flyers attempted to clear space under the 50-contract limit. A second round pick by Columbus in 2007, the right wing had 42 points (19-23=42) in 114 games over the last two seasons with Manchester.
Kolomatis, 24, was selected in the fifth round of the 2009 draft by the Kings. The right-shooting defenseman who previously played for the U.S. National Team Development Program appeared in 250 games with Manchester over the last four seasons, totaling 110 points (29-81=110).
By submitting a qualifying offer to Alec Martinez, the Kings have the opportunity to continue to negotiate with the puck-moving defenseman who won a Cup with the team in 2012 but had been the recipient of some pointed Darryl Sutter observations in 2012-13. The left-handed shooter has recorded 33 points (12-21=33) in his 142 games in Los Angeles, while the Kings are 22-5 in playoff games in which he has dressed over the last two years.
In other news, the Edmonton Oilers did not extend a qualifying offer to defenseman Colton Teubert, a 2008 first round pick by Los Angeles who was traded to Edmonton along with a 2011 first round draft pick and a 2012 conditional pick that turned out to be a third round pick in exchange for Dustin Penner.SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT (publ. 6/16/2012, page A2)
A story about the scheduling of a girls volleyball tournament and HempCon 2012 at the San Jose Convention Center incorrectly characterized “Doobons” as coupons that could be redeemed for cash value. Doobons.com is a clearinghouse for information about medicinal marijuana and will have a booth at HempCon.
When Narda Skov signed up her 10- and 14-year-old daughters for one of Northern California’s top youth volleyball leagues, she intended to keep the girls busy with wholesome activities and away from the temptations so readily available to them elsewhere. The last place the Piedmont mom wanted to find her kids — much less deliver them there herself — was the den of iniquity 840 underage girls will enter this weekend: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.
As Skov and other parents getting ready for the girls 17-and-under volleyball tournament just discovered, this weekend they will be bumping into glassy-eyed glaucoma sufferers taking part in the reefer sadness of HempCon 2012, San Jose’s medical marijuana show, which blazes up today in the Convention Center’s South Hall.
“I’m just beside myself that we’re actually paying money to put our kids in front of all this marijuana,” said Skov, who found out about the potential culture clash from billboards promoting HempCon. “I know there are a lot of great things about San Jose, but this weekend, I feel like it’s one big Burning Man.”
She didn’t seem particularly comforted by reassurances from a convention center spokeswoman that the two events will share a head space more than a physical one. South Hall, which resembles a large termite tent, is “a completely separate building from the convention center,” said Meghan Horrigan, director of communications for Team San Jose, which runs the convention center. The bong bonanza is expected to draw 15,000 people.
This weekend stirred up uncomfortable memories for Skov of the most recent Northern California Volleyball Association tournament at the convention center in January. The place was overrun with “furries” — people who dress in animal costumes — at FurCon. “First we had the fuzzy people, now we have HempCon,” Skov said. “Come on, San Jose! What’s happening?”
Bad juxtapositions
That’s what Tom D’Aquino wanted to know, too. His 13-year-old daughter, Lana, plays for the same Golden Bears Volleyball Club in Berkeley. But that’s not what worries D’Aquino.
“They’re literally distributing marijuana inside this convention center,” he said. “Obviously, management isn’t going to let people smoke inside, so they go outside and smoke it up.” And because the convention center doesn’t allow people to bring in outside food, D’Aquino said volleyball families often set up temporary encampments outside the building. There, he fears, the charcoal smoke from their grills may mix with the aromatic offerings of BodyBud Botanicals and Granny Purps.
“It’s just a bunch of degenerates who use medical marijuana as an excuse to do whatever they want to do,” D’Aquino said. “They’re generally people that I don’t think should be commingling with this group of 12- to 17-year-old volleyball girls.”
Attempts to reach a representative for Mega Productions, which runs HempCon, were highly unsuccessful. Someone calling himself “Tony Z” told a caller he could only speak to people whose “credentials” he had vetted. He promised to call back, and then totally didn’t.
It isn’t unusual for odd scheduling juxtapositions to occur at large facilities like the San Jose Convention Center, where events are sometimes booked years in advance. In this case, no one was sure who got there first — the setters, the stoners or the private school presentation of “The Little Mermaid,” showing Saturday and Sunday. Couldn’t they all just get along?
“What do these parents want us to do?” asked an exasperated Donna Donaghy, executive director of the Northern California Volleyball Association. “Do they want us to cancel the tournament? It would be interesting to see what Team San Jose would do if I call them and say, ‘I’m sorry. You can’t book that here.’ “
Fuzzy, buzzy
Even among volleyball parents, not everyone was worried that their little girls would be crashing the gates of HempCon. “If my daughter wanted to buy grass or dope, she could get it in downtown Berkeley; we don’t have to drive all the way down to San Jose,” said Carrie Dovzak, whose 14-year-old daughter plays for the Golden Bears Club. “Our kids are into Justin Bieber, looking good and makeup. They’re not into searching out where they’re going to get their next joint, that’s for sure. If anything, the people at HempCon might turn off our girls so much, it will have the opposite effect.”
Horrigan said there will be added security outside the convention center this weekend to make sure everyone has exactly the experience they came for — and nothing more. The same thing happened in January when the NCVA learned it would share the convention center with FurCon. “Some of the other parents told me they had checked into it and found things that made it out to be basically a porn fetish convention,” said D’Aquino, who conceded his knowledge of furries is based on an episode of television’s “CSI.”
“As soon as we heard about that, we were big-time alarmed,” Donaghy said.
Parents of volleyball players were warned not to stay in hotels where furries had booked rooms. Skov was one of the few parents who ignored that warning.
“Oh my God,” she said, recalling several tense elevator rides during the tournament. “Who even ever heard of these people? I’m like, ‘OK, if you’re so unhappy you’ve got to be an animal, that’s a little strange to me.’ Not my world.”
The Skovs will high-tail it home every night this weekend so they don’t have to spend any more time than necessary in fuzzy, buzzy San Jose. “No way I’m staying,” Skov said. “I’ll be happy to get the hell out of there.”
Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004.On Wednesday, Twitter users started posting pictures of a mislabeled map that was broadcast by CNN. The network, attempting to portray the countries that had cases of Ebola, had mistaken Niger for Nigeria:
Dear @CNN, the area you marked "Nigeria" is actually "Niger"; Nigeria is the area below it. Get a map-reader, please! pic.twitter.com/e03Fv1pcC2 — Gimba Kakanda (@gimbakakanda) August 6, 2014
The confusion provoked angry reactions from many Twitter users. It would not be the first time CNN has mapped cities or countries far away from their actual position, however:
Which is scarier? Giant hornets killing people or CNN not knowing where Hong Kong is? #journalism #ormaybenot pic.twitter.com/gxasizKazt — Colin Miner (@cominer) October 7, 2013
US TV knowledge of Britain. pic.twitter.com/DOv2XuqxTj — David Eckhoff (@theroyalfactor) February 9, 2014
As you can see, CNN has mapping issues not only in Africa, but also in Europe and Asia. And it's far from the only news outlet to make such an error. Earlier this year, NBC News anchor Brian Williams began his broadcast by saying: “Tonight it now feels as if the world is aware and responding to the kidnapping of 276 girls in Kenya three weeks ago today." In reality, the kidnappings had taken place in Nigeria.
The pressures of live television make mistakes like these understandable. However, many Twitter users seem to perceive the recent Nigeria-Niger confusion as just another example of ignorance by Western media outlets. Other examples are easy to come by. In 2010, a BBC series on Nigeria's most populous city, Lagos, featuring the lives of slum dwellers, drew criticism for its potrayal of the city, which many felt was not accurate. One year later, international media came under attack on Twitter during the Somalia famine for showing up only "when there were dying children to film," according to Reuters.
In an article for the Guardian published in 2013, Nigerian journalist Remi Adekoya offered an explanation for why some have such strong feelings about how journalists cover the continent: "Africans, especially those living abroad, fret about the perception of their continent and its inhabitants because their future often depends on the opinions of those in whose country they reside," Adekoya wrote. "Each major news item presenting Africa in a negative light is viewed by these folk as something that will make their working lives that bit harder."
While CNN's on-air mislabeling sparked a major backlash on Twitter, many Americans might not have noticed the flawed map. On Friday, in honor of the U.S.-African Leaders Summit taking place in D.C. this week, The Washington Post published a quiz that asked readers to find countries from the African continent on a map.
According to data from more than 40,000 respondents, the countries were identified correctly less than half of the time. Although Niger and Nigeria did not rank among the least-recognized countries (those would be Gambia and Guinea-Bissau), they were correctly identified only by 43 percent and 48 percent, respectively.Before last night’s game against the Toronto Raptors, Marcus Smart wasn’t interested in mincing words.
Along with throwing his vote toward Brad Stevens as the NBA’s coach of the year, the Celtics point guard took some time to laud himself.
“I’d like to think I’m probably the most competitive rookie in my class,” Smart said.
Then, he went out and backed it up.
The rookie logged nine points, five rebounds and three assists in the Celtics’ thrilling 95-93 victory at the Garden, but his true impact could not be found in the numbers.
Smart, as usual, was ruthless on the defensive end of the floor. Matched up primarily with the Raptors’ Lou Williams, Smart accepted the challenge and paid attention closely to the scouting report on his dynamic counterpart, and the results were apparent.
Williams finished with a team-high 16 points, but he had to work hard to score. as he was 3-of-13 from the floor. It was Smart’s aggressive on-ball defense, which has been on display all season, that did the trick.
Specifically in the third quarter, Smart was disrupting Toronto’s ballhandlers on a regular basis, and it was a major reason why the C’s were able to battle back from a 12-point deficit and gain a three-point lead heading into the fourth.
“I thought he did an unbelievable job defensively, and one of the people in our front office just said that his impact per stat was pretty remarkable tonight, and I think that’s all year,” Stevens said. “That’s 81 games. He’s had a huge impact on making winning plays, and he did again tonight. He kept the ball alive on rebounds, he got steals, he was so active. He was hard to go through. Those guys (Kyle Lowry and Williams) are hard to guard, and to have them go 6-for-20 and 3-for-13 takes a lot of work.”
On the offensive end, Smart’s scoring came at critical junctures.
Smart perfectly executed an after-timeout play to end the first half, streaking from midcourt on a give-and-go and finishing with a monstrous left-handed slam to give the Celtics momentum into halftime. In the third quarter, he anticipated an ill-fated Evan Turner shot, jumping from the far baseline for a put-back, two-handed dunk. Both plays sent the Garden crowd into a frenzy, and the latter brought the C’s back to within one after they fell behind by double digits in the frame.
He wasn’t done, either, as his 3-pointer with 3:32 to go tied the game at 87. Smart helped mount the winning comeback, a testament to a clutch gene that he has developed all season long, just like his total game.
“It’s weird, even the regular season went by faster than I expected it to go,” Smart said. “I don’t really look at myself as a rookie anymore. Those guys might, but I don’t. That comes with games played and the experience of those games.”
And as the playoffs approach with a tough first-round matchup with LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and the Cleveland Cavaliers, that might be just what Stevens and the rest of the Celtics would like to hear from their rookie guard who has seemed to age quickly.The multi-functional swiss army ring is a unique titanium utility ring that lets you carry a set of tools right on your finger, which are so tiny, and would most likely be very hard to get an edge on, that you will probably never use, but hey, at least it's cool to show off to friends and strangers... The swiss army ring has 5 flip up hidden tools within the ring, including a bottle opener, a straight blade |
thousands of words to the Tallahassee Police Department and its treatment of Florida State football players — alleging, among other things, that the TPD was protecting Winston in 2012 by half-heartedly investigating a sexual-assault accusation.
Is that true? Did the police force make sure Winston, who was the fourth-string QB at the time, wasn't investigated thoroughly for a crime as serious as rape because there was a chance he would be the starting quarterback in 2013? That's the perception for many after reading those stories: A corrupt police force that protects football players at all costs. Especially transcendent talents like Winston.
Naturally, most Florida State fans disagree. They see stories that conveniently leave out names like Greg Dent, Greg Reid, Preston Parker, Nigel Carr, Arrington Jenkins, Ernie Sims, Travis Johnson, Peter Warrick, Adrian McPherson and plenty of others who have been arrested in the last 15 years.
They think the notion of the TPD protecting FSU football players is laughable.
They see a story like the one centering on Winston that ran back in April and wonder how The New York Times could insinuate the accuser had been drugged — thus the "memory lapses" State Attorney Willie Meggs said were the main reason he couldn't charge Winston with a crime — and yet not mention the results of the toxicology report.
They think Winston was wrongfully accused. That's their perception.
While many people around the country think the Seminoles' star QB got away with sexual assault due to either a blatant cover-up or an incompetent investigation. That's their perception.
What is the reality?
None of us know for sure, of course. Not you. Not me. Not Jimbo Fisher and not TheNew York Times.
Just because the accuser had memory lapses doesn't mean her allegation that night was untrue. Obviously. It just means that Meggs knew he couldn't win the case in court.
And on the flip side, just because the TPD was said to have "botched" the investigation doesn't mean a by-the-book, perfectly executed one would have led to charges being filed. That's a foolish leap to make as well.
Personally, I think the nonstop media onslaught has been unfair in many respects. Most notably the apparent perception that it's all but impossible for a Florida State football player to be arrested in this garnet-and-gold, football-loving town. And that sexual assault accusations and motorbike thefts are willfully ignored by a systemically corrupt police department.
The reality is that Dent, who was a starting receiver with an NFL future, and Jenkins were both arrested for those respective allegations the last two years. Subsequently, they were both kicked off the team.
My perception is that these cases aren't mentioned in most stories because they don't fit the narrative.
Is that the reality? I have no idea. We've already established my perception can be off at times.
But what's astonishing to me is how a case like Winston's, which is so much more important than football and fandom, can still seemingly be split along allegiance lines.
I've talked, tweeted and emailed with a number of non-FSU fans in the last year about the Seminoles' quarterback. Most of them think the Tallahassee police covered up a sexual assault in an effort to help the local football team win games. Even after it's brought up that the redshirting Winston was in no way guaranteed of beating out Clint Trickett and Jacob Coker for the starting spot in 2013.
They also think it's ridiculous how Fisher keeps coddling his best player with the media.
I've talked, tweeted and emailed with a number of FSU fans in the last year as well. Naturally, most of them see Winston as a 20-year-old who has done some immature things off the field, but who is largely being persecuted for a crime he was never even charged with. They believe the national media is on a mission, whether with autographs or internet memes, to bring down the star QB and the FSU program.
They are thrilled when Fisher stridently defends his best player to the media.
Perception is a funny thing.
With the 24-hour news cycle and the prevalence of social media in our lives, the delineation between it and reality has never been so blurred.
Paul Newman is Angela Lansbury. Offensive pass interference is a blown coverage. An investigation is a cover-up. Media coverage is a witch hunt.
When the truth is: We all see what we want to see.Welcome to the 9th CX’s Weiss Schwarz Deck Techs! For this article, we’re going to take a look at a high-placing deck from the 2014 WS New Year Festival Trios event: Railgun! [とある科学の超電磁砲（ レールガン）]
This deck tech is brought to you by team 目指せ！新春トリオ２連覇. The deck list can be viewed here. Card names will be matched to the translations provided by Heart of the Cards.
さて、始めるぞ！
Railgun
Cards – 50
Level 0 – 14
4 “ITEM” Takitsubo (RG/W26-014)
1 Accelerator, Change in Routine (ID/W13-010)
4 Kuroko, Admiration for Onee-Sama (RG/W13-059)
2 “Railgun” Mikoto (RG/W10-051)
3 “Passion Orange” Mikoto (RG/W26-059)
Level 1 – 15
2 “Passion Pink” Uiharu (RG/W26-038)
2 Saten, Seeking help (RG/W26-051)
4 Uiharu, Kuroko’s Partner (RG/W10-035)
3 Haruue, Munching (RG/W26-050)
3 Mikoto, A Certain Day Off (RG/W26-062)
1 Uiharu & Saten, Good Classmates (RG/W13-044)
Level 2 – 6
2 “Multiskill” Kiyama (RG/W10-031)
2 Kuroko, Serious about Work (RG/W26-067)
2 Big Spider (RG/W13-047)
Level 3 – 7
2 Uiharu in Swimsuits (RG/W10-027)
3 “Academy City” Kuroko (RG/W26-058)
2 Mikoto & Kuroko, Under One Roof (RG/W13-052)
CX – 8
4 Ability and Power (RG/W10-073)
4 Eyewitness (RG/W26-078)
At level 0, we have 14 (!) characters.
With “ITEM” Takitsubo, you can pay 1 stock, put the top card of your deck into clock and rest it to tutor (search your deck) for up to 1 [ESP] character.
Accelerator, Change in Routine, despite its name, does not have an Accelerate ability, but gives another character you control +1500 until end of turn when you attack with it.
Kuroko, Admiration for Onee-Sama is a ‘runner‘.
“Railgun” Mikoto has a Brainstorm ability: pay 1 stock, and for each CX revealed, choose up to one 0 or lower cost character in your opponent’s center stage and put it into the waiting room.
“Passion Orange” Mikoto is a level reverser. Whenever a character you control reveals a CX during trigger check, you choose 1 of your characters and it gains +1000 power until end of turn.
At level 1, we have 15 characters.
When you play “Passion Pink” Uiharu, it gets +1500 power until end of turn. It also has a Brainstorm ability: pay 1 stock, and tutor for up to X [ESP] characters where X is the number of CXs revealed this way.
Saten, Seeking Help is a 1/0 5500 power vanilla character.
Uiharu, Kuroko’s Partner is a 1/0 5500 power vanilla character.
Haruue, Munching gives all your other characters +500 power, and all your other characters with “Uiharu” and/or “Saten” and/or “Hatsuharu” in the name an additional +500 power.
Mikoto, A Certain Day Off has a 0 stock +1000 power Backup ability. When you use its Backup ability, if you control 2 or more [ESP] characters, you choose 1 of your characters in battle, and it gains +X power until end of turn, where X is 500 times your level.
Uiharu & Saten, Good Classmates is a 1/1 7000 power vanilla character.
Level 2 gives us 4 characters and 2 events.
“Multiskill” Kiyama is a rare “global level support”; it gives all your other [ESP] characters +X power, where X is 500 times the level of that character. It has a CX combo with “A Teacher’s Obsession”: When you play “A Teacher’s Obsession”, you may choose an [ESP] character in your waiting room and put it into stock.
Kuroko, Serious About Work has a Change ability. At the start of your climax phase, you may pay 2 stock, discard a card and send this to memory to choose an “‘Academy City’ Kuroko” in your waiting room and put it in the slot this card was in.
Big Spider gives one of your [Judgment] characters +4000 power until end of turn and sends itself to memory.
At level 3, we have 7 characters.
Uiharu in Swimsuits has a Recollection ability that gives it +1000 power if you have 3 or more cards in memory, and a Heal ability.
When you play “Academy City” Kuroko from your hand or place it onto the stage with a Change ability, you draw up to 2 cards and discard a card. It has a CX combo with “Eyewitness”: when this character attacks, you Salvage up to 2 [ESP] characters and discard a card.
Mikoto & Kuroko, Under One Roof has a Heal ability. When it attacks, you may pay 1 stock and discard a card. If you do, it gains +2000 power and “When this character reverses a character in battle, you may deal 1 damage to your opponent” until end of turn.
The CX spread is 8 1k1 effects, with 8 Door triggers.
How do we play this deck?
Level 0 is very aggressive in terms of how many characters it has; only 14! However, Kuroko, Admiration for お姉さま is a runner, which means that it will ideally be able to sneak around in the first couple of turns and build stock. The level 0 characters are not meant to overpower other characters. While the deck does have “Passion Orange” Mikoto to deal with a full board of level 0 characters, it doesn’t have anything to reliably push something over 4000 power.
“ITEM” Takitsubo is a particularly powerful card, as it lets you access any character at a given time for only 1 stock. The additional cost of having to put a card into your clock can be leveraged in the user’s favor to avoid being stranded on a level. Early on, it can ensure your level 1 will be as strong as possible, and late in the game it can search for bigger characters.
Given the deck’s very inexpensive level 1, the level 0 is meant to run on few characters. Repeatable Brainstorm effects are also found in both level 0 and 1. It’s during level 1 that “Railgun” Mikoto shines most as the effect allows you to remove a character with cost 0 or less for each CX revealed; removing a level 1 character is generally much more valuable than removing a level 0 character. If an opponent makes the mistake of rushing this deck to level 1 without many cards in hand, the vanilla Saten and Uiharu are there to run over any leftover level 0 characters. Haruue, Munching gives the deck’s seemingly ho-hum vanilla characters a whole +1000 power with no stock commitment. The deck also as a single 7000 power vanilla Uiharu & Saten to go over most other characters of comparable level, and even some if not most level 2 characters if it has sufficient backup.
The Backup effect in the deck scales into the late game very well. It starts as a +1500 power Backup at level 1, and then goes to a +2500 power Backup at level 3 for free.
Level 2 is where the deck sets itself up for level 3. (Authors Note: It might sound silly, but this is relevant because not every deck is built the same way. Some decks have a higher emphasis on placing a large board presence at level 2 as opposed to level 3. It so happens though, that this is another list where level 2 is mostly ignored in terms of placing slightly larger characters onto the stage.)
Kuroko, Serious About Work is in the deck to Change into an early “Academy City” Kuroko if the deck so happens to have the resources. If the deck does manage it, it can net up to two cards from the deck and waiting room, but having it early is a luxury. Big Spider’s immense +4000 power Backup is enough to keep most characters around through level 2.
Level 3 is split between Heal and Salvage effects. Mikoto & Kuroko, Under One Roof has a Heal and a Burn ability, but beyond that there is not very much variation in what the late game has to offer. By level 3, the deck should aim to Heal, Salvage, and possibly Burn the opponent out.
The deck has 8 Door triggers to maximize its hand size, especially given its lack of special types of encore.
What does this deck not do well? How do we beat it? Is there something missing from it?
Railgun is a fairly large series, so there are a lot of viable deck combinations in the card pool. Much of the overlap in builds is seen in the CX spreads, which tend to be 8 Door triggers.
Because of this, decks that specifically punish Salvage effects are incredibly effective against this deck. Heal tax is marginally effective, because the deck does not have any way of recurring its Heal effects outside of replaying the characters. Anti-burn or Prevention effects are also narrowly effective against the deck, as the deck does not have any other damage-dealing effects outside of its level 3.
Level reversers can be effective at early levels, but cost reversers can also be effective. Ironically, one of the deck’s cards is one of the better tools against it: “Railgun” Mikoto. Because the deck also has no specific types of encore effects such as hand encore or clock encore, effects that send reversed characters to somewhere other than the waiting room (such as those found in Illya and SAO, including vol. 2) can help to nullify the deck’s extremely Salvage-focused strategy.
Questions? Comments? Have an idea for another article? Send us a message on Facebook, or email us at theninthcx AT gmail DOT com! Be sure to find us there and sign up for the monthly giveaway! Thanks for reading!
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FacebookOn the night of January 22nd, the shores of Hong Kong glowed blue with wave upon wave of beautiful bioluminescent water in a phenomenon commonly known as Sea Sparkle. However, this magical display, caused by blooms of a microscopic dinoflagellate called Noctiluca scintillans, was brought on by something less-than-inspiring: environmental pollution.
Noctiluca glow when they’re disturbed, which is why the blooms are primarily visible on the shores, where they’re tossed by waves. This recent bloom was caused by agricultural runoff – fertilizers and other chemicals washed from farmland into the sea by rain. The Noctiluca that feed on these chemicals are not toxic in and of themselves, but other similar organisms are, and the ammonia they excrete as waste can help make the toxins released by other blooming microorganisms even worse.
For the time being, however, photographers willing to spend the night on some long-exposure photography are being treated to a truly special opportunity!
(h/t: theatlantic, huffpost)
Image credits: Kim Cheung/AP
Image credits: Kim Cheung/AP
Image credits: Kim Cheung/AP
Image credits: Kim Cheung/APSanctions against Russia should be lifted as soon as possible, France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs said on Wednesday following a meeting with his Russian counterpart, while insisting that implementation of the Minsk agreements still remain key to the process.
“Sanctions is not a goal in and of itself,” Jean-Marc Ayrault said in Paris, adding that his country looks forward to scrapping the restrictive measures against Moscow.
Read more
The process of lifting the Western sanctions on Russia is still related to Minsk agreements that aim to put an end to the crisis in southeastern Ukraine, Ayrault added, saying that “Russia should play a positive role” in their implementation.
Moscow and Paris have been closely working together “in the Normandy format,” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after the meeting. The countries’ foreign ministries have been “closely cooperating” and their aides have been involved too, Russia’s top diplomat said. The Normandy format includes Russia, France, Ukraine, and Germany.
“The most important condition for the progress, as stated in the Minsk deal and in UN Security Council resolution, is establishment of direct dialogue between Kiev and Donbass,” Lavrov stressed.
READ MORE: Time to send ‘strong signal’ to Russia and gradually lift sanctions – Austrian FM
Russia has repeatedly said that it’s doing everything in its power to facilitate the implementation of the Ukrainian peace deal, while Kiev has been hindering the process. The West should work with its “allies” in Kiev, President Putin has said, adding that direct dialogue between the parties to the conflict should be promoted.
Russia’s European partners should not hold Moscow solely responsible for fulfilling the Minsk agreements, Putin said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) earlier this month, adding that there are “issues that are beyond our abilities.”
A number of the 28 countries in the European Union have expressed strong disapproval of the bloc’s restrictive measures on Russia. Italy has repeatedly called for a debate on the issue, rather than the automatic prolongation of sanctions.
READ MORE: Anti-Russian sanctions should be lifted ASAP – leader of Saxony, Germany
In France, both the Senate and the lower house of Parliament, the French Assembly, have previously voted in favor of a resolution designed to lift the sanctions imposed by the EU in 2014 because of the crisis in eastern Ukraine and the reunification of Crimea with Russia.If you could peer deeply into how the 535 members of Congress handle their money, what would you find?
You would see a diversity of investment strategies and results, from those who put their money into riskier, high-growth funds to those who own safe municipal bonds. The legislators range from the super-rich to the deep-in-debt, from inherited wealth to married wealth to no wealth at all. They are entrepreneurs and farmers, oilmen and ranchers, lawyers and real estate developers.
You would find that, contrary to many popular perceptions, lawmakers don’t get rich by merely being in Congress. Rich people who go to Congress, though, keep getting richer while they’re there.
The wealthiest one-third of lawmakers were largely immune from the Great Recession, taking the fewest financial hits and watching their investments quickly recover and rise to new heights. But more than 20 percent of the members of the current Congress — 121 lawmakers — appeared to be worse off in 2010 than they had been six years earlier, and 24 saw their reported wealth slide into negative territory.
Those findings emerge from an ongoing examination of congressional finances by The Washington Post, which analyzed thousands of financial disclosure forms and public records for all members of Congress.
Most members weathered the financial crisis better than the average American, who saw median household net worth drop 39 percent from 2007 to 2010. The median estimated wealth of members of the current Congress rose 5 percent during the same period, according to their reported assets and liabilities. The wealthiest one-third of Congress gained 14 percent.
Because lawmakers are allowed to report their holdings and debts in broad ranges, it is impossible for the public to determine their precise net worth. They also are not required to reveal the value of their homes, the salaries of their spouses or money kept in non-
interest-bearing bank accounts and their congressional retirement plan.
For its analysis, The Post used the midpoint of the range of each reported holding and tracked the figures over time to determine whether the relative wealth of lawmakers had increased or declined between 2004 and 2010. Previous studies of congressional wealth have looked at Congress as a whole, rather than tracking the financial trend for each individual lawmaker. The Post created an in-depth financial portrait of each member of Congress.
Among the findings:
●The estimated wealth of Republicans was 44 percent higher than Democrats in 2004, but that disparity has virtually disappeared.
●The number of millionaires in Congress dropped after the Great Recession; the 253 who have served during the current session are the smallest group since 2004. The numbers are likely to be underestimated because lawmakers are not required to list their homes among their assets.
●Between 2004 and 2010, 72 lawmakers appeared to have doubled their estimated wealth.
1 of 14 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Congress’s financial winners and losers View Photos Most lawmakers — but not all — fared better than the average American during the recession. Caption Most lawmakers — but not all — fared better than the average American in recent years.
View The Post’s complete findings on every member of Congress. While the median American household has seen its wealth plummet by 39 percent since 2007, these lawmakers saw large gains in their estimated wealth between 2004 and 2010, a Washington Post examination of congressional wealth found. Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
●At least 150 lawmakers reported receiving more income from outside jobs and investments than from their congressional salaries of $174,000 for rank-and-file members.
●Representatives in 2010 had a median estimated wealth of $746,000; senators had $2.6 million.
●Since 2004, lawmakers reported more than 3,500 outside jobs paying their spouses more than $1,000 a year. The lawmakers are not required to report how much the spouses are paid or what they did for the money.
●Lawmakers’ wealth is held in a variety of ways: 127 primarily in real estate, 117 in institutional funds, 75 in their spouses’ names, 51 in essentially cash, 36 in specific stocks and bonds, 32 in high-turnover trading, 30 in business ownership and 20 in agriculture. More than 40 had reported assets of $25,000 or less.
The Post also found that some congressional financial interests intersected with public actions taken by legislators: 73 lawmakers sponsored or co-sponsored legislation that could have benefitted businesses or industries in which either they or their families were involved or invested. The Post will report on several of those cases Monday.
Because of the imprecise financial disclosure system, estimations of wealth can be off by millions. For example, reports for Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) between 2004 and 2010 show that her wealth most likely increased by as little as $1 million or as much as $20 million, as framed by the changes to the lowest and highest possible totals of her reported assets. The Post analysis, which takes the midpoint of the ranges, estimated the increase at $11 million.
That figure is inaccurate, said her spokesman, Matt Dennis.
“The Loweys’ net worth did not increase by anywhere near $11m from 2004-2010 — the metric you’re using presents a hugely distorted picture,” Dennis said in an e-mail.
He declined to provide more accurate values for the assets of Lowey, a 12-term congresswoman, who is married to a partner in a White Plains, N.Y., law firm.
“They’re entitled to a certain level of privacy with their finances,” Dennis said in an interview. “That’s why the system is the way it is. They want a certain standard of disclosure without sacrificing their personal privacy.”
Rebound after recession
The analysis shows that lawmakers who were well-off before the financial crisis of 2008 saw portions of their portfolios level off during the darkest days. But most of these lawmakers managed to maintain their financial footing and emerge far wealthier than they had been earlier in the decade.
Some of the richest members of Congress watched their portfolios soar between 2004 and 2010. Of the 72 lawmakers whose estimated wealth doubled during that time, it appears that 11 increased their portfolios by at least $10 million, based on the midpoint of their reported ranges.
Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Tex.) posted an estimated $22 million gain. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saw an estimated $60 million increase in her reported wealth as the value of her husband’s commercial real estate holdings in San Francisco climbed dramatically during the first decade of the century.
“This is really driven by real estate that he has held, some of it inherited, for a number of years,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said. “San Francisco is one of the places where the market has skyrocketed in terms of price per square foot and has been fairly insulated in terms of the 2008 financial crisis.”
Another Californian has consistently ranked in the top five of the richest House members: Rep. Darrell Issa (R). He has also been one of the most successful investors on Capitol Hill, with estimated wealth of $448 million in 2010, according to The Post’s analysis.
Issa came to Congress in 2000 with a fortune he made from the sale of an electronics company that specialized in car alarms. One of his alarm systems carried a recording of his voice warning, “Please step away from the car,” if anyone got too close.
Now most of Issa’s investments are in mutual funds, bonds and securities. Issa’s chief of staff said the securities have provided an annual rate of return of between 6 and 7 percent. He also has significant investments in commercial real estate.
“He isn’t speculating on individual stocks. He isn’t a property speculator,” said Dale Neugebauer, the congressman’s chief of staff. “The properties are usually mature real estate with established renters and a predictable rate of return.”
Issa appeared to lose about $90 million in 2008, but his portfolio regained an estimated $197 million within two years of the financial meltdown. The rises were fueled by his commercial real estate ventures in San Diego and successful investments in mutual funds, bonds and other securities.
For Issa, staying patient and holding assets during the downturn paid off.
“Mr. Issa was fortunate enough to be very successful before he was elected to Congress,” Neugebauer said.
Among his real estate ventures, Greene Properties Inc. has gained the most. Issa valued the property holding company at $25 million to $50 million in 2004, a figure that would eventually exceed $50 million.
Issa presents a particular challenge of analysis. In the system Congress set up for itself, the disclosure form’s highest category of value is “more than $50 million,” with no upper limit. As with the other richest legislators who report assets in that category, there is no way for the public to tell how much Issa is worth.
The same is true of Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.). The Post analysis using the midpoints of his reported ranges shows that his estimated wealth rose from $6 million in 2004 to $34 million in 2010, boosted by stock in Trinity Petroleum and holdings in Providence Trust.
He reported the value of each of those assets as between $5 million to $25 million in 2010, up from $1 million to $5 million the year before. But such ranges obscure the real value of his assets, which could have risen just enough to switch categories or by many millions of dollars.
A spokesman for Franks did not respond to requests for comment.
Losing money
Not all members of Congress were immune from the financial meltdown. Some who were enjoying modest gains and a semblance of wealth in the early years of the decade experienced the brunt of the crisis. Twenty lawmakers lost at least 50 percent of their portfolios between 2004 and 2010. Two dozen had their assets wiped out, the analysis found.
Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) rose to political heights in the middle of the decade — he became House majority leader in 2007 — but his finances failed to follow suit. His reported wealth declined by an estimated 90 percent between 2004 and 2010.
Hoyer, currently Democratic whip, had holdings estimated at $600,000 in 2004, not including a home in St. Mary’s County on the banks of the Patuxent River. As the markets tumbled, Hoyer’s holdings went along for the ride. Between 2007 and 2008, he lost about $249,000 in his mutual funds, joining legions of investors who watched their savings wither away as the housing and financial markets teetered.
Hoyer, the longest serving representative in Maryland history, regained some of his financial footing in 2009, with his estimated wealth bouncing back by nearly $200,000. But the next year, it dropped by $441,000 — 89 percent — apparently because of market fluctuations.
A spokeswoman for Hoyer said that his portfolio took a hit during the recession.
“Like a number of people, Mr. Hoyer’s assets experienced the effects of the financial crisis and saw a steep decline,” spokeswoman Katie Grant said.
Hoyer had plenty of company in Congress.
The estimated wealth of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) dropped from $2 million in 2004 to $1 million in 2010. Nearly half of those losses were tied to holdings in OneUnited Bank, where Waters’s husband served on the board.
Waters was the subject of a two-year House Ethics Committee investigation relating to bailout money OneUnited received under the Troubled Assets Relief Program. The bank received $12 million from TARP but is still struggling. In 2010, her husband’s stock and deposits at the bank had dropped from a range of $500,000 to $1 million to between $101,000 and $265,000.
The committee cleared her of any wrongdoing last month.
Waters declined to discuss her family’s finances.
The estimated holdings of Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) dropped from $3 million in 2004 to $848,000 in 2010. Much of the loss was due to the declining value of the music catalogues she inherited from her late husband, onetime congressman and singer-songwriter Sonny Bono. In the 1960s, Bono wrote a string of hit records that included “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On,” recording them with his pop-star partner and then-wife, Cher.
In 2004, the catalogues were worth $765,000 to $1.8 million and generated at least $385,000 in royalties, records show. By 2010, their value had fallen to between $250,000 and $500,000, and royalties fell to at least $106,000.
From bad to worse
The economic meltdown was particularly tough on members of Congress who were already struggling with their personal finances.
Rep. Rubén Hinojosa (D-Tex.) is the only member of Congress known to have filed for personal bankruptcy after the financial crisis. In 2007, his family’s longtime food processing plant in Mercedes fell on hard times. As the economy shrank, the plant was unable to secure credit. “It took a turn for the worse during the financial crisis,” he said in an interview.
Hinojosa had not been active in the business operations for many years, but he had guaranteed a company loan. In 2010, his family closed the business and he was held liable for millions of dollars in losses. His estimated wealth fell dramatically between 2004 and 2010, the year he filed for bankruptcy, citing debts that range between $1.4 million and $5.9 million, the largest owed to Wells Fargo.
For years, Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.) has been one of the most financially distressed members of Congress. He reported debts of between $2 million and $7 million in 2010. The debt is due to legal fees he incurred in the 1980s when he was a federal judge and accused of accepting bribes. A jury acquitted Hastings, but Congress impeached him.
“I paid some of them along the way,” Hastings said of the legal fees in a recent interview. “I wish I could just hit the lottery so I could pay them all.”
He said the lawyers would give him affidavits forgiving the debt if he requested it, but “what the accountants say to me is that then I would have a tax consequence.”
“Because of the liabilities, I wind up looking as if I am the poorest person” in Congress, he said.
Rep. Sanford D. Bishop Jr. (D-Ga.) had estimated family wealth of $184,000 in 2004. His mutual funds lost money during the recession. The biggest apparent drop in assets he reported came during 2009, from $335,000 to $9,000 in debt. By 2010, he reported holdings that were an estimated $159,000 in debt.
Bishop reported liabilities that included mortgages ranging from $250,000 to $500,000 and a debt in the same range to Greenberg Traurig, a high-powered law firm that had been representing him in an ethics case. Bishop was accused of sending federal funds to a Georgia youth program that employed his stepdaughter and her husband.
While the Office of Congressional Ethics eventually recommended that the allegations not be pursued, Bishop still owed Greenberg Traurig between $100,000 and $250,000, according to his most recent disclosure form.
Bishop declined to comment.
Wedding windfalls
Many members of Congress have impressive financial backgrounds, and some of those trace their wealth back to their spouses.
The net worth of Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) rose by more than 1,000 percent between 2004 and 2010. McCaul is married to Linda McCaul, the daughter of the chief executive and founder of Clear Channel Communications, which generates nearly $6 billion in annual revenue from its network of radio stations and outdoor advertising business.
While many portfolios suffered painful losses during the economic meltdown, McCaul’s finances emerged stronger than ever because of money coming from his wife’s family. His estimated wealth skyrocketed, from $70 million in 2008 to $380 million in 2010, broadly invested in numerous companies.
After Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) married a Washington lobbyist in 2003, his financial picture vastly improved. The year before, while he was separated from his first wife, Blunt had an estimated reported wealth of $164,000. By 2010, that figure had risen to nearly $4 million.
The senator’s wife, Abigail Blunt, was a lobbyist for tobacco giant Altria at the time of their wedding. When Altria sold its Kraft Foods division in 2007, she remained with Kraft as a lobbyist.
Abigail Blunt has brought numerous investments to the marriage, including a retirement account from Altria worth between $250,000 and $500,000, stock in Altria and Kraft Foods worth between $100,000 to $250,000, and a piece of Washington real estate valued at between $1 million and $5 million.
The fortunes of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) can also be traced to his wife’s success in the corporate world. The senator’s estimated wealth jumped by more than 500 percent between 2004 and 2010, from $3 million to $17 million, The Post analysis found.
Tom and Ruth Harkin were married in 1968, but the couple didn’t begin to amass wealth until the early 2000s. Ruth Harkin worked as a prosecutor and as a lawyer for the Department of Agriculture before joining the law firm Akin Gump, where she represented companies involved in international business deals. She left to head the Overseas Private Investment Corp. before joining United Technologies as a senior vice president for international affairs and government relations.
In the early 2000s, Tom and Ruth Harkin opened mutual funds and began investing heavily in the financial markets. In disclosure forms filed with the Senate, Tom Harkin attributed much of his wealth to his wife, including her holdings in United Technologies and ConocoPhillips, where she served as a board member until recently.
Ruth Harkin also holds an unpaid position on the Iowa Board of Regents and the couple own a vacation home in the Bahamas, which is valued at between $500,000 and $1 million.
The biggest jump in the couple’s wealth occurred in 2007, a time when the stock market was reaching historic heights. The couple doubled their estimated wealth, from $8 million in 2006 to $16 million in 2007. The Great Recession shaved off about $3 million in 2008, but the Harkins rebounded in 2009, rising to an estimated $17 million.
A spokeswoman for the senator said Harkin is proud of his wife’s financial success.
“Most of the assets reported by the Harkins have been made possible by Ruth’s private-
sector work,” spokeswoman Kate Frischmann said in a statement. “He views their life partnership as crucial to his own career, but his policy and political views are his own, as are hers.
“His policy views have not been guided by personal financial interests. Nor have his actions as a Senator, or information gained as a Senator, guided business dealings.”
Bobbye Pratt contributed to this article."There is a lot of anger that Washington just isn't working," Ryan said in his victory speech. "In times as uncertain as these, it is easy to resort to division. It's simple to prey on people's fears. That stuff sells, but it doesn't stick. It doesn't last. Most of all, it doesn't work."
He added: "We can't afford another four years like the Obama years, and let it be very, very clear, that is exactly what Hillary Clinton and her party are offering."
Just a week before the primary, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump publicly thanked Nehlen for his support and told The Washington Post he wasn't ready to endorse Ryan -- a move that came as payback for Ryan's slow-walked Trump endorsement in the spring.
Trump reversed |
hyper-aggressive carries such as Slark or Templar Assassin. When MVP broke into The International last year, pundits were quick to describe him as a “Feast or Famine” carry.
“I dont know about feast or famine but I really am more of a killer,” answered QO when asked about what he thought of the moniker. “I really love just killing everyone in front of me, but lately my team tells me to slow down.”
“I think I’m a controlled killer now. I like assassinating higher value targets,” QO added, complete with finger guns mimicking an AK-47.
And it shows. MVP’s recent successes have been mostly on the back of playing around QO’s flexible carry picks. The team deftly alternates resource allocation between their two linchpins in Lee “FoRev” Sangdon and Pyo “MP” No-a. Support players Kim “Febby” Yong-min and Kim “DuBu” Doo-young are often seen running tight rotations for QO to get him to level 6 as quickly as possible. The moment QO becomes armed with an ultimate-level ability, he comes alive, ready to teleport aggressively to assassinate opposing carries in the early game to cut down the transition times for the enemy team.
But that is not to say that the MVP that walked in the major have placed all their bets on QO. FoRev, long-time teammate of QO, has become a rising star on his own, owing to his ability to serve as a secondary carry or as a teamfight initiator should the QO train be put on ice.
“I don’t mind playing a sacrifice role on the offlane or a carry on Furion (Nature’s Prophet),” said FoRev. “I have the most fun when we win.”
“Whatever my team needs, I’ll be that (hero) when they need it. We’ve been playing for a long time so we know each other really well. We’re confident about each other,” he added.
Whether momentum, confidence or killer instinct will be enough to push MVP through Liquid as the first match of the Winner’s bracket at the Manila Major this June 7, one thing is for sure: QO, Forev and the rest of MVP will be coming in hot and the rest of MVP will follow.photo by Joan Marcus
****
I think that HEISENBERG is best enjoyed without any knowledge of the plot, so I will only tell you that this is an emotionally satisfying two-handed that is sophisticated and passionate without ever being cliché. Well, maybe a little more needs to be said. Mary-Louise Parker is back in top form as an impetuous lost soul and Denis Arndt is wonderful as a man who thinks his best days are behind him. You might be glad to hear that there is no discussion of physicist Heisenberg or his principle of uncertainty, except in the broadest terms that all human interaction is uncertain. What is certain is that this production, insightfully written by THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME‘s Simon Stephens, is beautifully acted, and tenderly directed by Mark Brokaw.
What a welcome start to this season to have entertainment that is adult and unique!
Show Info
Show SiteA boozy Brooklyn lawyer tried to skip out on a $6 taxi fare — then was busted after stripping off her panties and tossing them at cops while screaming profanities, police said.
Cops they found a very drunk Stephanie Hendricks, 39 — who has clerked for an Oregon Supreme Court justice and served as a Blackmun Fellow — in front of a Williamsburg deli after she bolted from a yellow cab at around 2:30 a.m. Saturday.
The bawdy barrister, who lives with her churchgoing mom in Flatlands, pulled off her panties, showed cops her lady parts, then lunged at them and yelled, “Suck my p—y,’’ and, “Eat my ass, you f–king pigs!” police said.
“Normally we don’t see people cursing a police officer,” deli owner Mohammad Rahman, 54, told The Post. “But then she opened her clothes in front of the police officer, in front of us. She looked crazy,”
“She... showed everything to the cop... She had no panties.
“The cops were saying, ‘Calm down, lady. Calm down. Be cool,’ ” Rahman said.
The incident was captured on the deli’s surveillance video, which shows Hendricks charging out of the shop, her butt exposed, and lunging at officers.
The lawyer, who runs a small private practice in Downtown Brooklyn, was slapped with a slew of charges, including theft of services, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and exposure.
“My boyfriend broke up with me,” an embarrassed Hendricks explained yesterday to The Post. “I went out. I got drunk. I had a bad night.
“It was obviously an altercation, but I have no recollection from a certain point in the evening.
“Everyone was in a festive mood,” she said. “Things were flowing. Then things got out of control. I was wasted — all caps bold. You couldn’t get bigger, all caps bold, wasted.”
She said she regrets her behavior and tried to apologize to police yesterday.
She worries that her sloppy antics will sink her career.
“I’m a sole practitioner,” Hendricks said, sobbing. “I solicit business from the public.”
Two of her clients were befuddled by the wacky incident.
“Wow, that’s an absolutely bizarre story to hear,” one said, while another added, “I’m completely shocked and appalled to hear this because that doesn’t sound like her in the least.”
The client described Hendricks as a hardworking professional whom she has recommended to many business colleagues.
According to Hendricks’ Web site, she has given legal talks at several New York State Bar Association conferences and served on their committees.
“Everybody has something like this happened to them,” the lawyer reasoned, “Life will go on. I will survive.”
Additional reporting by Julia Marsh and Josh SaulLow in alcohol and full of flavor, Belgian-style table beers are headed to a restaurant near you.
by Joshua M. Bernstein
Last year, an Arizona mom eating at a pizzeria made headlines when she allegedly filled her son’s sippy cup with beer. Outrage was immediate. So was her arrest. While we’re not advocating getting a toddler trashed, it’s interesting how one nation’s indignation is another country’s tradition.
French families often pour their children watered-down wine, educating them about respecting alcohol and its polite place in everyday life. While neighboring Belgium is not so wild for wine, families also teach their offspring a similar lesson with tafelbier—Flemish for “table beer.” Traditionally served with meals, tafelbiers are light-bodied and low in alcohol (usually less than 3% ABV), yet still remain flavorful. While table beers were so prevalent that they used to be served to Belgian schoolchildren in lieu of milk, the lightly boozy tradition has waned in recent years due to the rise of bottled water and, more prevalently, soft drinks.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, American brewers have begun to take a keen interest in crafting low-ABV tafelbiers. They’re affable companions to lunch, dinner or whenever you crave a beer but not a buzz. In Indiana, New Albanian offers Tafelbier, while California’s Heretic makes the slightly stronger Tafelbully with Brettanomyces. The wild yeast also appears in Stillwater Artisanal Ales’ earthy, refreshing Beer Table Table Beer, while Massachusetts’ session beer–focused Notch Brewing dials up Belgian yeast and European hops for its Tafelbier. It’s a style-appropriate 2.8% ABV, a low number that appeals to Notch’s brewer, Chris Lohring.
“For me, it’s the ultimate anytime beer,” says Lohring, who sees tafelbier as an ideal accompaniment to outdoor sports or daylong barbecuing. While his dry, thirst-quenching Tafelbier packs flavor aplenty, the dainty ABV means “you have to drink serious volume to get inebriated.”
Producing a beer suited for any-time imbibing was important for Ron Extract, the co-owner at Texas-based Jester King Craft Brewery. “We drink quite a lot around the brewery, and Le Petit Prince is our quenching beverage of choice,” Extract says of the 2.8%-ABV “farmhouse table beer.” The bottle-conditioned easy-sipper is smooth and effervescent, with a spicy, grassy profile and a touch of tartness. You can gulp Le Petit Prince like Gatorade and not feel worse for the wear. “It’s a beverage for people who enjoy the flavor of beer,” says Extract, who sees Le Petit Prince as an ideal lunchtime beer, something one person can take down by the bottle—a 750ml bottle. “It contains less alcohol than a 12-ounce bottle of most West Coast IPAs,” Extract says. “Your body will absorb the majority of alcohol before you finish the meal.”
To test his hypothesis, I took two friends and three bottles of Le Petit Prince to my favorite BYOB restaurant in Brooklyn, The Islands. The Caribbean restaurant specializes in spicy jerk chicken, curry goat and slow service—a perfect recipe for savoring table beer. After climbing the precarious stairs to our second-floor table, I filled my friends’ glasses with hazy Prince and gave simple instructions: “Drink as much as you want.” They did as bade. Consumed without food, the spritzy table beer was enjoyable, if slightly tame for taste buds accustomed to bitter IPAs and roasty stouts.
But when our platters of jerk chicken, curry goat and coconut shrimp arrived some 30 minutes later, the table beer demonstrated its merit. The Prince handily tamed the fiery fare without competing for our taste buds’ attention. The water pitcher sat untouched as the second bottle disappeared, then a third. Ron Extract was right: One wine-size bottle of table beer was the perfect amount for a single person.
We drained the last drops from our glasses, then stood up and descended the stairs, eagerly anticipating the next time we could pull up a dinner chair with table beer.Hey wait I just checked Baka-Tsuki, and someone registered me all the way up to 305. It’s not like I wasn’t planning on doing them, but please don’t register me.
Chapter 304: A Price Too Great
I step in front of the bursting Houou. To protect Raphtalia. To protect the Heroes, and the slaves, and the Allied Armies. I stand against the flames scorching the ground before me.
I have no time to worry about the damage from Blutopfer.
I can only count on the Wrath Shield’s defense power.
Perhaps the Spirit Turtle Shell would work as well, but this one has higher defense at the moment.
“UWWWOOOOOOOOHHH!”
I let out my voice, as I go forward, step by step, to push away the flames coming at us.
Besides the area I defend, everything is charred black.
Gu… It’s gotten past my Shield’s defenses, and I feel the excruciatingly hot flames eating at my flesh.
The sense of feeling in my arms disappears, along with the pain.
My instincts scream that my body is in danger.
Should I switch to the Spirit Turtle Shell?
It has high fire resistance. I imagine it changing in my mind.
And, from the Shield… I feel something screaming out.
If I change to that shield, I still won’t be able to stand this.
「Change Shield」!
I change one of my Float Shields to the Spirit Turtle Shell.
… It was burned to a crisp in no time! I deploy the Shield again in front of me to buy some time.
Even with the Wrath Shield, I’m taking this much damage.
If this attack gets past me, those behind me will be reduced to nothing but cinders.
I feel the world around me slowing down.
I guess this is the sensation you get when your life is in peril. I think I read about it in a book somewhere, once. When humans sense their lives are in great danger, their thought process hastens, and time seems to pass slower.
The merciless flames from Houou keep attacking me. In order to turn everything into ash.
Barely… I’m barely containing it, but I get the feeling that only 5 seconds have passed in real time.
How long will I have to do this?
I deployed Meteor Shield long ago, and it was instantly destroyed.
There’s no point in using a reflecting Shield, and my Float Shields are already out.
But by deploying my floats one after the other, I’m just barely getting through this.
What do I do?
「Dreifach Resist Fire!」
Something from behind me… is it Ren? A magic that increases my fire resistance flies at me.
I guess it isn’t Revelation level because there wasn’t enough time.
A wise decision.
I feel that the damage I’m taking has reduced ever-so-slightly.
But that’s merely delaying the inevitable.
!?
Houou’s fire’s output increased.
As if to tell me there was more to come, the fire power suddenly jumps up. The flames burn through me.
The heat seeps through the cracks forming on my Shield. My shoulder is now a nicely baked entrée.
“Naofumi-sama!” (Raphtalia)
“Naofumi!” (Ren)
“Gu…”
Raphtalia and the others call out to me.
A few of them cast recovery and support magic on me. I’m impressed they were able to muster that up in this short amount of time.
But it’s still not enough to handle Houou’s inferno.
Gugu…
I frantically put all of my strength to keeping my Shield arm steady.
The force hitting me seems like it’ll blow me away at any moment. My limbs are turning into charcoal. The HP bar on my status is unsteadily teetering into the critical zone, and I guess I’ll be burned away to nothing at this rate.
I’m impressed that the past Seven Star Hero was able to take on this monster.
Looking back, isn’t this explosion more powerful than the one on the mural?
Ku…
In ten seconds or so, I’ll be blown away, won’t I?
No, there’s a single way.
If I use that, I’ll save everyone’s life.
But if I do, I’ll definitely die…
But…
“I just have to do it!”
It happened at the same time as my scream.
Next to me, a single little girl stood.
“It’s fine. I’ll protect… I’ll fulfill Naofumi-sama’s wish.” (Atlas)
“What!?”
Me and… that girl’s brother cry out.
The girl firmly nods… she holds out her hands as she jumps forwards.
I can’t let her challenge the impossible. I immediately reach out my hand to grab her.
But my outstretched hand never reached Atlas.
Having studied defense under me, that girl… uses one of the attacks we made together. 『Collect』. She directs all of the flames towards her, and collects them. She creates a Wall to redirect them, and sends them in a direction devoid of human life.
“Atlas!”
In response to my voice, the girl’s mouth forms a kind smile.
She’s letting off an immeasurable amount of sweat… the meat on her arms has been burnt to a crisp, yet still, she uses her chi to redirect the flames… And in response to her great will, the flames obeyed.
What came next was an explosive sound strong enough to destroy my ears, and a flash too loud for me to keep my eyes open.
When I open them, the smoke prevents me from seeing anything.
“Geho, Geho! Atlas!” (TL: Sound of coughing)
I wave my arm as if to brush away the smoke. I shout out.
And I turn and ask a question.
“Are you okay! Is everyone safe!?”
The smoke clears, and behind me, I see everyone standing.
It seems that we managed to change the direction of Houou’s flames, but the flames we missed came into contact with the army, and caused large casualties.
There are corpses all around. Many have collapsed on the ground.
More importantly, Atlas.
She ran in front of me, into the flames. I look for the young girl who took drastic measures to save us.
And… I look up.
And I realized the fact that something was falling down from the sky.
I hold out my arms to catch it.
“Ah…”
Heavy emotions run through my head, yet the item in my hands is so light… that thing, that item… was a girl missing an arm, with both of her legs turned to charcoal. It took me several seconds to realize that I had found Atlas.
“Atlas!”
Fohl runs over
“KYUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!”
At the same time, the shadows of two large birds cover us.
“Naofumi! We have to retreat!” (Ren)
Ren shouts at me.
“Ah… bu-but…”
“The current you can’t fight! We have to heal your wounds! And… We need to hurry up and treat that child! There are many injured people. This is the time where… the best healer among us should step forward. This is the time for you to act!” (Ren)
No words can come out of my mouth… what do I do? What can I do!?
“Quickly! Leave this place to us!” (Ren)
“U-understood.” (Naofumi)
“Raphtalia-san, hurry and get those two out of here! Fohl, you get back too!” (Ren)
“Y-yes! Firo!” (Raphtalia)
“Yeah!” (Firo)
In response to Ren’s stern words, I was brought to the back lines. My mind was still blank.
“Ah… ah…”
I still can’t form any words.
Atlas is on the verge of death.
Looking closely, it isn’t just her legs that have turned to charcoal. Everything under her stomach has been burned to a crisp.
It’s amazing that she’s still alive.
“Hah… ha… hah…”
I leave her to rest in a temporary medical tent, and go around treating those on the verge of death with the rest of the medics.
But the most severely wounded is Atlas.
The rest are… only those that survived made it here.
In my blank mind, I look over everything I saw and heard once more.
“Atlas! Get a grip!” (Fohl)
Fohl grips Atlas’s remaining arm, and desperately starts talking to her.
Atlas responds in a whisper.
Don’t waver…
What I have to do now is treat the wounded.
I need to save as many lives as I can.
I’m a hero. I’m the Hero of the Shield.
Defense, Support, and Recovery. I’m perhaps the best in the world in those aspects.
… I can’t concentrate.
Even so… I can’t let anybody… I can’t let Atlas die.
Calm down. Concentrate, and cast the highest level healing you can.
「Revelation Heal」!
The glow of my recovery magic envelops Atlas.
But… it didn’t bring back her missing limbs.
“W-why!?” (Naofumi)
Healing Magic is all-purpose, right!?
Ah, right, when I got back, the magic they cast on me healed my wounds, but it didn’t seem to have an effect on Atlas.
No… It’s probably healing her, but her wounds are too severe…?
Then… I take out Yggdrasil medicine from my Shield, and apply it to Atlas.
It works as an ointment, and if drunk, it can save patients on the verge of death. If I use it in all ways possible, she should get better.
But…
“WHY!?”
There’s no sign of Atlas healing.
I take out my anger on a nearby healer.
“Why won’t she heal!?” (Naofumi)
… She’s crossed the line where healing is possible.“
Rat came forward, and muttered this.
“What… do you mean?” (Naofumi)
“The fact that Atlas-chan is even living is something close to a miracle. Starting with the healers, and the Marquis’s magic and medicines, keeping her alive is the best we can do. Also…” (Rat)
“Rafu…”
Under Rat’s arm, Mii-kun’s core cried out.
“This child also had her body destroyed as he protected everyone. He did this much…” (Rat)
“Rat-san. Is there any way you can save Atlas?” (Raphtalia)
“Can’t you do anything!? Can we give her life like that Mii-kun in your hands?” (Naofumi)
“Monsters and Demi-Humans are different. If we used homunculus technology, then perhaps we could get her arms and legs to move, but that girl’s also burnt up most of her organs. Alchemy isn’t omnipotent.” (Rat)
“This can’t be…” (Raphtalia)
“Even by replacing parts, it’s not enough. No matter what we do, she won’t be saved.” (Rat)
“That’s a lie!”
I won’t believe it! Never! There has to be a way!
Where!? Where is the Shield that can save Atlas’s life? There has to be one.
What the hell is the Hero of the Shield? What the hell is with this hero that had to sacrifice a little girl to survive…
“Naofumi…… sama…” (Atlas)
I turn to Atlas.
“Did we protect everyone?” (Atlas)
“Yeah, but more importantly, you-” (Fohl)
“Onii-sama… please bring Naofumi-sama here…” (Atlas)
“… Okay.” (Fohl)
Fohl grabs me, and drags me next to Atlas.
“… I know. I have no time left, right?” (Atlas)
“What are you saying? You have as much time as there’s time in the world.” (Naofumi)
On my answer, Atlas, weakly shakes her head.
“Naofumi-sama… It’s fine already. Don’t worry about me.” (Atlas)
“Of course I would worry about you!” (Naofumi)
Right. If one Yggdrasil medicine was no good, then if I use more, I should be able to save a single life.
But my supply is limited to two. But if I just get more, then definitely.
I signal the healer to come closer, and order him to bring some Yggdrasil medicine.
“Quit it already, Marquis! I just said it, but she’s past the limit.” (Rat)
“We won’t know if it works until we try!” (Naofumi)
“And I’m telling you because we do know!” (Rat)
I ignore Rat, and apply the second vial to Atlas.
First, rub it on the wounds…
But as I touched her skin, I noticed.
The parts that had become charcoal wouldn’t come off no matter what.
“Sorry, Atlas!”
I took a knife meant for medical use, and cut off the charcoal portions.
But… still, there’s no sign of her healing.
“Hah… hah…”
It seems she can do nothing but breathe. She puts her remaining hand on mine.
“Please… stop already.” (Atlas)
“Never!” (Naofumi)
Don’t say such things in front of me!
No matter what happened, I never gave up.
Even when I was betrayed by those I trusted, even when I was called a devil, even when I was almost killed, I never gave up.
Even so… I can’t give up in the face of this… this unreasonable turn of events!
“Naofumi… sama. Please understand… I can’t be saved anymore. I’m the one who understands that best. Every second, part of my chi, my life force leaves my body, so… I understand.” (Atlas)
“But,even so-”
Water scatters from my eyes, which I thought had withered long ago.
“With Naofumi-sama’s miraculous power, I am… here talking to you. Please… calm yourself.” (Atlas)
Weakly, as if her body would crumble at any second, Atlas stroked my face.
“Hah… hah…” (Atlas)
“…”
I close my mouth, and Atlas smiles. It’s a smile like one a mother would give to comfort a crying child. Using her hand, she wipes away my tears.
“Naofumi-sama, I love you more than anyone else in this world. And I said this before, right? I wanted to become your shield.” (Atlas)
“… Yeah.” (Naofumi)
And that means you’ll accept a fate like this!?
If you died because you acted as someone’s shield, do you understand just what sort of emotions the person you protected would experience!?
When I was thinking that, I understood what Atlas was trying to tell me.
What she did was exactly what I was trying to do.
Using Collect to gather the flames, and release them somewhere else.
If put into practice, what would happen? I was the one who understood that best.
If Atlas didn’t step in front first… I would be where she is now.
“Even so.. this…” (Naofumi)
I can’t muster up anything but a cracked voice from my throat.
“I am… satisfied. Like this, I was able to use the life you saved to save yours.” (Atlas)
“No, you can’t die. You can’t die from protecting someone like me.” (Naofumi)
That was something that I should have been doing.
It’s not like I wanted to die.
If it was me, I may have survived it.
“Naofumi-sama… I don’t think I can… answer that request.” (Atlas)
“Why!?” (Naofumi)
I know! I already Know.
But can’t I pray for a miracle too?
Someone. Anyone is fine. God, I pray to you.
I don’t believe in anyone, but I’ll pray to you!
I’m well aware that this is a selfish request.
Even if the God of this world is the Four Heroes, even if I go against myself, if you can save the girl before my eyes, then… I…
“Naofumi-sama, please… listen to my last bit of selfishness.” (Atlas)
“What? What is it? I’ll definitely grant it. That’s why you can’t do anything like dying!” (Naofumi)
“… I wished to become your Shield. That wish hasn’t changed… and… I don’t want to return my blood, flesh, or soul to the earth.” (Atlas)
“Eh?” (Naofumi)
The hand grasping mine moved to my Shield.
“I knew from the start I could never become Naofumi-sama’s number one.” (Atlas)
“What are you…” (Naofumi)
“But still, I wished for it. If at least this body can be closer to yours than anyone else…” (Atlas)
I remember the Atlas that came to my room every night.
She always wanted to be by my side.
“Even if I lose my form, please let… me be with you.” (Atlas)
At this girl’s goal… I trembled.Alain B adiou The Fasc ism of th e Potato
1
Today w e can d raw up the most g eneral
–
ontological
–
balance sheet of the 1960s and 1970s.At the heart of the matter,there is the idea that the
mass
uprising of May ’68 –
as unprecedented popular revolt
–
in the eyes of its intellectual protagonists would not have had a tangible
class
background and that,for this reason,it would be conceivable as an insurrection of the multiple.Students,workers,employees seemed to have risen up in parallel fashion,in a kind of horizontal storm,or a cumulative dispersion,in which on top of everything the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia could vindicate the role of tactical vanguard. The imme diate att ack again st the pseud o-centre s of the u nions,and even more so against their bourgeois political guarantor (the PCF) in its objective form,was an essential component of the storm.The entire external unity of the bourgeois type was violently rejected.But this revolt against the pseudo- centres was far from giving way on the spot to the new Maoist thought,which is that of a centre of a new type (of the party of a new type),new not only in its being,but also in its process. Contrary to numerous revolutionary workers for whom this was the dominant question,the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia resisted en masse letting itself be traversed by the Maoist question,because the latter concentrated anew the proletarian class point of view,the absence of which at bottom pleased these intellectuals.In order to protect that which had catapulted it onto front stage (the dialectic of an extended mass revolt and a defeated proletarian leadership; of a vigorous ideology and an inexistent politics),the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia forged in haste the concepts with which the organic weaknesses of the situation could be changed into so many apparent strenghts.It unleashed into the clouds of pure thought the storm of the Multiple against the pretensions of the One.Down with the centres,whatever they are! Long live dispersion as such!Ontology returned to the Megarian school:only the multiple is affirmative,whereas the One is its oprpressive spectre,puffed up with resentment. Let us admit that the transitory force of this frenzied polycentrism was
nourished by the realities of the tempest.To attack on all fronts the ‘unities’ of the bourgeois type (labor unions,national unity,the union of the ‘Left’)
gave the movement its vitality.Better the multiple storms of revolt than the unifying tutelage of a bourgeois politics.That is certainly true. But at the same time,under the anti-organizational pretexts,it is not too difficult to see the rejection of the point of view of class.Its theme was the
1
Review of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Rhizome
(Paris: Minuit,1976).Eng lish
translation is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,’Introduction:Rhizome’,
A Thousand PlateausFormer McDonald’s employees have welcomed the company’s banishment of a Queensland franchisee accused of exploiting staff.
The decision comes after an investigation by The New Daily found crew members at the Forest Lake store were subject to bullying, unpaid work and prevented from joining a union.
McDonald’s head office confirmed David Robinson, who owned four franchises including Richlands, Forest Lake, Inala and BP Logan Highway, has since been fired and stripped of his investments as a result of the inquiry.
If you have more information or a similar story, contact us here.
“This particular franchisee is no longer part of the McDonald’s business; our head office has taken over operations of his restaurants,” McDonald’s spokeswoman Skye Oxenham told The New Daily.
“We take any allegation regarding payment or working conditions very seriously and will continue to enforce the highest possible standards in our business.”
Jessica Burns, 23, told The New Daily earlier this month that young employees at the Forest Lake store were regularly forced to attend unpaid “cleaning nights” during her four years as a manager from 2010 to 2013.
Since Mr Robinson’s lay off, Ms Burns has been inundated with thank you’s from current employees, who say the franchises are “already a better place to work”.
“The crews are starting to relax and enjoy their job now,” she said.
“Now, crews are not under immense pressure and can concentrate more on making sure the customers order are right and quality is good.
“It’s the first step to McDonald’s showing they are listening and do care. It shows companies and business owners can not keep doing this to their staff and expect to always get away with it.”
Former Richland crew member Courtney Leishman said staff, past and present, were relieved to hear of Mr Robinson’s axing.
“You have no idea how good it feels to know that he has been let go,” Ms Leishman said.
“Already the staff at McDonald’s are relieved and apologising for their behaviour to staff, previous and current. How much stress everyone was put under constantly making them difficult to talk to.
“I really hope the stores will now improve and better treatment of staff will happen.”
However, another ex-Forest Lake employee, Drew Sonter, was less optimistic about the future of Mr Robinsons’ stores.
“I feel this news is the start of some good change within the stores and for those still working at the stores. Although, I am going to be honest and say I am not relieved,” he said.
“There have been managers he put in power who have even worse attitudes than David ever could, and they have retained their positions.
“The job is not done cleaning those stores up until management have a good clean through as well, so in my opinion I do not feel relief nor feel that this is over for those there being abused and taken advantage of.
“However, McDonald’s did make the right move. Hopefully things can now be monitored directly.”
Mr Robinson declined The New Daily’s request for comment.How To Edit An Action Movie
As an editor some of the most fun I’ve had in editing a scene is when there’s a good amount of action going on.
Now in my ‘normal work’ that opportunity doesn’t come along all that often, but there are some really useful insights that come into play when editing an action sequence that are actually very applicable to editing any type of scene.
So I thought I’d put together a quick post on some of the best resources and insights on editing action sequences, car chases, fight scenes and more.
But first, my two cents on what makes for a good action scene.
The audience needs to care
If the audience doesn’t care and empathise with your central character it doesn’t matter how impressive/expensive/crazy your action sequence is, they’ll snooze out.
In one of the post production extras on Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers he mentioned in that it was crucial to cut back to a central character every few shots during the battle for Helm’s Deep sequence because otherwise you’d just get lost in the melee.
It can’t just be about huge crowds thrashing each other.
This is also why the first half of Rocky is about him helping change his neighbour’s lightbulbs and being a good guy, because you need to care about him to root for him to win in the big fights later on.
The Intention and Obstacle need to be clear
In screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s Masterclass on writing effective screenplays, his fundamental principle for any workable scene was a clear intention and a clear obstacle.
The good guy wants something, the bad guy (or the forces against him) want to stop him. (or her, it is 2016 after all!)
This is why most big battle/fight/chase scenes are preceded by a spell-out-exactly-what-we-need-to-achieve type of scene most memorable from Mission Impossible and Star Wars planning scenes.
It’s also why you might have a third character or perspective on the scene that is adding in extra information or re-iterating what needs to happen next.
E.g. “You’re running out of time to stop the bomb.”
So that the intention and obstacle is clear all the way through the scene or sequence of scenes.
Clarity needs to be maintained
The third ingredient in a successful action sequence is that the audience needs to know what’s going on.
This might sound obvious, and it is, but if you’re trying to ratchet up the tension and the speed of the action then making things confusing, crossing the line, editing in lots of close ups for blurry action can be tempting. But it won’t be effective.
The audience needs to know what’s happening, where all the key players are and have some idea of what might happen next.
Even if that’s only a few seconds into the future. For example, we’re about to run out of road and we need to jump the bus, a la Speed.
This most excellent one-punch fight scene has all of these elements involved.
The audience cares about the characters, they are clear about the stakes involved and the meaning of the outcomes, and the through line of the action is obvious at all times.
I’ve included this video just because it’s awesome. Although if you were to download it and play through it shot by shot, or even frame by frame, you would learn a lot about how to cut an action sequence together too.
How to Edit an Action Sequence
If you only watch one video in this post (unlikely) make it this one.
In this presentation from editor Eddie Hamilton (Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Kick Ass 1&2, Kingsman: The Secret Service) you get an exceptionally rare opportunity to see a before and after showcase of cutting an action sequence.
At about 24 minutes into his presentation (which is all worth watching) Eddie plays the first cut of the scene and then his final version. This provides a masterclass on how to re-edit an action sequence to make it more dynamic and how that can sometimes rescue a lack-lustre scene.
For more great insights from Eddie, check out this previous and very popular post Inside Professional Editing Timelines, which includes stills of his timelines from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and other films.
You can also read more about Eddie’s edit of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation in this previous post too.
In this Manhattan Edit Workshop video you get to hear editor Bill Pankow ACE discussing this action sequence from Brian De Palma’s superb Carlito’s Way. Again the intention and obstacle are clear, the through line of the action is obvious and the result is great. According to Bill, that’s all there in the dailies.
I feel like the dailies speak to us. We read the dailies and the tell us how they want to be edited.
The impact of the shooting style on the edit is clear from both Bill’s comments and Eddie’s re-edit. It’s also evident in the shooting style of Mad Max Fury Road. I originally included this great video in my massive round up of behind the scenes goodies on the film.
Editor Vashi Nedomansky draws attention to how much of the clarity of the action, especially when it comes to being able to ‘read’ every shot at high speed, is due to the way the film was shot – centre framed.
This was an edict passed down directly from director George Miller. Over the walkie talkies during every scene he could be heard saying “Put the cross hairs on her nose! Put the cross hairs on the gun!” This was to protect the footage for editorial and to ensure that the entire high speed film would be easily digestible with both eyes and brain. Every new shot that slammed onto the |
the race left, and then in the Top 6 with 30 seconds left, you aren’t going to win the sprint.
Of course these results and conclusions may not apply to other sprinters, or to all the sprints. Among other things, the number and performance level of the competitors play a major role in the importance of good positioning. The main limitation of the presented data set, with regard to this specific analysis, is that power data were recorded from different sprinters during different competitions. For future studies it would be interesting to compare files from several sprinters competing against each other in the same sprint. In that case it will be possible to better understand what the determinants of successful sprint performances are. The sprint cyclists are a unique and exciting component of the Tour de France. Not only do the sprinters boast some of the highest peak cycling power outputs in the peloton but they also display tremendous courage and tenacity as they jockey for ideal position leading into the final sprint. The winning sprint appears to be the combination of well executed tactics combined with outstanding physiology and aerodynamics.
So that’s an overview of the power output, aerodynamics and tactics in a professional sprint, which you can expect to see more of in coming weeks. Paolo informs me that there are likely seven stages ideally suited to the sprinters, and we’ve seen two.
I’d like to thank Paolo for taking the time to produce a translation of his research. He is currently studying at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) as an Edith Cowan University PhD scholar. If you’d like to know more, then please contact him either at his Edith Cowan University site, or follow him and make contact via Twitter.
Also, I’d like to use this opportunity to invite anyone else who has interesting insights on the Science of Cycling to contact me to submit articles, and I’ll use them like I’ve done with Paolo in this article. So if you have a contribution, don’t hold onto it, let’s carry on the discussion!
Enjoy the sprint later!
Ross
This post is part of the following threads: Tour de France Analysis, Tour de France timeline – ongoing stories on this site. View the thread timelines for more context on this post.When Bob Dylan finally delivered his long-awaited Nobel Prize lecture this week, he set out to show how his songs relate to literature.
In the process, something else became clear as well: The man really knows his Bible, and he said biblical themes from some of his favorite novels worked their way into his songs over the years.
Referring to Herman Melville’s 1851 novel “Moby-Dick,” which he said has stuck with him ever since he read it in grammar school, Dylan noted the many biblical names in the book.
“This book tells how different men react in different ways to the same experience,” he said. “A lot of Old Testament, biblical allegory: Gabriel, Rachel, Jeroboam, Bildah, Elijah. Pagan names as well: Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo, Fleece, Starbuck, Stubb, Martha’s Vineyard. The Pagans are idol worshippers. Some worship little wax figures, some wooden figures. Some worship fire.”
In Dylan’s eyes, “Moby-Dick” is rich in religious and mythical references.
“Everything is mixed in,” he wrote. “All the myths: the Judeo-Christian Bible, Hindu myths, British legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules – they’re all whalers. Greek mythology, the gory business of cutting up a whale. Lots of facts in this book, geographical knowledge, whale oil – good for coronation of royalty – noble families in the whaling industry. Whale oil is used to anoint the kings. History of the whale, phrenology, classical philosophy, pseudo-scientific theories, justification for discrimination – everything thrown in and none of it hardly rational.”
Dylan said the theme of “Moby-Dick” and all it implies “would work its way into more than a few of my songs.” One such theme was that of death and resurrection. He saw that theme play out in the climactic moment of the novel.
“Finally, Ahab spots Moby, and the harpoons come out,” Dylan recounted. “Boats are lowered. Ahab’s harpoon has been baptized in blood. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat and destroys it. Next day, he sights Moby again. Boats are lowered again. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat again. On the third day, another boat goes in. More religious allegory. He has risen. Moby attacks one more time, ramming the Pequod and sinking it. Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave.”
Dylan even pointed out there was a missing ingredient in the resurrection tale of one of the harpooners – and that missing ingredient was Jesus.
“Tashtego says that he died and was reborn,” the singer noted. “His extra days are a gift. He wasn’t saved by Christ, though, he says he was saved by a fellow man and a non-Christian at that. He parodies the resurrection.”
The incredible spiritual journey of an American icon. You’ll never look at American pop culture – or Christianity – the same way again. Discover the unbelievable true story behind one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. “Bob Dylan: The Spiritual Life” is available now at the WND Superstore.
Another book whose themes showed up in Dylan’s music, according to the man himself, was “All Quiet on the Western Front.” That 1929 German novel is a “horror story” in which the characters are “stuck in a nightmare,” according to Dylan, and he spotted one instance in which the protagonist was tested like Jesus was on the cross, shortly before His death.
“Yesterday, you tried to save a wounded messenger dog, and somebody shouted, ‘Don’t be a fool,'” Dylan recalled about the book. “One Froggy is laying gurgling at your feet. You stuck him with a dagger in his stomach, but the man still lives. You know you should finish the job, but you can’t. You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.”
All of this insight comes from a man whom many people believe left Christianity behind in the 1980s after a brief period of fascination with the faith. But as the brand new book “Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life” reveals, there is plenty of evidence Dylan has continued to believe in the God of both the Old and New Testament through the years.
Scott Marshall, the book’s author, notes Dylan’s 1990 composition “God Knows” warned there would be “no more water but fire next time,” an apparent reference to the biblical end of the world. It was in 1999 that Dylan began performing “I Am The Man, Thomas” at his concerts. The song tells the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the risen Christ’s interaction with Doubting Thomas.
These are only two examples from the singer’s long and winding spiritual journey. Dylan was born a Jew, but he surprised critics by becoming a Christian in the late 1970s. Some thought he left Christianity behind in the early 1980s, but Jewish and Christian references would continue to play a central role in his life and career.
“Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life” explores all the nuances of the legendary singer-songwriter’s spiritual beliefs. Marshall draws on years of research and original interviews to shine a light on a side of Dylan many fans and critics don’t know about. He paints the picture of a man who was preoccupied with God from essentially the start of his music career in the 1960s through the present day.
In fact, that may be one of Dylan’s few consistencies.
“It is ironic that the seemingly inconsistent Bob Dylan – who occupies such hallowed space in the countercultural decade of the 1960s – has been so consistent in assuming that God exists,” Marshall writes. “When asked by Neil Spencer of New Musical Express about the ‘compatibility’ between his interest in Judaism (his visits to Israel in 1969-1971) and his controversial beliefs of 1979-1981, Dylan simply replied, ‘There’s really no difference between any of it in my mind.’
The incredible spiritual journey of an American icon. You’ll never look at American pop culture – or Christianity – the same way again. Discover the unbelievable true story behind one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. “Bob Dylan: The Spiritual Life” is available now at the WND Superstore.Leeds is amazing. If you read this blog, you know it already.
But have you ever found yourself in that situation where a friend from out of town has come to stay and they ask “so what is there to do in Leeds?”
Er… Harvey Nichols? The Armouries? Bundobust? And then you get stuck. You know there’s loads of stuff to see and do here but you can’t remember now.
Let me help you with that! How about:
Leeds is also home to some of the absolute finest food & drink establishments in the North, and with my Leeds Beer Quest hat on I’m tempted to say it’s the beer capital of the entire UK.
Perhaps it’s so difficult to think of Leeds in this way because it’s been overlooked by the traditional overlords of where’s hot to visit in the world: the makers of printed guidebooks. They would dedicate more pages to York or Whitby or — gasp! — Manchester.
So enter The Leeds We Love: we’re planning to write a 160-page full-colour printed guidebook to the city, just like the ones you have on your shelf to every other amazing city in Europe. With a copy of this book you’ll never be at a loss for something to do on the weekend or somewhere to go out for date night.
But we can’t do it without your help! We need to raise £14,000 – that’s not going into our pockets but it’s the minimum it’s going to cost us to get the book produced to professional standards, then printed and shipped.
And of course we’re not asking the lovely people of Leeds to give us summat fer nowt! Every pledge of £5+ will get a copy of the ebook when it’s done, and £10+ will get you a copy for your bookshelf.
If you’ve got your own local knowledge, get in on the discussion about what’s going to be in the book by pledging a little bit more to gain access to our insider forum. There are lots of other things you can pledge for too: check them out on our Kickstarter page.
Oh yeah: who are we to say we can do this? We’re Rich Daley — half of Leeds Beer Quest, which has visited every bar in Leeds city centre — and Lorna Parkes, a travel writer who has written and edited loads of stuff for Lonely Planet. We’re both crazy about Leeds and know all kinds of interesting history and less-well-known things to do.
Aren’t there other guidebooks out there already? Amazingly, no. There are online guides, and books of listings, but in our experience these are either not very good (focussing mainly on food & drink businesses) or they’re paid for by the people they feature, which means you’re not going to get a fair review.
If you’ve got a fiver or a tenner to spare, head on over to our Kickstarter and give us a pledge. If we don’t hit our goal by 7th December, your card won’t be charged. And if we do — well, you’re going to get an amazing book in a few months’ time!
Follow @LeedsWeLove on Twitter or on Facebook for updates.Update 9/15/2014: The Dungeon Master's Guide has been delayed.
Update: Details continue to emerge, with an organized play program and information about some of the rulebook being free.
Update 1:55 PM EST: Wizards of the Coast has released a set of images to accompany the game, including the new logo:
Release dates for the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide, and various adventures unveiled.
Update 12:25 AM EST: Kobold Press has confirmed that they are the design studio behind the new adventures, and Wizards of the Coast will simply publish that material. In a joint statement, Dungeons & Dragons R&D member Mike Mearls said that Kobold Press writers Wolfgang Baur and Steve Winter were "at the top of his list" for writing the new D&D adventures. "What I love about Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat is how Wolfgang and Steve Winter have approached the traditional adventure format. While the episodic structure makes it easy for DMs to trace the campaign's humble beginnings to its epic conclusion, within those episodes is a level of flexibility and freedom for DMs and players that places this among the great D&D campaigns." From that information, it appears that the new adventures will have an episodic format within individual books, meaning that both adventures may include multiple mini-adventures within them.
Original Story: Wizards of the Coast has revealed the covers and release dates for not only the core books of the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but the adventures and miniatures that will accompany the release later this year. In addition to the previously revealed dates for the Player's Handbook and Starter Set, we now have dates for the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide for a three month window after the release of the Player's Handbook in August. The covers, prices, and details were revealed via Wizards' website product listings, as well as on Amazon. Among the new reveals are two adventures, Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat, both intended as part of Wizards' Tyranny of Dragons story event for D&D. Regarding the extended game launch window, Wizards of the Coast's Mike Mearls said that the development team wanted to ensure that each book was as high quality as possible.
Much of the same information as was announced by Wizards of the Coast has been posted to multiple listings on giant online retailer Amazon.com. Most of that information is duplicated, but it does include the details that the Adventures for the new D&D are designed by Kobold Press, a popular third party RPG publisher that makes material for a variety of fantasy roleplaying games.
The products announced are:
Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set (July 15, 2014) ; Fantasy Roleplaying Fundamentals; $19.99; Will include six dice, a 64-page rulebook with adventure, rules for characters levels 1-5, and 5 pregenerated characters.
; Fantasy Roleplaying Fundamentals; $19.99; Will include six dice, a 64-page rulebook with adventure, rules for characters levels 1-5, and 5 pregenerated characters. Player's Handbook (August 19, 2014) ; Core Rulebook; $49.95; Looks like the same book it has always been - learn the game's systems from it, but it includes only basic rules.
; Core Rulebook; $49.95; Looks like the same book it has always been - learn the game's systems from it, but it includes only basic rules. Hoard of the Dragon Queen (August 19, 2014) ; Tyranny of Dragons Adventure; $29.95; The first of the Tyranny of Dragons adventures, looks like the kickoff of the big event at 96 pages. The Amazon listing says that this one was designed and developed by Kobold Press, a third party firm.
; Tyranny of Dragons Adventure; $29.95; The first of the Tyranny of Dragons adventures, looks like the kickoff of the big event at 96 pages. The Amazon listing says that this one was designed and developed by Kobold Press, a third party firm. Monster Manual (September 17, 2014) ; Core Rulebook $49.95; Bills its game statistics as "easy to use" and is supposedly full of "thrilling stories to feed your imagination" - same old, same old with a chance of increased game fluff.
; Core Rulebook $49.95; Bills its game statistics as "easy to use" and is supposedly full of "thrilling stories to feed your imagination" - same old, same old with a chance of increased game fluff. The Rise of Tiamat (October 21, 2014) ; Tyranny of Dragons Adventure $29.95; Looks like the battle against Tiamat will become "increasingly political" - which would be an interesting twist for a second game adventure. Also designed by Kobold Press.
; Tyranny of Dragons Adventure $29.95; Looks like the battle against Tiamat will become "increasingly political" - which would be an interesting twist for a second game adventure. Also designed by Kobold Press. Dungeon Master's Guide (November 18, 2014) ; Core Rulebook $49.95; Full of "inspiration and guidance" as well as the optional rules modules we've been hearing so much about, as well as all the magic items - so not an optional book at all.
; Core Rulebook $49.95; Full of "inspiration and guidance" as well as the optional rules modules we've been hearing so much about, as well as all the magic items - so not an optional book at all. Deluxe DM Screen (January 20, 2015); $14.95; This one is listed at Amazon without details and not yet listed by Wizards.
Dungeons & Dragons, to be released later this year, will be the fifth official edition of the fantasy roleplaying game. It went through an extensive public playtest in late 2012 and early 2013, and has been in private development ever since.
Posted alongside the releases were two new miniatures products which by the familiar look of the sculpts are part of the line of miniatures produced by WizKids that were previously announced:
Icons of the Realms: Starter Set (July 14, 2014) ; Miniatures; $19.99; Described as a starter pack and clearly including figures intended as adventurers. Described as including "the dwarf cleric, human ranger, halfling rouge[sic], northlands fighter, elf wizard, and the famous drow ranger, Drizzt Do'Urden."
; Miniatures; $19.99; Described as a starter pack and clearly including figures intended as adventurers. Described as including "the dwarf cleric, human ranger, halfling rouge[sic], northlands fighter, elf wizard, and the famous drow ranger, Drizzt Do'Urden." Icons of the Realms: Booster (July, 2014); Miniatures; $15.99; A box of four blind miniatures "inspired by the Tyranny of Dragons storyline" and almost definitely catered to go alongside the starter set and first adventures including "dragons, kobold fighters, bugbears, wraiths, mind flayers, and many more iconic D&D characters."
Trevor Kidd, Wizards of the Coast's community manager, also posted a mockup of the book's spines.
The products are listed on the Wizards of the Coast website.
What does all of this mean? Check out our article on whether or not D&D's release plan is botched or brilliant.TRANSFORMERS – AGE OF EXTINCTION: Rick O’Connor – Co-Animation Supervisor – ILM
Rick O’Connor began his career in the visual effects at ILM more than 15 years ago with STAR WARS: EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE. He then worked on films such as VAN HELSING, WAR OF THE WORLDS, all the TRANSFORMERS films or STAR TREK.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2: Simon Otto – Head of Character Animation – Dreamworks
In 2010, Simon Otto had explained in detail about his work at Dreamworks Animation on the first episode of HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON. He then worked on several shorts inspired by this film. He is now back with the second episode.
TRANSFORMERS – AGE OF EXTINCTION: Ben Murray – Senior Stereo Supervisor – Prime Focus World
Ben Murray has worked over 10 years as an Inferno / Flame artist. He then helps Prime Focus World to developed his stereo pipeline and he worked on films such as MEN IN BLACK 3, FRANKENWEENIE or NOAH.
© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2014Last time, we took a look at basic browsing with Tor, the anonymizing Web relay network. At the very end of that article, we touched on how to actively participate in Tor by running your own relay. That's when your local copy of Tor functions as a node in the network, funneling encrypted Tor traffic peer-to-peer to help increase the overall Tor network's bandwidth. But there is even more you can do, such as running invisible services and bridges for those who need even more privacy than vanilla Tor provides out of the box.
As a refresher, all active Tor nodes are called "relays" — they pass packets between other relays. Each connection is encrypted, and no relay knows the starting point or ultimate destination of any of the traffic it relays. That's what makes Tor impossible to snoop: the route is calculated out-of-band (so to speak), and no one on the network knows it so no one else can steal it.
But the end-user's HTTP (or IM, or IRC, or whatever else) traffic does have to enter the Tor network somewhere. By default, whenever you launch Tor, it requests addresses of some Tor network "on-ramp" relays. Although the topography of the Tor network is constantly changing, and although the connection between the user and the on-ramp is encrypted, these addresses are public information, so adversaries could still watch the user's connection and interfere somehow — even by crude means such as switching off the user's connectivity.
Bridging the Privacy Gap
The solution is to have secret, unpublished on-ramp relays. The Tor project calls them bridges, in order to denote the distinction. How many bridges there are is unknown, because there is no list. The most an ISP or attacker can do to block Tor is cut off access to the public relays, but if a user has the address of a Tor bridge, he or she can still connect.
Running a Tor bridge is as simple as running a normal Tor relay. The simplest way is to install the Vidalia GUI client, which allows you to start and stop Tor functionality on demand. The project recommends you use the latest files directly from them, rather than use a distribution's package management system, because security fixes can take too long to pass through distro review. The Linux/Unix download page links to repositories for Debian-based, RPM-based, and Gentoo distributions, as well as the three BSD flavors and source packages.
Note that this is not the "Browser Bundle" which is geared towards end-users only. You'll need to install the "vidalia" package, which will pull in the necessary Tor dependencies. Launch Vidalia, then choose the "Setup Relaying" button. Selecting "Relay traffic for the Tor network" configures your node as a standard relay. "Help censored users reach the Tor network" is the bridge option.
There are a few options to consider in the "Basic Settings" tab. Stick with the default relay port (9001) unless you know that your ISP blocks it. Unless you have a compelling reason not to, the project also wants you to provide some sort of contact information — but it is not published. Your IP address and port number are all that Tor users see. By default, you should check "Mirror the Relay Directory," because this is how Tor users establish connections. At the very bottom, you see "Automatically distribute my bridge address." To run a generic bridge, leave this checked. If, however, you are setting up your bridge for the benefit of some particular friend (including yourself), you can leave it unchecked — but you will need to tell the person in question your bridge IP address and port number.
You'll notice that the "Exit Policies" tab is grayed-out when you configure a bridge. When running a normal relay, you can set options here to limit access to particular types of traffic or block specific site requests from exiting the network at your node. But since a bridge is an entry point, those options do not apply.
That's all there is to bridge setup. To use a bridge as your own entry point to the Tor network, visit Vidalia's Network tab. Check the "My ISP blocks connections to the Tor network" option, which will reveal a list box where you can enter individual bridges. If someone you know is running an unpublished bridge, you can enter it directly. Otherwise, you will need to request bridge information from the Tor project.
How that works securely is a bit complicated. You can request a bridge list by visiting a special SSL-encrypted page on the Tor site; my understanding is that the project keeps track of what bridges it sends to what requesting IPs, so that evildoers cannot harvest the entire bridge collection. You can also send an email to the Tor project, and as long as you use one of the few well-known email address domains, it will return a set of bridge IDs. I assume that this information is also tracked; how to allow access to bridges without compromising their security is a hard problem.
But however you get them, simply enter the bridge IP:port information into Vidalia's Network tab, and you can browse and network without getting blocked. All bridge IDs consist of a an IP address and port number separated by a colon, and optionally can provide a cryptographic fingerprint, although this feature does not seem to be in widespread usage.
Are You Being Served?
Essentially, bridges simply offer an alternate, harder-to-block access method to the Tor network. A more intriguing use of the software is to run an IP-based service that can only be accessed through Tor (as opposed to the Internet at large). You can publish a Web site, run a POP/IMAP/IRC server, or even make an SSH server accessible, all without ever revealing your address to visitors, and even from behind a firewall.
How is that possible? The actual traffic is routed through the Tor network, just like any other Tor data. The tricky part is making the service reachable. Tor does this by maintaining a distributed hash table of services, each of which is identified by a pseudo-random host name in the.onion domain. Whenever a new service launches, it connects to a few Tor relays (like any other relay would), then tells the hash database which relays those are. When a client makes a request to the ABCDEFWXYZ.onion host, the hash database picks one of the relays associated with the service and forwards the request on. The relays involved never know that the packets they are carrying are destined for a particular service, because the data is mixed in with all other Tor-based, encrypted traffic.
There are a few other checks-and-balances involved to protect everyone; if you're interested, the entire protocol is documented on the Tor Web site. There you can also find a link to the Tor hidden service search engine (based on DuckDuckGo), as well as an example Web site run by the project. A key point to remember, however, is that you must be running Tor on the client side to access these services, because they are accessible only within the Tor network.
It is also important to remember that the hidden service should probably only connect to Tor on the server-side, too — in can be extremely tricky to try and run a normal Web server setup and a Tor-based.onion site from the same Apache configuration, plus, someone who finds the hidden content on your existing IP could then prove that you are the host, which defeats the purpose of running a "hidden" service entirely.
Tor recommends you take a look at a lightweight Web server like thttpd. Whichever HTTP server you choose, you should make it accessible only to localhost. Next, in your.torrc configuration file, find the location-hidden services block, and add a pair of lines like
HiddenServiceDir /some/path/to/a/place/where/you/can/keep/files/for.your/hidden_service/ HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:5222
The HiddenServiceDir directory is merely a location where Tor will dump a text file containing the.onion address for your service. The HiddenServicePort line has three parts: the "fake" port number advertised to visitors (80 here, to serve as a standard Web server), the address to bind to (here, 127.0.0.1, which is localhost), and the local port number (5222). You can also provide this information in Vidalia, in the Setup: Services tab.
Now, when you restart Tor, it will fetch a.onion host name for you, and save a private key file in your HiddenServiceDir directory. This key verifies that you are, in fact, the service listed in the distributed hash database, so that clients can connect with confidence — so don't lose it. That's all there is to it; you can set up as many services as you like, running anything that you care to configure and that can be ferried by Tor.
How you spread the word about your service is another matter — if you post about it on the public Internet, your foes can almost certainly associate you with it. There are in-Tor-only message boards, however, as well as community forums where people often post links to.onion services. Of course, that's assuming you want to publish your content. As with bridges, you may also need to make something available only to specific people, or only for a short amount of time, in which case person-to-person is probably best.
Bridgebuilding and More
There is definitely a trade-off involved with both of these techniques. You cannot simply run an invisible Tor bridge and expect dissidents to find it and use it — they will have to set up and run Tor. Likewise, you cannot run an anonymous Web server dishing out Truth by the barrel-full to the whole wide world — you can only make it accessible to other people running Tor. Nevertheless, these are both exciting opportunities that without Tor wouldn't exist at all. The initial Tor concept didn't include either — it just goes to show you that a solid technology like Tor has more and better uses than casual Web surfing, as long as users are willing to push the boundaries. Who knows what else can be built on top of Tor?A failed butcher who used a hunting knife to repeatedly stab a Melbourne woman in the face and head before leaving her to die on the street has been jailed for almost three decades.
Rani Featherston was subjected to a horrifying death in April 2014, Victorian Supreme Court judge Christopher Beale noted on Friday.
The 34-year old at one stage managed to escape her attacker but was chased down and murdered at suburban Eumemmerring by Christian Bain-Singh, 24.
"You posted a callous message on Facebook whilst still at the crime scene," Justice Beale said as he sentenced the confessed killer to serve 29 years in prison.
His social media message quoted lyrics from American heavy metal band Five Finger Death Punch: "It's not the size of the dog in the fight. It's the size of the fight in the dog".
The pair were familiar to each other but it was a chance meeting on the night of the murder when Ms Featherston suffered 21 stab wounds.
The violent killing came 11 days after Bain-Singh's unrelated stabbing attack on sleeping man Daniel Maynard.
The knife-wielding assailant entered Mr Maynard's Doveton home looking for money.
"Mr Maynard woke and tried to defend himself with his bare hands as you continued stabbing him," Justice Beale said.
Bain-Singh's offences were shocking, but he was remorseful and had good rehabilitation prospects, the judge said.
Outside court, Mr Maynard, who was left with ongoing physical and mental injuries, told journalists he doubted Bain-Singh was truly sorry.
"Remorse is a big word... some people say it but don't know what it means," the victim said.
Bain-Singh previously worked as a butcher before losing his job amid allegations he stole from his employer.
He must serve at least 22 years before being eligible for parole after pleading guilty to murder and the attack on Mr Maynard.
Rani Featherston. ()
© AAP 2019Today we continue our summer reviews of the pre-season Top 20 Prospects lists with the Chicago Cubs.
This is a review of the pre-season list.
It is not a new list.
These are the pre-season grades.
This list was originally published December 7, 2014
1) Kris Bryant, 3B, Grade A: 99 games for the Cubs, hitting.247/.357/.433 with 14 homers, 57 walks, 131 strikeouts in 360 at-bats. Very much as expected; with time I think we will see the whiffs come down some and the average go up.
2) Addison Russell, 2B-SS, Grade A: 91 games for the Cubs, hitting.235/.299/.359 with seven homers, 27 walks, 98 strikeouts in 315 at-bats. Could use more in the OBP department but that will come in time.
3) Jorge Soler, OF, Grade A: 77 games for the Cubs, hitting.269/.326/.387 with five homers, 24 walks, 99 strikeouts in 297 at-bats. Another guy with contact issues, power has been disappointing but he’s been hot lately and I retain confidence in his future.
4) Kyle Schwarber, C-OF, Grade A-/B+: Damn:.323/.430/.591 in the high minors between Iowa and Tennessee,.345/.427/.631 in 84 major league at-bats..Although I don’t think he hits.345 in a full season, he’s not that much over his head. Power, average, OBP, he’ll provide it all.
5) Carl Edwards, Jr, RHP, Grade B+: Formerly known as C.J., converted to bullpen and performing very well, 2.81 with 71/38 K/BB in 51 innings between AA and AAA. Needs to lower walk rate but the stuff looks great.
6) Albert Almora, OF, Grade B+/B: Hitting.253/.305/.373 with five homers, 23 walks, 34 strikeouts in 300 at-bats in Double-A. Age 21 now, still draws praise for overall feel for the game and defense, but bat has not developed as hoped. Without more hitting zip he’s destined to be a fourth outfielder.
7) Pierce Johnson, RHP, Grade B: Pitching well in Double-A, 1.65 ERA in 55 innings, 42/22 K/BB, 43 hits. Didn’t get started until June but has lived up to expectations, still has mid-rotation projection.
8) Billy McKinney, OF, Grade B: Outstanding in High-A (.340/.432/.544) but just decent in Double-A (.276/.337/.397) which is just fine for a 20-year-old. Remains a scout favorite due to instincts, work ethic.
9) Duane Underwood, RHP, Grade B-: Fine spring in High-A (2.66 in 64 innings, 42/20 K/BB, 46 hits), secondary pitches improving to go with fastball, but hurt his elbow in late June and has been on DL since.
10) Jen-Ho Tseng, RHP, Grade B-: 18 starts in High-A, 3.41 ERA with 95 innings, 60/27 K/BB, 90 hits. A reasonably good season at age 20, but would like to see more whiffs.
11) Gleyber Torres, SS, Grade B-: Hitting.307/.367/.403 with 21 doubles, 20 steals, 37 walks, 88 strikeouts in 387 at-bats at age 18 in Low-A. Stock rising, Midwest League sources are very enthusiastic about both his tools and skills.
12) Carson Sands, LHP, Grade B-: 4.06 ERA in 38 innings in short-season A-ball, 24/12 K/BB, 46 hits. Nothing especially good nor especially bad about the stats, scouting reports continue to emphasize three-pitch mid-rotation potential. Fourth-round pick in 2014.
13) Dan Vogelbach, 1B, Grade B-: Hitting.284/.410/.431 with five homers, 45 walks, 54 strikeouts in 204 at-bats in Double-A, on DL since early July with oblique injury. Bat is still quite intriguing but where does he fit?
14) Eloy Jimenez, OF, Grade C+: Hitting.272/.316/.384 with eight walks, 28 strikeouts in 125 at-bats in short-season A-ball. Reports haven’t changed much: good/great tools, performance spotty, still young at 18.
15) Victor Caratini, C, Grade C+: Hitting.239/.332/.338 with three homers, 43 walks, 62 strikeouts in 314 at-bats in High-A. Playing well defensively, controlling zone but lack of power disappointing.
16) Corey Black, RHP, Grade C+: 4.11 ERA with 91/37 K/BB in 77 innings in Double-A, 55 hits. Impressive K/IP and H/IP marks back up reports on consistently plus stuff. Moved to bullpen in June but was actually more effective as a starter. Not sure what his role will be.
17) Armando Rivero, RHP, Grade C+: 3.43 ERA with 41/26 K/BB in 42 innings, 36 hits out of Iowa bullpen. Command issues but overall holding his own, should get big league trial soon, nothing left to prove really at age 27.
18) Jake Stinnett, RHP, Grade C+: Disappointing season in Low-A, 4.78 ERA in 85 innings, 61/43 K/BB, 91 hits. Impressive ground ball ratios but has to sharpen his command.
19) Mark Zagunis, C-OF, Grade C+: Hitting.275/.408/.415 with 71 walks, 72 strikeouts in 364 at-bats in High-A. Full-time outfielder at this point, strong on-base skills but power?
20) Jeferson Mejia, RHP, Grade C+: Traded to Arizona Diamondbacks, 5.98 ERA with 45/52 K/BB in 65 innings between Low-A and short-season A. Good stuff but command has been terribly disappointing.
Huge leap forward with the rebuilding project this year: the big league club is 60-48, and keep in mind that Bryant, Soler, and Russell haven’t yet reached their full potential. |
/human-bones-found-during-holden-chapel/
Lovejoy, B. (2014 May 6). Meet Grandison Harris, the Grave Robber Enslaved (and then Employed) By the Georgia Medical College. Smithsonian. Retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/meet-grandison-harris-grave-robber-enslaved-and-then-employed-georgia-college-medicine-180951344/
Owsley, D. and Bruwelheide, K. (2012 June 18). Artifacts and Comingled Skeletal Remains from a Well on the Medical College of Virginia Campus: Introduction. VCU Scholars Compass. Retrieved from: http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=arch001Story highlights Chief: None of the injuries to law enforcement officers are life-threatening
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent is shot in the leg, police say
3 Roseville, California, officers are shot in the jaw, shoulder and hurt by fragments
Authorities had "pinned... down" the suspect, a wanted parolee, in a house
California authorities have surrounded a wanted parolee accused of shooting federal and local officers, hitting three and wounding one more with shrapnel fragments, police said.
After that initial shooting, Samuel Duran ran and hopped fences in a Roseville neighborhood as members of various law enforcement agencies converged on the scene, police said.
Authorities located him at an otherwise unoccupied house in Roseville, which is 20 miles northeast of Sacramento.
"I know he's pinned down," Roseville police Lt. Cal Walstad said.
Duran has been sought by authorities "for the last couple of weeks," according to Walstad, who did not detail what crimes the suspect had been tied to.
After determining where he was in Roseville, local police and a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations unit went there Friday afternoon.
According to Walstad, "once they made contact with him, shots were exchanged."
The ICE special agent was shot in the leg and transported to a local hospital, the police spokesman said. He was reported to be stable and alert a few hours later, said ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice.
The suspect ran, firing at times and jumping fences.
Three Roseville police officers ended up wounded at a third shooting site. One was struck in the jaw, one was hit in the shoulder, and the third wounded by bullet fragments, according to Walstad.
One of the Roseville officers was in serious condition, while the other two were stable, he said. Chief Daniel Hahn added later Friday that none of the injuries to the officers, all of them men and veterans of the department, are considered life-threatening.
Authorities from multiple agencies quickly converged on the scene looking for Duran, who Walstad said had an "assault-type weapon."
Neighbors were asked not to leave their houses, but they were never evacuated. The scene was later considered "contained" -- even though police hadn't said they knew exactly where the suspect was.
Now that they do, he's being surrounded by law enforcement. Hostage negotiations are on site as well, though it's not believed that the suspect has taken any hostages.
Authorities are talking to the suspect by telephone, Walstad said.
Brenda Bell told CNN affiliate KCRA that the suspect is in her house; she went outside after her "dogs went crazy," then she ran into a neighbor's house after seeing him run through her back gate.
"(Police) keep repeating, 'We have the house surrounded. Come out with your hands up,'" Jim Stewart, the neighbor who invited Bell in, said Friday night. "They've been doing this for hours now."
Placer County Sheriff Edward Bonner described the situation as "incredibly dangerous," while expressing confidence it'll be resolved as well as possible.
"This is a very tough day," Bonner said. "It's unsettling for all us; no one is immune to this sort of tragedy and criminality. But here it is.
"But I'll tell you what," he added. "We have a great community of law enforcement that is going to deal with this."A screen displays the Instagram logo during a presentation in New York December 12, 2013. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Instagram now boasts more than 500 million users, more than 80 percent of whom are outside the United States, the company said on Tuesday, in a sign of the photo-sharing app’s rapidly growing global reach.
The company owned by Facebook Inc (FB.O) had 400 million users last September. It has seen its user base more than double over the past two years. Instagram added that 300 million people used the app every day.
Instagram has quickly eclipsed its rivals, notably Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), which has seen its user base stall at just above 300 million. Facebook has about 1.6 billion users.
Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, its first large acquisition, a deal initially met with skepticism.
Instagram has grown into one of the most popular social media apps worldwide and is expected to contribute significantly to Facebook’s revenue, with research firm eMarketer predicting the company will generate $1.5 billion in ad revenue this year.
It is able to leverage Facebook’s popular advertising technology and resources to target highly specific audiences.
Instagram said users shared on average more than 95 million photos and videos every day, with posts garnering 4.2 billion “likes” each day.NASHVILLE, Tenn. –– Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage, the Tennessee attorney general’s office is no longer contesting the divorce of two men who wed in another state.
On Friday, the office sent a brief to the Tennessee Court of Appeals making clear that it won’t stand in the way of Frederick Michael Borman and Larry Kevin Pyles-Borman getting a divorce.
The couple married in Iowa in 2010. Rockwood attorney Mark Foster, who represents Frederick Michael Borman, said they have been denied a divorce since filing in Roane County in March 2014 because the state didn’t recognize same-sex marriages before last month’s Supreme Court decision.
Harlow Sumerford, a spokesman for Attorney General Herbert Slatery, said in a statement that the filing acknowledges the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on Tennessee law.
© 2015, Associated Press, All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
This Story Filed UnderA gunman ambushed 33-year old Philadelphia police officer Jesse Hartnett on Thursday night. His attacker is in custody and claims it was an attempted “execution” in the name of Islam.
CBS News in Philadelphia reports Hartnett was sitting in his patrol car at around 11:30 PM when the attacker fired 13 shots through the driver’s side window at point-blank range. The CBS report describes the shooter as walking toward the police car while he fired. Three of the shots struck Hartnett’s arm. His injuries do not appear to be life-threatening.
“Shots fired! I’m shot! I’m bleeding heavily!” Hartnett called out on police radio, as can be heard in the CBS report:
Hartnett was able to return fire, and hit the as-yet unnamed suspect three times. Other offices swiftly caught the wounded assailant while attempting to flee the scene, and he has made a full confession, according to CBS. The confession reportedly describes Islam as part of the motive for the attack.
Police also recovered his weapon. The New York Daily News identifies it as a 9mm handgun.
Commissioner Ross said there is video of the entire attack. “This is absolutely one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen,” he declared. “I mean, this guy tried to execute the police officer. The officer had no idea he was coming. It’s amazing he’s alive.”
The shooter is described as a male in his 30s. According to a news description of the surveillance video, he was wearing a “long white frock and black pants” as he approached the police cruiser with his gun drawn. The current condition of the shooter has not been disclosed at the time of this writing.
Ross said Hartnett suffered “significant damage” to his arm, including nerve damage, but is awake and coherent. According to the New York Daily News, he underwent surgery early Friday at Presbyterian Hospital and is expected to make a full recovery.
NJ.com cites Officer Hartnett’s social media profiles to describe him as a native of East Landsdowne, Pennsylvania, who attended Delaware County Community College, served in the U.S. Coast Guard for over a decade, and then became a four-year veteran of the police force.
CBS News reported late Friday morning that the FBI has become involved in the investigation.
Update, 11:05 AM EST: ABC News has published images of the attacker, from the surveillance video:
Update, 11:15 AM EST: Philly.com reports the shooter has been identified as Edward Archer, 30, of Yeadon.
Update, 1:15 PM: According to Commissioner Ross, the attacker pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.
Also, the gun used in the attack was reportedly stolen, which will be bad news for those who were frantically looking for a way to fold the incident into their gun-control narratives.
Update, 1:45 PM: Philly.com has some more details about Edward Archer, courtesy of his mother:
Reached at her home in Lansdowne, his mother, Valerie Holliday, said Archer was the eldest of seven children and suffered head injuries from playing football and a moped accident. “He’s been acting kind of strange lately. He’s been talking to himself... laughing and mumbling,” Holliday said. “He’s been hearing voices in his head. We asked him to get medical help.” She said her son is devout Muslim who has practiced the faith “for a long time.” “He’s going through a lot lately,” Holliday said, adding Archer believed he was targeted by police.
There are some good reasons the police might have “targeted” Edward:
Archer was scheduled to be sentenced Monday in a Delaware County case, according to court records. He was found guilty in a November nonjury trial of forging documents, careless driving, driving with a suspended or revoked license and other related offenses. In Philadelphia, he was sentenced in March to nine to 23 months in jail and two years probation in an assault case. He was charged with aggravated assault, conspiracy, firearms offenses and terroristic threats for a January 2012 incident but pleaded guilty to simple assault.
Here’s a thought: maybe we should put more effort into enforcing existing laws, rather than passing a boatload of new ones. Of course, the existing laws involve difficult duties such as catching and imprisoning violent criminals, and protecting the nation from terrorist threats – both of which are pursuits that often infuriate the cult of political correctness.
It’s much easier to pass new laws that either do nothing of substance, or involve pushing around decent law-abiding taxpayers. Telling a rape victim she shouldn’t have a gun to defend herself is far easier than keeping someone imprisoned for assault.
Philly.com also tells us a bit more about the wounded Officer Jesse Hartnett, hailed as a “true hero” by fellow officers. He actually got out of his car and pursued the suspect on foot, after getting sprayed with 13 bullets and taking three hits in the arm. His father Robert described Hartnett as “a very quality young man.” On that, I think we can all agree.Jarno Trulli ( Italian pronunciation: [ˈjarno ˈtrulli]; born 13 July 1974) is an Italian professional automotive racing driver. He regularly competed in Formula One from 1997 to 2011, driving for Minardi, Prost, Jordan, Renault, Toyota, Lotus Racing and Team Lotus. His best result in the World Drivers' Championship was sixth place in 2004; this was also the year in which he scored the only win of his Formula One career at the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix.
Throughout his Formula One career, Trulli was renowned for his skill in qualifying, regularly achieving far better grid positions than rivals with superior cars to his own.[1] He was also known for his defensive driving style which allowed him to successfully hold off quicker drivers, sometimes for an entire race. The combination of being able to achieve high grid positions in comparatively slow cars and his ability to hold off faster drivers would often result in a line of vehicles forming behind him during a race, which was commonly referred to as the 'Trulli Train' by commentators, fans and journalists.[2]
Trulli was slated to compete in the 2012 Formula One season, but retired before the season began. In 2014–15 he competed in the inaugural season of the FIA Formula E Championship, driving for Trulli GP, a team he founded himself.[3]
Career [ edit ]
Early career and junior formulae [ edit ]
His parents were motorsport fans and named their son after Jarno Saarinen, the Finnish Grand Prix motorcycle racing champion who was killed at Monza in 1973. He started racing in karts at an early age; after winning the Karting World Championship in 1991, the Italian and several karting championships in different categories up to 1995, Trulli won the German Formula Three Championship in 1996.
Formula One [ edit ]
Minardi and Prost (1997–1999) [ edit ]
In 1997, Trulli made his debut in Formula One with Minardi. After 7 races he replaced the injured Olivier Panis at Prost and impressed immediately, finishing fourth in Germany and even leading in Austria, looking set to finish second until his engine blew. He stayed at the Prost team for the next two seasons and eventually scored his first podium in wet conditions at the 1999 European Grand Prix. However, this was a rare highlight in a race few of the main front-runners finished, and the poor performance of the Prost team convinced him that a switch to Jordan would bring improved results.
Jordan (2000–2001) [ edit ]
In 2000 he moved to the Irish squad, but the team was no longer the force it had been in the late 1990s. In his two years with Jordan, Trulli failed to score a podium, but did impress with a series of brilliant qualifying displays. During this period suggestions were made that Trulli was more of a qualifying specialist than an out-and-out fast race driver, a charge he frequently denied. Under long-term contract to personal manager (and Renault manager) Flavio Briatore, Trulli secured a contract with the Anglo-French squad for 2002.
Renault (2002–2004) [ edit ]
Alongside Jenson Button, he often outqualified his British teammate, but was generally shaded in races. Regardless of Button's improved pace that season, it was Trulli who stayed at Renault for 2003 to partner promoted test-driver Fernando Alonso. The 2003 Renault was a strong car and in Alonso's hands won in Hungary. Trulli struggled to attain similar results, but did achieve a podium in Germany, his first since leaving Prost.
Mindful of how much Alonso had outperformed him in 2003, Trulli improved markedly the next year. For the first half of the season he was the better of the two Renault drivers, racking up regular points and podiums. At Monaco he finally took his first victory after a brilliant display from pole position. Having performed so well, the Italian was eager to stick with the team for 2005, but his relationship with team-boss Briatore soured. A last corner error which allowed Ferrari's Rubens Barrichello onto the podium in France enraged the team, and from that point his days with the French manufacturer were numbered. He did not score any points after the French Grand Prix and was consistently off the pace during races. He later accused the team of favouring Alonso, but the reasons why his 2004 season deteriorated have never been properly identified. He was sacked three races before the end of the season and replaced by 1997 World Champion Jacques Villeneuve, despite leading his teammate in the championship at that point. Trulli had already agreed to drive for Toyota in 2005, and his early exit from Renault allowed him to take up his new seat for the last two races of the 2004 season, replacing Ricardo Zonta.
Toyota (2004–2009) [ edit ]
Trulli driving the Toyota TF105 in 2005
In 2005, early season podiums demonstrated Trulli's speed and at Indianapolis he took Toyota's first Formula One pole. For the vast majority of the year he outpaced his highly paid teammate Ralf Schumacher, but a late season dip in form saw him slip to seventh in the championship, two points behind the German.
Jarno Trulli in Helsinki in 2006
2006 [ edit ]
In 2006, Trulli suffered a very poor start to the season. On the first lap of the Australian Grand Prix, he was taken out by David Coulthard. He seemed to be outpaced by teammate Ralf Schumacher more often than not, but finally scored his first points of the season when he raced to 6th from 4th on the grid at the Canadian Grand Prix. Following this was a 4th place in the United States Grand Prix. From then on, he would only score 3 more times, with a couple of 7th-place finishes in the German Grand Prix and the Italian Grand Prix and also a 6th place in the Japanese Grand Prix, where his car became troublesome to drive mid-race, and Ralf Schumacher was delayed in the process. Trulli was racing very well in the season finale at Interlagos, but his car suffered suspension failure in the first 10 laps, a fate which befell his teammate at the same time. He finished 12th overall.
2007 [ edit ]
Trulli scored his first points of 2007 in Malaysia, finishing in 7th place after qualifying 8th. A couple more points followed in Bahrain, but he stalled on the grid at the start of the Spanish Grand Prix and dropped out during the early laps due to mechanical failure. Monaco brought no better fortune for Trulli, as he finished down in 15th place, just ahead of teammate Schumacher, after qualifying his season-worst 14th. Points were collected by Trulli at the Indianapolis for 6th place. After a series of non-scoring runs, Trulli said that the result was 'incredible'.[4] He also qualified well for the French Grand Prix but crashed with the Renault of Heikki Kovalainen on the opening lap, and duly retired because of the damage. Trulli accepted the blame for the incident. The second half of the season was disappointing with Trulli's only point coming in the final race of the season at Brazil.
Post season there had been reports that Trulli's contract was not safe, and that he may have been replaced in the Toyota team for 2008 by Heikki Kovalainen.[5] These proved unfounded as Kovalainen signed for McLaren.
2008 [ edit ]
Trulli driving for Toyota at the 2008 French Grand Prix, where he scored the team's first podium finish for more than two years
In 2008, Trulli was hoping Toyota would make a big step forward. Timo Glock was confirmed as his teammate for the season.[6] Trulli started the season quite well, with several points scoring finishes, the height of which was a fourth-place finish in Malaysia. Trulli's qualifying performances were also very good throughout the first few rounds of the Championship. His form then slumped a little, with disappointing performances in Turkey and Monaco, as he finished in non-points scoring positions.
However, he bounced back from this with a 6th-place finish in Montreal. He then topped that in France by finishing on the podium in 3rd place, holding off the challenge of Heikki Kovalainen and Robert Kubica in the closing laps.
He qualified on the front row alongside pole-sitter Felipe Massa for the season-ending Brazilian Grand Prix, which was to decide the 2008 world championship between Massa and Lewis Hamilton. During the race, Trulli had several close shaves in the changeable weather conditions, and eventually finished 8th. His teammate Glock played a pivotal part in the title outcome as he was passed by Hamilton on the last corner of the race, which gave the Englishman the championship by one point from Massa, who won easily.
2009 [ edit ]
Trulli was confident going into 2009.[7] In the first race of the 2009 season, the Toyotas of Trulli and Glock started the race from the pitlane as their qualifying times were disallowed due to Toyota's flexible rear wing breaching regulations. Although Trulli started from the pit lane, he finished in an impressive 3rd place before being penalised 25 seconds, dropping him to 12th position for passing Lewis Hamilton under the safety car. A few days after this decision, Hamilton was disqualified from the race results for'misleading' the race stewards by insisting that Jarno Trulli had passed him under the Safety Car although Hamilton in fact let him pass on purpose due to an order given by the team from the pitlane. Jarno Trulli therefore regained his third-place finish.[8] At the Bahrain Grand Prix, Trulli qualified on pole position but due to an unconventional tyre strategy, he finished third. However he did record the fastest lap, the only time he has achieved this in his career. He holds the record of having started the most Grands Prix before recording a fastest lap.
He crashed out of the Spanish Grand Prix after being forced off the track at the second corner and being collected by Adrian Sutil, and then had a poor performance in Monaco as the Toyotas qualified on the back row of the grid. Improvements saw him score points in three of the next four races, before the following four rounds saw him struggle again as he failed to finish in the Top 10. At the Singapore Grand Prix he placed 12th while teammate Glock was second. Trulli then fought back at the Japanese Grand Prix – which would prove to be Toyota's last home race – by qualifying and finishing second. He then qualified fourth in torrential conditions in Brazil, but like in Spain collided with Adrian Sutil on the opening lap of the race, an incident which enraged Trulli as he blamed Sutil for the crash. His obvious display of anger towards Sutil (who also retired) afterwards earned him a $10,000 fine. Trulli finished seventh at the season finale in Abu Dhabi scoring his final points in Toyota F1's last race.
Lotus (2010–2011) [ edit ]
2010 [ edit ]
On 14 December 2009, Trulli was confirmed as one of the newly formed Lotus team's drivers, joining former McLaren driver Heikki Kovalainen.[9] He only finished one of the opening four races, a weaker reliability record than Kovalainen, leading him to note that "everything happens on my car and my car only – so to this day, my expectations have not been met".[10]
At the launch of the Lotus T127, Trulli admitted in an interview with Autosport that US F1 and Sauber had been in contact with him. In late 2009, Trulli was asked to test a NASCAR stock car in North America for Toyota. The car was set up by Michael Waltrip Racing.
2011 [ edit ]
Trulli continued to drive for Lotus in 2011, with Lotus Racing being renamed Team Lotus. He again partnered Heikki Kovalainen.
Trulli's season started with thirteenth in Australia, before a retirement with a clutch problem in Malaysia. Trulli finished each of the next six races, equalling his best season finish of thirteenth in Monaco. In Britain, he retired with an oil leak. For the German Grand Prix, Trulli was replaced by reserve driver Karun Chandhok.[11] When he returned in Hungary, he retired due to a water leak. He finished 14th at both the Belgian Grand Prix and the Italian Grand Prix, where it was announced that Trulli would be retained for the 2012 season.[12] After retiring in Singapore with a gearbox failure, Trulli finished 19th in Japan, 17th in Korea and 19th again, in India.
Caterham (2012) [ edit ]
Trulli in pre-season testing for Caterham at Jerez – he was replaced by Vitaly Petrov after this test
Team Lotus was renamed to Caterham F1 ahead of the 2012 season.[13] Trulli drove in one pre-season test, but on 17 February 2012 it was announced that Trulli was replaced by Vitaly Petrov.[14][15] This left Formula One without an Italian driver at the start of the 2012 season, for the first time since 1969.
FIA Formula E Championship [ edit ]
In 2014–15 season Trulli drove in the inaugural FIA Formula E Championship for his own team Trulli GP in partnership with Drayson Racing Technologies and Super Nova Racing, as announced on 18 June 2014. After failing to pass scrutineering of their new drivetrain for the first two races of the 2015–16 season, the team withdrew from the championship.[16]
Racing record [ edit ]
Career summary [ edit ]
Complete Formula One results [ edit ]
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
‡ Half points awarded as less than 75% of race distance was completed.
† Driver did not finish the Grand Prix, but was classified as they had completed over 90% of the race distance.
Complete Formula E results [ edit ]
(key) (Races in bold indicate pole position; races in italics indicate fastest lap)
† Driver did not finish the race, but was classified as he completed more than 90% of the race distance.
Pre-Formula One career [ edit ]
1996: Champion in German Formula 3 (KMS Dallara-Opel)
1995: 4th in German Formula 3 (KMS Dallara-Opel), 1st in Italian Karting class 100 FA, 1st in World karting class 125FC, Senna Memorial World Cup winner
1994: Senna Memorial World Cup winner, 1st in North American class 100SA, 1st in European class 100SA
1993: 2nd in World karting Champion class 100 SA, 1st in Grand prix of Japan Class 100 FSA
1992: 2nd in World karting class 125 FC
1991: Champion in Karting World Championship 100 FK
1990: 1st in Grand Prix of Hong Kong Class 100 FA
1988–1990: Three times Champion in Italian National 100 Class
1983–1995: Karting
Helmet [ edit ]
Trulli's helmet from the 2009 season
Trulli's original helmet design was white with a blue shape around the visor with a blue circle in the top and a green J with a red T in the sides. A ring around the blue circle was incorporated when he raced at Jordan and Renault, being coloured after the team's main sponsor. In 2004 his helmet changed from white to chromed silver and the shape, the J and the T became chromed with black outline. Later, in his first Toyota years the top became red and was added a white ring around the red circle. Finally in 2008 the helmet turned red with the J and the T of the original colours (and white outline) plus a white line on the chin area. From his Lotus years, the helmet design remained intact, with the change of the shades of colour from chromed to normal shades (the chromed silver becomes white).[17][18]
Personal life [ edit ]
Trulli is married to Barbara and they have two sons, Enzo (b. 2005), named after Trulli's father, and Marco (b. 2006). He is the co-owner of a vineyard in the Abruzzo region in Italy and produces his own wine.[19] He also has his own range of Karts named 'Trulli Kart'; Trulli himself was a World Champion at Karting level.[20] His son Enzo currently competes in the WSK karting series.[21]
See also [ edit ]In Sperling et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 163602 (2017)], we introduced and applied a detector-independent method to uncover nonclassicality. Here, we extend those techniques and give more details on the performed analysis. We derive a general theory of the positive-operator-valued measure that describes multiplexing layouts with arbitrary detectors. From the resulting quantum version of a multinomial statistics, we infer nonclassicality probes based on a matrix of normally ordered moments. We discuss these criteria and apply the theory to our data which are measured with superconducting transition-edge sensors. Our experiment produces heralded multiphoton states from a parametric down-conversion light source. We show that the known notions of sub-Poisson and sub-binomial light can be deduced from our general approach, and we establish the concept of sub-multinomial light, which is shown to outperform the former two concepts of nonclassicality for our data.
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.96.013804
©2017 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Research Areas Quantum opticsSecurity is our top priority at the moment. We have been really commited to it and will continue to be.
We are pleased to announce that our code has been reviewed by the team of iExec, audited by Quantstamp, and audited by Clement Lesaege, CTO at Kleros. No vulnerability that would impact the token launch has been found.
Now that the audit has been completed, we are launching a bug bounty program. The bounty concerns only the smart contracts of the token launch.
The code is available here (commit: d493261): https://github.com/RequestNetwork/RequestTokenSale
Critical vulnerabilities will be awarded with up to $20 000, while major bugs will be awarded with up to $15 000.
Rules & Rewards
The rules of our bug bounty program are the same which applied to the Ethereum protocol: https://bounty.ethereum.org
Issues that have already been submitted by another user or are already known to the Request Network team are not eligible for bounty rewards.
Public disclosure of a vulnerability makes it ineligible for a bounty.
The Request Network core development team, employees, and all other people paid by the Request Network project, directly or indirectly, are not eligible for rewards.
The Request Network bounty program considers a number of variables in determining rewards. Determinations of eligibility, score, and all terms related to an award are at the sole and final discretion of the Request Network Foundation bug bounty panel.
The value of rewards paid out will vary depending on Severity. The severity is calculated according to the OWASP risk rating model based on Impact and Likelihood :
Reward sizes are guided by the rules below, but are in the end determined at the sole discretion of the Request Network Foundation bug bounty panel.
Critical: up to $20 000
High: up to $15 000
Medium: up to $10 000
Low: up to $2 000
Note: up to $500
All bounty will be paid in Ethereum.
Scope
5 files are within the scope.
ProgressiveIndividualCappedCrowdsale.sol
RequestToken.sol
RequestTokenSale.sol
StandardCrowdsale.sol
WhitelistedCrowdsale.sol
The files inside the folder base are from Open Zeppelin and have not been modified.
Informal Specification of the Contract
The token launch is open only to registered users. Every user has the same individual cap for the amount of Ether he can contribute. In the event, a capped number of tokens are offered (e.g. there is a hard cap for raised Ether).
In the first 24 hours, user contribution is limited by the individual cap. In the second 24 hours, the individual cap doubles. In the 24 hours thereafter, the individual cap doubles again etc.. until token supply is depleted.
Preminted tokens are allocated to 4 different addresses.
500000000 REQ (50%) are sent to the token launch contract
150000000 REQ (15%) are sent to the team vesting contract
150000000 REQ (15%) are sent to the foundation multisig wallet
200000000 REQ (20%) are sent to the early investors multisig wallet
Detailed Description
Overview of the flow
The start time of the token sale is denoted by T.
On T-5 days, we deploy RequestTokenSale.sol which will deploy also Requestoken.sol. Then, we list users for the whitelist. The listing is done by us with a standard private key. Upon deployment, preminted tokens are already distributed to 4 different addresses. We manually verify that preminted tokens were assigned to the correct addresses. Token transfers are enabled only for the early contributors multisig wallet, the foundation multisig wallet, and the token launch contract. We start to issue the token to the early contributor via the early contributors multisig wallet. On T -3, we compute the individual cap and set it up on the blockchain thanks to the entry “RequestTokenSale/setBaseEthCapPerAddress()” On T-1, baseEthCapPerAddress and the whitelist are not modifiable anymore. We check the cap and the whitelist. On T, the event starts. At this point, users can participate according to the individual cap. It is possible to buy several times, as long as cap is not exceeded. On T+1, the event continues but the individual cap is doubled. On T+2, the event continues if the hard cap is not reached with the individual cap being doubled again. On T+3, the event continues if the hard cap is not reached with the individual cap being doubled again. On T+4, the token launch is over. We transfer the tokens that are not sold to the foundation multisig wallet with the entry RequestTokenSale.drainRemainingToken() On T+7, tokens are tradable for everyone.
Per module description
The system has 2 modules : the token launch (RequestTokenSale.sol) and the token (RequestToken.sol)
The token launch (RequestTokenSale.sol)
Implemented in RequestTokenSale.sol.
It inherits from StandardCrowdsale.sol by Open Zeppelin with small changes (see REQUEST-NOTE in comments) providing the basic check for the token launch.
It inherits from CappedCrowdsale.sol by Open Zeppelin providing the hard cap.
It inherits from ProgressiveIndividualCappedCrowdsale.sol developped by Request, providing the progressive individual cap.
It inherits from WhitelistedCrowdsale.sol developped by Request, providing the whitelist mechanism.
It uses SafeMath.sol by Open Zeppelin.
The owner can list and delist users until the last 24h before the token launch. The owner can modify the individual base cap until the last 24h before the token launch.
Because we expect > 10k users, we must start uploading the users before we have a full list. For this reason we also have an optimized version of listing which can take an array as input.
The token (RequestToken.sol)
Implemented in RequestToken.sol. It inherits from StandardToken.sol by Open Zeppelin (ERC20 standard token) It inherits from Ownable.sol by Open Zeppelin It uses SafeMath.sol by Open Zeppelin
The token is fully compatible with the ERC20 standard, with the next addition:
The tokens become transferable 7 days after the token launch start, hence October 20th. To be more precise, only the token launch contract, the early contributors multisig wallet and the foundation multisig wallet are allowed to transfer tokens before that date.
More information
The bug bounty program starts now, and we encourage you to report the bugs as an issue on the Github repository. You can also email [email protected]. Anonymous submissions are welcome as well.Get the biggest Manchester United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
More than twenty devastated Manchester United fans found their cars had been vandalised after the victory over Bournemouth.
Windows were smashed and wheels were removed during a wrecking spree at a car park close to Old Trafford as the game continued.
Police were called to the car park at the end of Pomona Strand in Old Trafford - close to the Pomona Metrolink station - at 8.37pm.
Officers found a number of vehicles, including BMWs and VWs, on the car park had been vandalised. Many had their rear windows smashed in. It was not clear whether items had been stolen from inside the cars.
Read more: Even Manchester United chief executive Ed Woodward is searched amid heightened security at Old Trafford
One vehicle, a Ford, parked on Pomona Strand was left standing on bricks after thieves had made off with the wheels.
The car owners only realised the wrecking spree once they returned from the rearranged Premier League game against Bournemouth, which United won 3-1.
The match had to be rearranged following a bomb scare just before the original fixture on Sunday when some 50,000 supporters were evacuated.
Later it transpired that the suspicious device was a fake bomb which had been left behind in the stadium in error following a training exercise last week.
Following Tuesday night’s wrecking spree, GMP Traffic tweeted images of the damage and asked anyone with information to call police on 101.
They wrote: “20+ cars damaged on Pomona Strand this evening during football match. Any info please call 101.”
Watch: Louis Van Gaal greets fans after Bournemouth matchYou’ve read about Pantheon, you’ve followed the various crowdfunding campaigns, and you’ve devoured every second of its trailers. Now it’s time to see the game in action.
This Friday, the Visionary Realms team is going to be playing Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen on Twitch for the first time. The stream will take place at 7:00 p.m. EST on March 11th.
“Join CCO Brad McQuaid, Creative Director Chris Perkins, and a handful of other VR developers as they play through some of Pantheon’s content,” the description reads. “The team at VR will be showing viewers some new regions, a bit of combat, and lightly touch on some of the differentiators that make Pantheon the unique classically-spirited MMO that is poised to capture a market segment many have overlooked or may not have even known about.”
Source: Press releaseFrom |
P =.97) or sex (χ2 = 2.05; P =.15). The crash hazard among males with ADHD was 1.42 times higher (95% CI, 1.28-1.56) than among males without ADHD and 1.25 times higher (95% CI, 1.08-1.45) for females with ADHD than females without ADHD.
Of 1063 licensed individuals with ADHD and a CHOP network visit in the year before licensure, 267 (25.1%) were prescribed ADHD medication in that year and 129 (12.1%) were prescribed ADHD medication by a CHOP clinician in the 30 days before licensure. There were no significant differences in 2-year postlicensure risk among the 3 groups compared: medication in the previous year but not just before licensure vs none (aHR, 0.95; 95% CI, 0.64-1.41); medication just before licensure vs none (aHR, 1.17; 95% CI, 0.80-1.71); and medication just before licensure vs in the previous year but not just before licensure (aHR, 1.24; 95% CI, 0.78-1.97).
We conducted sensitivity analyses by reclassifying 482 individuals with ADHD who did not have independent confirming evidence of ADHD into the non-ADHD group. Results did not meaningfully change; estimated aHRs for crash were attenuated by less than 1%. We also reweighted the time variable in Cox regression models to assess potential bias owing to differences in driving exposure (mileage) and estimated that individuals with ADHD would have to drive a mean of 48% more miles than those without ADHD before the 95% CIs of aHRs included 1.0.
Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study to estimate licensing probability and crash likelihood throughout adolescence and young adulthood among individuals with ADHD identified in a community setting. Results indicate that individuals with ADHD are licensed somewhat less and later than those without ADHD. Further, licensed individuals with ADHD experienced an estimated 36% increase in the risk of first crash involvement than those without ADHD, an increase that exists regardless of licensure age and persists into early adulthood. Only 12.1% of individuals with ADHD were prescribed medication by a CHOP clinician in the 30 days before licensure; medication status at licensure did not significantly alter crash risk.
Using a rigorous epidemiologic design, this study overcame limitations of previous studies by including objective measures of license and crash occurrence over an extended period, accounting for sex, licensing age, driving experience, comorbid conditions, and other potential confounders and increasing generalizability to the general population of adolescents with ADHD via use of a community-identified cohort. In 1993, a small clinic-based investigation of this topic suggested “an almost fourfold increase in the average frequency of [crash involvement]” for adolescents with ADHD,15 a finding frequently cited in other studies and media.7,26,27 However, it is likely that internal and/or external validity were compromised in that and other previous studies given potential of confounding and limited generalizability owing to comparing specialized clinic-based ADHD samples to conveniently sampled comparison groups; no or inadequate control for driving experience and/or comorbid conditions; small sample sizes; and lack of females.11-15 Additionally, these studies assessed crash outcomes via self-report surveys with long recall periods.11-14 This may be of particular concern among those with ADHD given findings of “positive illusory bias,” or overestimation of performance and abilities, in driving and other domains.28,29 A 2006 meta-analysis of self-report driving studies among adolescent and young adult drivers estimated a risk ratio for crash involvement of 1.88 (95% CI, 1.42-2.50)30; a 2014 meta-analysis that included adult studies but accounted for driving exposure estimated a risk ratio of 1.23 (95% CI, 1.04-1.46).31 Two population-based studies of crash-related hospital visits published in 2010 and 2014 estimated a 34% to 47% increased risk among adolescent male drivers with ADHD and adult drivers with ADHD.32,33
The large population included in this study made it, to our knowledge, the first sufficiently powered to examine how the effect of ADHD on crash rates varied by both sex and licensing age. We did not find evidence that HRs varied significantly by either factor. However, studies34-37 among community samples of children with ADHD have suggested that symptom profiles may differ in ways that would affect driving. Boys may experience greater hyperactivity, impulsivity, and externalizing problems, and girls may experience more internalizing problems (eg, anxiety, depression) and potentially higher levels of inattention.34-37 Future research should examine male and female drivers separately to uncover potential sex-based mechanisms underlying increased crash risk among adolescent drivers with ADHD. In addition, although initial crash risk is generally lower for adolescents licensed later,16 we found no evidence that crash risk differs multiplicatively by licensing age for adolescents and young adults with and without ADHD. More in-depth analyses should be conducted to determine why adolescents with ADHD get licensed later and whether the potential benefits of later licensure might be enhanced by extending the intermediate phase of Graduated Driver Licensing, which lowers crash risk by restricting exposure to high-risk situations.38
Study results demonstrate the need to provide guidance for families around reducing the elevated crash risk among young drivers with ADHD,39 yet foundational research and evidence-based recommendations are lacking. Several efficacy studies, primarily using driving simulators, indicate that ADHD medication improves driving behavior.18,19 Further, a prior study found that medication statistically significantly reduced the risk of serious transport crashes in male but not female patients with ADHD.33 Our study found that prescription rates at licensure were low and did not reveal a difference in crash risk among those prescribed medication at licensure. Notably, however, we were not able to capture prescriptions from non-CHOP clinicians, and sample size was limited. The real-world effectiveness of medication may be attenuated because of known inconsistent adherence among adolescents and failure to use medication, which is generally short-acting, when driving (eg, after school).40-43 On-road crash studies that capture medication use more precisely than ordered or dispensed prescriptions and at the time of the crash are critically needed. Other studies have explored aspects of driver training and parental monitoring with some early suggestion of benefit,44,45 but none have demonstrated clear positive effects on objective measures of risky driving or crashes. Additional work is critically needed to provide clinicians with evidence-based guidance on appropriate age of licensure and specific practice guidelines to reduce crashes in this population (including training, monitoring, and medication use).
Limitations
There are several limitations of this study. Diagnoses relied on assessment by primary care clinicians rather than rigorous testing using criterion standard as set by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition); however, we validated ADHD diagnosis codes with high sensitivity and specificity, and most individuals continued to have primary care visits after becoming eligible for licensure.21 Given that our sample includes individuals who were identified before adolescence, a certain percentage may not have impairments owing to ADHD symptoms by the time of licensure46; thus, this sample more appropriately reflects individuals with a lifetime history of ADHD. Additionally, we did not directly measure driving exposure. Young adults with ADHD reported driving more in 2 of 3 previous studies that assessed mileage.11,12,47 However, these assessments involved surveys of usual driving patterns at the time of survey, potentially years after crash occurrence, or total mileage driven in the 3 to 5 years since licensure and may be subject to positive illusory bias. Our analyses inherently accounted for time since licensure, which has been used as a proxy for exposure and itself is a critically important variable given rapid declines in crash rates over the first few years of driving. Adolescents and young adults with ADHD may also be less likely to attend college, and hence move out of state after high school, than their counterparts without ADHD48,49; however, significant associations were constant over time and include the period just after licensure when most individuals were still in high school. Finally, there may be limits to generalizability. New Jersey has the oldest licensing age in the United States and is highly urbanized. Further, the prevalence of ADHD in our primary care cohort (14%) was somewhat higher than US-based estimates,50 perhaps reflecting parental decisions to seek care within the CHOP network.
Conclusions
Adolescents and young adults with ADHD experience an estimated 36% higher motor vehicle crash risk than their counterparts without ADHD regardless of licensure age or sex; risk persists over the first few years of licensure. Few individuals with ADHD had active ADHD prescriptions at the time of licensure. Future research is needed to examine parent and clinician management of licensure decisions and crash risk among patients with ADHD, elucidate sex-specific mechanisms by which ADHD influences crash risk to develop countermeasures, and examine real-world effectiveness of medication use and detrimental effects of distractions.
Back to top Article Information
Accepted for Publication: March 8, 2017.
Corresponding Author: Allison E. Curry, PhD, MPH, Center for Injury Research and Prevention, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Roberts Pediatric Research Building, 2716 South St, 13 Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19146 ([email protected]).
Published Online: June 12, 2017. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2017.0910
Author Contributions: Drs Curry and Metzger had full access to all of the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Study concept and design: Curry, Metzger, Winston, Power.
Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: Curry, Metzger, Pfeiffer, Elliott, Winston.
Drafting of the manuscript: Curry, Metzger, Elliott.
Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: Metzger, Pfeiffer, Winston, Power.
Statistical analysis: Curry, Metzger, Pfeiffer, Elliott.
Obtained funding: Curry.
Administrative, technical, or material support: Pfeiffer, Winston.
Study supervision: Curry, Elliott.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: None reported.
Funding/Support: This work was supported by grant 1R01HD079398 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health (Dr Curry).
Role of the Funder/Sponsor: The sponsor had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
Disclaimer: The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Additional Contributions: We thank Meghan Kirk, MS, and Sayaka Ogawa, BS, from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for their help in coordinating and formatting the manuscript; Christine Norris, BA, from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for her editorial guidance; and the New Jersey Department of Transportation, New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, and New Jersey Office of Information Technology for their assistance in providing data. Ms Ogawa was a research assistant funded on the R01 grant from the National Institutes of Health. Ms Kirk and Ms Norris did not receive compensation.Whilst you were doing other things like living your life and or doing other constructive shyt, there was a huge internet kerfuffle, wait… ugh I did not use; Kerfuffle in a sentence. I just lost both my man card and black card all in one fell swoop.
Let me have a redo. Ready? OK…
This weekend some foolishness went down between the fans of feminist icon; Ani Difranco and feminist women of color as news spread that Difranco was holding a seminar for songwriting and other progressive goodness at good ol Nottoway plantation in Louisiana. Yeah you read that right. A plantation.
Now if someone from the far right said they were holding a shindig at a real southern plantation, home of some of the most heinous acts to ever happen on this soil, none of us wold be very shocked at all. We’d all pretty much sit here like:
But this is progressive, liberal, feminist icon; Ani DiFranco we’re talking about. An absolute icon in the feminist/progressive movement for the past 20 years even. When SHE said she was throwing an event at the home of Nottoway Plantation, her clueless fans were like:
Women of colour feminists were like:
and their allies looked at Ani DiFranco’s stupid azz like:
So of course, women of colour went to the event’s facebook page and let it be known how disgusted they were with how this was yet another slap in the face from white women feminists towards their black feminist “sisters”. Apparently unbeknownst to me, there is quite the amount of strife within the feminist community in regards to white feminists dismissing the issues brought to the table by feminist women of colour and ignoring racism when it’s convenient for the whole.
But of course when the women of colour and their allies made their points about how offensive holding this event on a plantation was, they were shot down by the mainstream feminists. Then….as those with lovely privilege like to do, they explained to the angry women of colour why it wasn’t offensive and how their being offended and expressing such anger was in bad taste.
One of them in particular, Mandi, presented her points as to why women of colour shouldn’t be offended and when that didn’t work, she decided to create a fake facebook account of a Black Woman, grab some random negress foto, use the moniker;’ Laqueeta, then start speaking “black” to try and pretend to be black in order to quell the angry black people …
THIS bytch went into digital black face, folks…
THAT Bytch was like:
But to add insult to injury, when the women of colour and their allies spoke out, many of their posts were actually DELETED from the page and some of the fans went to go make their own page about the event so they didn’t have to listen to the cries of the women of colour….
because how dare they express outrage at something and interfere with the fun that the white feminists wanted to have. After all they have (not) done for black feminists…
and many other women chimed in with their digital tears at how everything was so unfair…and women of colour were making this an big deal…
I mean how inconsiderate of women of colour for being offended at this…
The interesting thing about all of this is that when black folks complain about referencing Slavery and we’re always told we need to get over it and learn to stop being so hypersensitive. Native Americans get told the saaaame thing. But soon as it’s about anyone else, we’re told to stfu and respect the atrocities and tragedies.
In the end the event was cancelled.
But man was a dirty internal war between mainstream feminists and women of colour feminists exposed…big time.
and of course… good ol privilege..
Did you follow the nonsense/spectacle over the weekend?
What say you?In the introduction to the Dallas Police Memorial, CNN’s Don Lemon listed 11 mass shootings that occurred on President Obama’s watch. And although Lemon did not point it out, 10 of those mass shootings occurred in gun-free zones.
Appearing on CNN’s Wolf, Lemon previewed Obama’s address in Dallas by saying, “I think this has become deeply personal for the president because he’s had to do it 11 times. When we say 11 times, we just say numbers, but that’s dozens of families, dozens of loved ones who have lost people that he has had to console over the years.”
Lemon continued by reading the 11 mass shootings that have taken place on Obama’s watch:
Fort Hood, that was in 2009, Tucson was 2011, Newtown was 2012, Aurora was 2012, the Navy Yard was 2013, Fort Hood was 2014, Charleston 2015, Roseburg [was] 2015, San Bernardino 2015, Orlando 2016, and here we are in Dallas — just a few weeks after Orlando — this is why it is personal for the president.
All of these except the Dallas police ambush took place in gun-free zones.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at [email protected] comes after the family enjoyed two-week holiday in Menorca this summer
She plans to buy iPads for four of her youngsters and jewellery for others
The 32-year-old says she's managed to save thousands for Christmas
She insists it's right she gets handouts to cover the cost of her children
A benefits mother-of-11 infamous for taking her huge brood on foreign holidays has boasted about having £4,000 to splash on Christmas presents.
Cheryl Prudham has previously attracted controversy for insisting she's happy to claim state handouts and blaming the welfare system for her large family.
She has now revealed that her family's heavily-subsidised income has allowed her to stash away thousands for the festive season.
Scroll down for video
Cheryl Prudham, pictured with husband Rob and her family, says she has saved £4,000 from her benefits to spend on Christmas presents for her 11 children
The couple - who this summer took their children to Menorca on holiday - have recently had twin daughters
The 32-year-old, from Gravesend, Kent, says she has saved £350 for each of her youngsters which she plans to spend on lavish gifts.
She told Closer magazine: 'I love spoiling them at Christmas - and being on benefits means I can do that.
'I've bought four of then iPad minis, costing £250 each, and the twins will get gold bracelets with their names engraved on them.'
In her latest interview, Mrs Prudham also revealed that her benefits help her fund a £30-a-week smoking habit and have paid for the family to redecorate their new five-bedroom council house.
Her comments have provoked anger among campaigners, who say state handouts should not fund lavish lifestyles.
Andy Silvester, from the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'It's not for the state to say how many children anyone should have, but there is a limit to the number of children taxpayers can support.
'Couples up and down the country face tough decisions all the time when they decide if they can afford another child, and those on benefits should be no different.'
Mrs Prudham has previously attracted controversy for insisting it was right that taxpayers paid for her holiday
The mother-of-11 says she plans to get iPad minis for four of her children and gold bracelets for the twins
They were moved into a five-bedroom council house after complaining their three-bed home was cramped
Mrs Prudham's husband Rob earns £1,600-a-month as a delivery driver, but their large family means they still get more than £28,000-a-year in benefits and tax credits.
The mother-of-11 first attracted criticism for demanding her local council provide her with a bigger council house to give her growing brood more space.
The family were then photographed enjoying a two-week holiday in Menorca, which she insisted they 'deserved'.
Mrs Prudham had her first son George, 13, when she was just 17 and was living in a homeless hostel in Kent in the summer of 2000.
She soon moved into a flat with her ex-boyfriend and had second son, Jack, 12, and her eldest daughter Caitlin, eight.
She then had three unplanned pregnancies; Maisie, seven, Lillie, five, and Madison, four.
In March 2009, she met current husband Rob and they had Leon, now three. They then had Lenny, now two, before she gave birth to daughter Lainey in January last year.
She then had twins Lacey-May and Lexi-Rose this summer.
Describing the holiday, she said: 'I asked the school headmaster if we could get time off, but he said 'no'. So we decided to go anyway. One of the weeks was during half term, so they haven't missed that much school'SAM ALLARDYCE wants the Premier League to introduce a January break to help reduce the number of injuries.
The Hammers manager is likely to be without two of his key players for tomorrow's visit to Everton. Winger Stewart Downing picked up a knee problem in England's 3-1 win over Scotland on Tuesday, while Senegal international Diafra Sakho sat out an Africa Cup of Nations tie against Botswana because of a back injury. Allardyce now feels it is time England follows the lead of Spanish and German football and brings in a winter break to make sure top stars can extend their careers. The Hammers boss said: "The load of constant performance at the highest level takes its toll across the whole of the Premier League.
"The demand on the players is so great for so long that eventually they're going to break down. If you look at the load placed this year on players, it's greater than ever before. "Not only do they travel at international level across the world but the constant pressure of the league is getting faster and more demanding, physically and mentally.Most land Israel sold for new homes in 2014 in West Bank or East Jerusalem
Haaretz 25 mar by Nimrod Bousso — The Israel Lands Authority published tenders for land to build some 3,050 residential units in the first quarter but only 45 units are in the center of the country and 55% are in the West Bank or East Jerusalem. The land sales reflect an annual pace of 12,000 new units, which is considered very low and casts serious doubt on the government’s ability to meet its housing-supply targets for this year, especially in areas of high demand near the center of the country. This is particularly embarrassing for the ILA and the Housing and Construction Ministry, which set optimistic new-construction targets for 2014. The sole land tender in the center of Israel was for 126 units in Tel Mond northeast of Tel Aviv. But since January 1, land for some 700 units was sold for construction in West Bank settlements, around 23% of the total. Another 966 units, or 31.5%, were in Jerusalem. All the units marketed for new construction in Jerusalem were in neighborhoods over the Green Line that were annexed to the capital after 1967 – Pisgat Ze’ev, Ramot, Ramat Shlomo and Neveh Yaakov – based on an analysis by the The Marker of the figures released by the ILA. All told, some 55% of all new tenders conducted by the ILA were for land over the Green Line.
http://www.haaretz.com/business/.premium-1.581726
Land, property, resources theft & destruction / Ethnic cleansing / Judaization / Racism & Discrimination
Two steps forward, one step back: Israeli’s new discriminatory health rights for Palestinians
72mag 25 Mar by Michael Omer-Man — A new law that extends health insurance rights to non-citizen family members of Israeli citizens discriminates against Palestinians, according to an attorney working on the subject. Israeli ministers signed the new regulations, which according to a Haaretz report on Monday, will primarily benefit Palestinians who are permitted to live in Israel under “family unification” procedures. (The Knesset last week extended the formal ban on family unification, which was first enacted 11 years ago at the height of the Second Intifada. The ban, to which humanitarian exceptions are occasionally granted, applies only to Palestinians and therefore primarily discriminates against the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are most likely to marry Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Those Palestinian family members of Israeli citizens who are granted humanitarian exceptions are given military permits to stay in Israel, but not formal residency permits that would allow them to work or make them eligible for any other social rights granted to residents or citizens.) What the Haaretz report missed, however, is that the new regulation gives far more, and far cheaper social and health rights to non-Palestinian family members in Israel for reasons of family unification. Furthermore, while Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party is attempting to take credit for the new regulation, which despite its discriminatory shortcomings is an important step forward, it turns out that the change is the result of a High Court petition and not, as Attorney Oded Feller of ACRI notes, the good will of any legislator.
http://972mag.com/two-steps-forward-one-step-back-israels-new-discriminatory-health-rights-for-palestinians/88848/
Watch: Thousands celebrate Palestinian culture in Jerusalem
JERUSALEM (Ma‘an) 25 Mar — Thousands of people surrounded Jerusalem’s Old City walls from Jaffa Gate (Bab al-Khalil) to Lions’ Gate (Bab al-Asbat) on March 16 for a celebration of Palestinian culture and education. In an event organized by the Shabbab al-Balad youth initiative, Palestinians from Jerusalem, the West Bank, and inside Israel gathered to read and to mark the anniversary of the opening of a public library in East Jerusalem’s Jabal al-Mukkaber neighborhood. For those in the West Bank who were unable to obtain Israeli permits to enter Jerusalem, a similar event was organized in Bethlehem’s Manger Square.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=682386
In photos: Al-Walaja village faces ‘slow death’ as Israel takes its land
Electronic Intifada 24 Mar by Anne Paq — Sheerin al-Araj, a prominent Palestinian activist from al-Walaja described her village this way in her TedEx Ramallah talk in 2011: “Al-Walaja is a microcosm of Palestine. It’s a window into the Palestinian people’s suffering. It’s a glimpse into the Palestinian people’s resilience, the Palestinian nation’s resilience. For me it is one of the most beautiful places on earth and believe me I have been to many places…. Among this beauty, there is madness – madness that stems from the Israeli occupation that began back in 1948. In October that year, my entire village was forced out by Zionist militias and we scattered all over the world as refugees, mainly in refugee camps in Amman, [Jordan].” Al-Walaja is a beautiful Palestinian village of around 2,000 people, located partly in the occupied West Bank’s Bethlehem governorate. It is well known for its water sources, its beautiful landscapes and agricultural terraces. According to UNWRA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, the village used to span more than 17,793 dunums (4,400 acres). But after more than six decades of continuous dispossession, it stands to be reduced to around 3,000 dunums through the completion of Israel’s separation wall in the West Bank – meaning a loss of around 85 percent of its agricultural lands and a painful share of its cultural heritage.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/photos-al-walaja-village-faces-slow-death-israel-takes-its-land/13264
Palestinians ordered to pay Israel to demolish their own homes
Middle East Monitor 18 Mar— An Israeli court has not only ruled that a number of Palestinian homes in Haifa have to be demolished but also that the home owners must pay 20,000 shekels (just under $6,000) to the authorities to cover the costs. The buildings belong to Palestinian citizens of Israel who refused to be ethnically cleansed from their land when the state was created in 1948. Most of the owners belong to the long-suffering Hamid family, which has 65 members. The Israeli authorities want to displace the family and replace them with Jewish settlers. According to Ata Hamid, his family have neither the means to pay for the demolition costs nor anywhere else to go. Despite living in a prosperous city, he said, like other “Arab-Israelis” they suffer grave economic circumstances. The family has called upon all the Palestinians in Haifa, Lod and Ramle to stand up in their support in the rejection of Israel’s discriminatory housing policy. They have asked the municipality in Lod to take appropriate action to freeze the demolition order and protect their homes. Sadly, dozens more Palestinian families and their homes face the same threat.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/10370-palestinians-ordered-to-pay-israel-to-demolish-their-own-homes
Court asked to restore water to Arab parts of Jerusalem
Haaretz 25 Mar by Nir Hasson — Rights watchdog says four areas have little to no water pressure — A rights group has asked the High Court of Justice to order the Jerusalem water company to restore normal water supply to Arab neighborhoods in the city’s northeast that have been suffering severe shortages for around three weeks. The Sho‘afat refugee camp and three neighborhoods next to it are on the far side of the separation barrier, but all are within city limits and most residents have Israeli ID cards. In the neighborhoods’ elevated areas and in other sections there is no water at all, while the other parts suffer from very low water pressure. Many families have had no choice but to buy water and severely limit their consumption – whether for drinking, showering, laundry or cleaning. As a result, a lawyer for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Keren Tzafrir, filed the petition Tuesday on behalf of the residents and the local community administration. “The water problem is the latest expression, and perhaps the most serious one, of the authorities’ neglect of the neighborhoods on the other side of the wall,” the association said. “Educational services, welfare, transportation, garbage collection, infrastructure and even policing – in almost every respect the state authorities are simply absent from the area…”
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.581944
Tourism as a tool to erase Palestinian identity
Middle East Monitor 22 Mar by Jessica Purkiss — At the entrance of a Dead Sea resort located in the West Bank, Palestinian man Hazem paid his 70 shekels admission fee to the women sitting behind the desk. “Can we camp here?” he asked. Surveying the group of internationals, she said, “Are there any Arabs in your group?” Hazem, born and bred in the West Bank city of Beit Sehour, confessed his origin to the women who replied, “We don’t let Arabs stay the night.” Past the entrance desk, the small stretch of beach is dotted with groups of Palestinian men smoking arguila- flavoured tobacco- and heating coals for BBQ’s. All of them have paid the same entrance fee. The women behind the desk collecting their fees is Israeli and only speaks Hebrew and English, and the shop on site sells Israeli flags and Jewish relics. While this resort stands on the chunk of the Dead Sea that lies in the West Bank, the Palestinian side and its resources have been appropriated by Israel. This means all the Palestinians that visit the resort, in fact any of the three resorts in the occupied Dead Sea area, have to pay Israel to do so. The Dead Sea, which is famous for its skin benefits, is a goldmine for those able to tap into its resources, with the extraction of mud proving to be an extremely lucrative business. Friends of the Earth Middle East claim that there are 50 cosmetic factories on the Western shore, both in the occupied Dead Sea area and in Israel proper, The Israeli cosmetic company Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories ltd. is located on the settlement of “Mitzpe Shalem,” in the occupied West Bank, and is the only cosmetic company to be licensed by Israel to mine mud in the area.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/middle-east/10456-tourism-as-a-tool-to-erase-palestinian-identity
After years of humiliation, Israeli Arabs say getting better treatment at airport
Haaretz 26 Mar by Amira Hass — A new security system at Ben-Gurion International Airport seems to have suspended the invasive and humiliating security checks that have until now been routine for Palestinian and Israeli Arab travelers. For the past two weeks, these passengers say, they have been treated exactly the same as Jewish passengers, instead of being subjected to interrogations, searches and delays. The change is due to the installation of a new, automated system for checking passengers’ bags. “The technological [baggage] check systems have replaced the physical security checks, and their goal is to significantly ease the physical security check process,” Israel Airports Authority spokesman Ofer Lefler said in a written statement to Haaretz. Since the system went into operation on March 9, the practice of selectively and publicly searching the contents of certain suitcases in the departure hall has ceased. Instead, after the routine security interrogation, all passengers are sent straight to the check-in counter, where their baggage is examined in the automated system. The change in procedure was prompted, in part, by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel’s petition to the High Court of Justice demanding that the airports end the discriminatory practice of treating all Arabs as potential security threats and subjecting them to special security checks. Israeli Arabs, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and Palestinians with foreign passports who have gone through Ben-Gurion Airport in the last few weeks have all reported to Haaretz and ACRI that in contrast to previous trips, this time they weren’t asked invasive and aggressive personal questions; their possessions (including laptop computers) weren’t taken from them to be searched; they weren’t separated from the other passengers; and they weren’t body-searched….
http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.581987
Is there by any chance a connection between the changes detailed in the previous article and the following?
US: Israel’s discrimination keeps it out of visa waiver deal
JTA 25 Mar — Discrimination against visiting Arab-Americans is the primary reason Israel is not eligible for a program allowing Israeli tourists in to the United States without visas, the Obama administration said. “The Department of Homeland Security and State remain concerned with the unequal treatment that Palestinian Americans and other Americans of Middle Eastern origin experience at Israel’s border and checkpoints, and reciprocity is the most basic condition of the Visa Waiver Program,” Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, said March 21 in her daily briefing with reporters. The State Department warns Americans of Arab descent that they may be delayed or even turned back when arriving at Israeli points of entry.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.581916
Israel to evacuate 18 families in northern Jordan Valley
IMEMC Mon 24 Mar by Chris Carlson — Israeli forces, on Monday, served 18 families from Wadi Buzeq, in the northern Jordan Valley, with orders to evacuate their homes tomorrow (Tuesday, March 25, 2014), under the pretext of carrying out military training. Representative of the Wadi Buzeq, Imad Harbout, according to the PNN, said that Israeli forces raided the area and gave evacuation orders to 18 families, adding that the residents were ordered to evacuate their homes from 7 am till 4 pm for military purposes.
http://www.imemc.org/article/67354
Israelis attempt to torch Palestinian-owned shop in Jerusalem
JERUSALEM (Ma‘an) 24 Mar — Three Israelis attempted to set fire to a gift shop owned by a Palestinian man in Jerusalem late Monday, an Israeli police spokeswoman said. Luba al-Samri said in a statement that the suspects also vandalized the shop — located on Jaffa Street in West Jerusalem — posting slogans reading “Kahane was right,” before fleeing the scene. She said police were investigating the incident. Meir Kahane was an American-born Israeli rabbi and political figure who advocated expelling all Arabs from Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=684507
Settlers continue to storm Al-Aqsa Mosque compound
IMEMC Mon 24 Mar by Chris Carlson — Israeli settlers raided, on Monday, al-Aqsa mosque through Bab al-Magharbeh (Maghrabi Gate), under the protection of Israeli police. Local and media sources said that the groups raided the mosque in small groups and carried out tours at the mosque’s compound, according to the PNN. The sources added that Israeli police stationed at the main entrances of the mosque imposed strict restrictions on the Palestinians, detaining the IDs of the young men and women until they leave the mosque. It’s worth mentioning that Israeli police arrested Sunday evening, an employee of the Islamic awqaf, Fadi Bakeer, while he was working in the mosque. The raids on al-Aqsa are continuous and have been escalating over the past few months, resulting in violent clashes with settlers and police.
http://www.imemc.org/article/67351
Japan: ‘Settlements violate international law’
IMEMC/Agencies 26 Mar — The Japanese government issued a statement strongly denouncing recent Israeli plans to build hundreds of units, for Jewish settlers, in occupied East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Japan’s Foreign Ministry said that Israel’s settlement activities violate International Law, and obstruct international efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace agreement, based on the two-state solution, especially US efforts to maintain direct peace talks between Ramallah and Tel Aviv. “Settlements violate International Law,” the Foreign Ministry stated. “Japan is renewing its call to Tel Aviv to stop its settlement construction and expansion activities”. It also stated that Israel must stop its unilateral moves, especially in occupied Jerusalem, and to refrain from any actions which could jeopardize direct peace talks with the Palestinians.
http://www.imemc.org/article/67365
Violence / Raids / Clashes / Illegal arrests
4 days of clashes in ‘Aida Camp, after activists break through wall
IMEMC Tues 25 Mar by Chris Carlson — Monday, March 24, 2014, marked the fourth day in a row of clashes between residents of ‘Aida refugee camp and Israeli forces, after Palestinian activists tore through the separation wall which surrounds the camp. Local popular committee member Munthir Amira told Ma‘an News Agency that Israeli special forces raided the Bethlehem-area refugee camp on Monday evening, detaining 24-year-old Muatasim Basim Abu Khdeir. A number of Israeli soldiers gathered in the area of Aida’s Key of Return, Amira said. Troops were also stationed on residents’ rooftops, using them as military posts during clashes with Palestinians in the area. The raid came on the same day which Israeli forces reinstalled a section of the separation wall that had been destroyed by Palestinians in the camp, on Thursday.
http://www.imemc.org/article/67362
Jerusalem students face constant harassment by Israeli forces
ABU DIS (Electronic Intifada) 25 Mar by |
15]
Related strategies and games [ edit ]
Brinkmanship [ edit ]
"Chicken" and "Brinkmanship" are often used synonymously in the context of conflict, but in the strict game-theoretic sense, "brinkmanship" refers to a strategic move designed to avert the possibility of the opponent switching to aggressive behavior. The move involves a credible threat of the risk of irrational behavior in the face of aggression. If player 1 unilaterally moves to A, a rational player 2 cannot retaliate since (A, C) is preferable to (A, A). Only if player 1 has grounds to believe that there is sufficient risk that player 2 responds irrationally (usually by giving up control over the response, so that there is sufficient risk that player 2 responds with A) player 1 will retract and agree on the compromise.
War of attrition [ edit ]
Like "Chicken", the "War of attrition" game models escalation of conflict, but they differ in the form in which the conflict can escalate. Chicken models a situation in which the catastrophic outcome differs in kind from the agreeable outcome, e.g., if the conflict is over life and death. War of attrition models a situation in which the outcomes differ only in degrees, such as a boxing match in which the contestants have to decide whether the ultimate prize of victory is worth the ongoing cost of deteriorating health and stamina.
Hawk–dove and war of attrition [ edit ]
The Hawk–Dove game is the most commonly used game theoretical model of aggressive interactions in biology.[16] The war of attrition is another very influential model of aggression in biology. The two models investigate slightly different questions. The Hawk–Dove game is a model of escalation, and addresses the question of when ought an individual escalate to dangerously costly physical combat. The war of attrition seeks to answer the question of how contests may be resolved when there is no possibility of physical combat. The war of attrition is an auction in which both players pay the lower bid (an all-pay second price auction). The bids are assumed to be the duration which the player is willing to persist in making a costly threat display. Both players accrue costs while displaying at each other, the contest ends when the individual making the lower bid quits. Both players will then have paid the lower bid.
Chicken and prisoner's dilemma [ edit ]
Chicken is a symmetrical 2x2 game with conflicting interests, the preferred outcome is to play Straight while the opponent plays Swerve. Similarly, the prisoner's dilemma is a symmetrical 2x2 game with conflicting interests: the preferred outcome is to Defect while the opponent plays Cooperate. PD is about the impossibility of cooperation while Chicken is about the inevitability of conflict. Iterated play can solve PD but not Chicken.
Defect Cooperate Defect N T Cooperate P C Prisoner's dilemma. Payoff ranks (to Row player) are: Temptation > Coordination > Neutral > Punishment.
Both games have a desirable cooperative outcome in which both players choose the less escalated strategy, Swerve-Swerve in the Chicken game, and Cooperate-Cooperate in the prisoner's dilemma, such that players receive the Coordination payoff C (see tables below). The temptation away from this sensible outcome is towards a Straight move in Chicken and a Defect move in the prisoner's dilemma (generating the Temptation payoff, should the other player use the less escalated move). The essential difference between these two games is that in the prisoner's dilemma, the Cooperate strategy is dominated, whereas in Chicken the equivalent move is not dominated since the outcome payoffs when the opponent plays the more escalated move (Straight in place of Defect) are reversed.
Straight Swerve Straight P T Swerve N C Chicken/Hawk–Dove. Payoff ranks (to Row player) are: Temptation > Coordination > Neutral > Punishment.
Schedule chicken and project management [ edit ]
The term "schedule chicken"[17] is used in project management and software development circles. The condition occurs when two or more areas of a product team claim they can deliver features at an unrealistically early date because each assumes the other teams are stretching the predictions even more than they are. This pretense continually moves forward past one project checkpoint to the next until feature integration begins or just before the functionality is actually due.
The practice of "schedule chicken"[18] often results in contagious schedule slips due to the inter-team dependencies and is difficult to identify and resolve, as it is in the best interest of each team not to be the first bearer of bad news. The psychological drivers underlining the "schedule chicken" behavior in many ways mimic the hawk–dove or snowdrift model of conflict.[19]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]The initiative also includes new incentives for replacing lawns with drought-friendly landscaping, consumer rebates for water-saving appliances, and special assistance for residents whose wells have run dry.
While the state's Department of Water Resources does monthly snow surveys during the winter season, the April 1 survey is the benchmark for assessing the season as a whole. That's when snowfall is reckoned to have peaked and the runoff season gets underway. Six percent on April 1 is essentially saying there's next-to-nothing to show for an entire winter's snow accumulation.
The snowpack has now seen four years of steady decline. 2013 was California's driest year on record. 2014 was dry too, but also the warmest on record, which combined for a one-two punch to California's water supply. In March, for example, both Sacramento and Redding logged average temperatures more than 10 degrees above normal, according to consulting meteorologist Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather Services.
"There will be consequences," says Mark Cowin, who heads DWR.
More than 400,000 acres of farmland were fallowed last year because of scarce water. Credible sources have estimated that figure could double this year.
"More impacts to farms where supplies will be shorted," predicts Cowin, "more local communities where wells will run dry, and we’ll have to help assist them in some sort of emergency response, and more impacts to fish & wildlife, which is of course, very important."
Groundwater resources will be stressed even more, as water-constrained farmers turn up the pumps to offset cuts in allocations from state and federal water projects.
Though Cowin hastens to add that "the vast majority of our citizens will not run out of water," some already have, mostly in rural areas where wells have gone dry.
"I hope that this will continue to be a wake-up call for people that things are different," says Lester Snow, a former DWR chief who now heads the non-partisan California Water Foundation.
"And not only is it gonna be bad this year but let’s not pretend that next year’s gonna be a lot better," he added. "This drought has revealed fundamental weaknesses in our drought management system, and we need to start addressing those weaknesses."Cher compared Donald Trump to Hitler and slammed him for being a 'f***ing idiot' as she unleashed a barrage of insults during a Hillary campaign event.
The legendary entertainer and long-time Clinton supporter also said the GOP candidate reminded her of the actress who played a murdering child in the 1970s film, 'The Bad Seed.'
Speaking Sunday in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the singer and actress gave a stinging — and at times profane — assessment of the Republican presidential nominee.
Cher compared Donald Trump to Hitler and slammed him for being a 'f***ing idiot' as she unleashed a barrage of insults during a Hillary campaign event in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Sunday
The legendary entertainer and long-time Clinton supporter also said the GOP candidate reminded her of the actress who played a murdering child in the 1970s film, 'The Bad Seed'
Invoking 'The Bad Seed' she said: 'He's so Patty McCormack, consummate liar, doesn't care who she hurts, insane.'
Before an enthusiastic crowd, Cher also said of Trump: 'Do you remember 'Fun with Dick and Jane'? It's like racist fun with Dick and Jane.'
She later added: 'He doesn't mean we want to make America great again. He means we want to make America straight and white.' She also said that she was reminded of 'despots, you know Stalin and Hitler.'
A video of Cher's remarks at the 'LGBT summer celebration' was posted on Facebook and first reported by The New York Times.
Cher and Hillary, who have worked together on past political campaigns, pose together at another fundraiser in 2000
People dressed as Cher hold signs supporting Democratic Hillary Clinton near the entrance of Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts
Cher, who has been campaigning with Clinton, offered praise, though with a few caveats.
'She is shy and she's not the greatest speaker in the world,' Cher said. 'But this is what I believe and this is what I know. I know she will work every moment of every day.'
After the event, Cher told reporters that Trump was 'a racist, he's a misogynist, he's a horrible person.'
A partial clip of Clinton's remarks was also posted on Facebook. Thanking Cher, Clinton said: 'I can't tell you how excited I am to have Cher here.'
A popular entertainer for decades, Cher came to fame in the 1960s as part of a singing duo with then-husband Sonny Bono.
She has enjoyed success as a solo artist, with songs like 'If I Could Turn Back Time' and 'Believe,' and has starred in movies, including 'Moonstruck,' ''Silkwood' and 'Mermaids.'
Hillary partied at a star-studded fund-raiser at the home of Justin Timberlake (left) and Jessica Biel (right) in Los Angeles on Monday eveningCardin, Oklahoma is a toxic twin to Picher, rendered uninhabitable by mining industry abuse. In a piece by Sheila Stogsdill in the Tulsa World, November 17, 2010, (the link is no longer active) the population of Cardin is listed as zero.
MJ Masilko snapped these photos of Cardin and neighboring Picher in 2010.
MJ said these photos “are from Cardin, the next town, which is basically right next to Picher, and is also part of the Tar Creek Superfund site. It also seemed totally abandoned.”
The Highway Tabernacle once served the hungry and welcomed weary travelers with the promise of peace. Today, traffic passes but doesn’t stop, and the local residents who once worshipped here are gone.
Looks like they just stepped out for some groceries.
Photos by MJ Masilko
Original content copyright Sonic Tremor Media LLCJOHOR BARU (THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - Traffic offenders from Singapore say they have no issue paying for summons in Malaysia, but want to be shown proof of their alleged wrongdoings.
Businessman S. Ratna Raj, 59, who has been driving between the two countries for the past 15 years, said although he acknowledged he was at the areas where he was caught speeding, he still wanted proof that he was the one driving the vehicle that was summoned.
"It is widely known that nowadays people are cloning plate numbers for other vehicles.
"So, in that sense if my plate number was cloned by the unscrupulous parties and they were caught speeding; and the summons were supported with pictures, they cannot ask me to pay.
"Now, it is a bit inconvenient as you (PDRM) stopped me in the middle of the road to pay the outstanding summons. What if I do not have enough money to pay? What if my credit card is full? You want to arrest me? Seize my car?" he asked.
Related Story Thousands of Singaporean motorists caught for unpaid summons in Malaysia traffic police operation
He said this after paying RM450 (S$144) for three summons between 2013 and 2015 at Iskandar Puteri, Tangkak in Johor, and Jasin in Malacca at the Gelang Patah Rest and Relaxation stop near the Second Link here on Sunday (Jan 8).
Lawyer Adrian Dharsan, 49, said he was not aware of the three summons issued on his vehicle since 2013 as there were no letters or reminders related to it.
"I did check online for any summons issued on my car for the past two years, but there was no outstanding summons shown.
"But today, I was told that they have recorded three speeding tickets on my car and I had to pay RM370 for it," said the father of two.
Bukit Aman Traffic Investigation and Enforcement director Senior Asst Comm Datuk Mahamad Akhir Darus said 275,663 outstanding summonses and 5,358 arrest warrants had been issued for foreign traffic offenders over the past seven years.
The figures were for the period between 2010 and 2016 where Singaporeans recorded the highest number of offenders with 184,014 summonses, he said.
This is followed by Brunei (63,696), Thailand (22,334), Indonesia (2,880) and others (2,739).
He said for arrest warrants issued to foreigners, Singaporeans recorded the highest at 3,423, followed by Thai nationals (1,116), Bruneians (509), Indonesian (36) and others 274.The combination of low interest rates and "an explosion of debt" has become the biggest risk to the world’s economies, according to the head of Canada’s Global Risk Institute.
"These low interest rates could have the potential to be the next serious issue faced by countries and it’s because debt is exploding everywhere," Richard Nesbitt, 60, chief executive officer of the group that researches risks to the financial industry, said Monday in an interview in Bloomberg’s Toronto bureau.
“There’s debt being piled upon debt being piled upon debt."
Since the middle of 2015, central bank balance sheet expansion has once again led to a collapse in sovereign bond yields, further encouraging global corporate debt to surge...
As the majors plunge into negative rates...
Global debt has climbed about 37 percent since the 2008 financial crisis, Nesbitt said, as central banks around the world have pushed interest rates down to stoke growth and even below zero in the case of Japan and some of Europe’s central banks.
Enticed by record-low interest rates, companies increased total debt by $2.81 trillion over the past five years to a record $6.64 trillion. In 2015 alone, liabilities jumped by $850 billion, 50 times the increase in cash by S&P’s reckoning.
And as SocGen showed last year, all the newly created debt in the 21th century has gone for just one thing: to fund stock buybacks.
Which, as Nesbit exclaims (via Bloomberg)...
“That is an Alice in Wonderland world, and if you go into negative interest rates, you are going through the looking glass and no one knows what will really happen," Nesbitt said. The fact that Europeans and Japanese policymakers have pursued negative interest rates “should be a signal to people that things are very wrong," said Nesbitt, who was formerly head of capital markets business at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. "Europeans do not seem to have a way out in my view, so it’s quite a broken situation." Raising rates brings its own problems including a cascading effect of people being unable to meet bloated debt payments. The only way out, which is the most likely outcome, is leadership from the U.S., Nesbitt said. “We start to see the Federal Reserve in the United States start to raise interest rates and other economies such as Canada and Australia that can do it will follow." "I think the ‘Goldilocks-just-right’ scenario is one where central banks can begin to raise interest rates on a slow systematic basis over a period of many years and the economy is able to absorb that."
Good luck with that... as economic growth forecasts are collapsing...From unreasonably cool open-plan offices in San Francisco and New York, they are orchestrating an international business revolution. Casually dressed and armed with MacBooks, a new generation of design executives have emerged from their studios to cross into the corporate mainstream. They are aiming to undercut, outperform and ultimately overthrow incumbents across the business world. And they want to improve your life.
An upcoming documentary, Design Disruptors: How Design Became the New Language of Business, promises to tell the story of how designers were integral to the success of new-media giants like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Dropbox, Airbnb, Netflix and Twitter. In recent years, they have also become the darlings of the wider business elite. With executive titles like “vice president, design” “VP of product” and “director of design”, their brief has been to integrate design philosophy into the biggest multinationals from the boardroom down. Such is their confidence that many believe there is nothing their designs cannot fix. But, as we will see, there is a lot they have to prove first.
The rise of these designers is a tale of two buzzphrases – “design thinking” and “disruptive innovation”. Disruptive innovation is a concept from Harvard Business School, characterising small businesses that often begin in obscure corners of markets. They don’t initially appear a threat, but begin to offer more mainstream services which are better and cheaper than those offered by incumbents. By the time the incumbents respond, often by mimicking the innovation, the disruptors have already taken over.
Design thinking, meanwhile, is the idea that non-designers can learn to think more creatively using methods based on how designers work – rapidly and repeatedly prototyping ideas and celebrating and embracing failures. A few years ago this began to be adopted by start-ups in Silicon Valley. According to the documentary, the key to their runaway success was combining this philosophy with disruptive innovation, plus the secret ingredient of excellent designs that focused on the experience of the user.
Take Airbnb, which disrupted the holiday-lettings industry by providing a cheaper service that was more enjoyable for users. Founded by two designers, the company has always had design thinking at its core. The success of the website and app is in small design details which allow sceptical travellers to see strangers not as risks but as welcoming hosts. Subtle hints like the size of text boxes for communications between users and prospective hosts encourage messages with just the right level of detail that come across as friendly rather than secretive or over-familiar. This is not simply web design: this is design for human relationships.
Many other big businesses watched these successes with great interest. They started buying into the idea that any individual or organisation that learns to think like designers can transform not only their products and services but also their processes, corporate strategies and underlying institutional structures. Through design thinking, went the argument, they would become more creative and more able to become disruptive innovators themselves.
Whether design thinking actually lives up to these promises is contentious, but many heavyweight corporations have been turning themselves into “design-led businesses” with integrated “design cultures” – often backed by serious investment. IBM is a good example. Under Phil Gilbert, the head of design, it has opened a string of design studios worldwide in the past three years. It hired over 1,100 designers and aims to reach 1,500. Apple’s success is often attributed to Steve Jobs’ belief in the power of design and trust in lead designer Jonathan Ive. But recently, less obviously design-oriented businesses such as 3M, Philips, Pepsico, Barclays and Johnson & Johnson have all hired a “chief design officer” too. Where once design was just a service that provided style and functionality to products, now it is a core business value.
Bow down?
Design at its best can significantly improve how we interact with the world. When the Design Disruptors film goes live in the coming weeks, it should be commended if it brings this story of the positive impact of design to a broader public. Yet there is a danger in getting slightly carried away, like some of the design executives towards the end of the trailer.
As music swells to an uplifting crescendo, Braden Kowitz, design partner at Google Ventures, states:
The questions now aren’t, can we build it? Cause more and more the answer’s yes, we can build anything. The question is, what is the future that we want to build together? For me that’s the power of design.
This is indeed a good question: if everything really is possible, what should designers do with this power? Companies like Google, Spotify and Airbnb certainly make our daily lives easier, more efficient and more pleasant by disruptively improving on old designs. But the list of problems facing human society is as long as ever. Injustice, poverty, prejudice, displacement, corruption, conflict, fear, disease – take your pick. Why aren’t the design disruptors tackling some of these issues?
To give just one example of how disruptive design can make a truly meaningful impact, M-Farm is a text-based service for farmers across Africa. It allows them to access accurate real-time information on market prices and weather; share and connect with previously inaccessible experts and the wider farming community; and sell their products at the best price. In an era where mobile-phone ownership has exploded in Africa, the service has been very successful in helping farmers that were previously isolated and exploited. M-Farm has been designed to meet an important need, but it has had no significant input from high-flying designers.
Design should be about more than just making comfortable lives more comfortable. If this is a story of how designers won great power and ultimately squandered it, what a pity that would be. Utopian optimism from the likes of Kowitz is one thing, but actions speak louder than words. Design can make a difference in the world, but designers must choose what this difference will be.Copyright by KSNW - All rights reserved Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay talks about community relations at the First Steps Cook Out at McAdams Park in Wichita on Sunday, July 17th. (KSN photo)
Copyright by KSNW - All rights reserved Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay talks about community relations at the First Steps Cook Out at McAdams Park in Wichita on Sunday, July 17th. (KSN photo)
KSNW-TV - WICHITA, Kan. (KSN) - A video showing a Wichita police officer dancing with a group of Black Lives Matter activists at a community cookout has become a viral hit.
Now, Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay has received an invitation to visit the White House to discuss community relations, according to a Wichita Police Department spokesperson.
KSN has been told, however, that Chief Ramsay cannot attend because he is already committed to be at a family wedding.
The First Steps Community Cookout at McAdams Park took place after Chief Ramsey met with representatives of a planned protest for the same night.
Chief Ramsay said he hopes to continue building the relationship between the community and police and he plans to have four more events in the next month.Hacking as it relates to cyber warfare and espionage is as hot a topic as it’s ever been, and everyone from the government to major tech firms like Apple and Google are working on locking down communications so as to make them as hack-proof as possible. Now, it seems China is taking the lead, and the country just used a quantum satellite launched last year to send what researches suggest is an unhackable communication, made possible by a branch of physics once pioneered by Albert Einstein.
The satellite utilized a peculiar phenomenon known as quantum entanglement to send the message. Quantum entanglement is an extremely interesting feature of physics where two or more entangled particles — often called “twins” — will react in a correlated manner even when separated by huge distances, and when only one of the particles is directly receiving a stimuli.
Using entangled pairs of photons separated by 1,200 km, Chinese researchers were able to establish a line of communication that is essentially impossible to be hacked. Because many bad actors tap into communications somewhere between the sender and receiver, the fact that quantum entanglement allows for data to be “sent” without actually traveling between two points makes it an extremely exciting option for secure messaging at very long distances.
Scientists have known of quantum entanglement for some time, and have even proven that it works at distances of around 100 km. This newest test shows that it is feasible to close much wider gaps, and could be the ultimate step forward in rapid, safe data transfer.News High time to decriminalise dagga trade
Loyiso Maqela* doesn’t see himself as a drug dealer or a criminal.
The 31-year-old dagga grower from a village near Mpande, south of Port St Johns on the Wild Coast, sees himself as more of a cross between a farmer and a herbalist.
Maqela, one of thousands of small-scale growers in his area, has never had a formal job, apart from working as a gillie for fishermen at nearby Mpande Beach since he was forced to leave school at the end of Grade 4. He reckons that joining the region’s multimillion-rand marijuana trade was his only option.
Maqela, a full-time dagga grower for the past two years, says the several hundred plants he has cultivated in two plantations are all that stand between him and his pregnant girlfriend (she told him the big news on New Year’s Day) and starvation.
“I grow ganja because it is the only way I can get the money to buy food for myself and my family. I don’t have a job. My parents moved to Mvelelo village in 2000, but I had to stay here. They are too poor to support me, so I had to find a way,” he says.
Maqela started selling dagga to tourists and fishermen for other growers while hustling at Mpande Beach and in Port St Johns, the hub of the Pondoland dagga industry and South Africa’s undisputed cannabis capital.
When one of the growers moved to East London, Maqela started growing the crop himself and already has a couple of successful harvests under his belt.
He and just about every other resident of his village, which City Press has agreed not to name, grow dagga alongside the maize outside their homes.
The 45-minute haul up the mountain on footpaths from where the road runs out to Maqela’s house, and the smallest of his plantations, takes us past carefully tended dagga patch after dagga patch. The taller maize plants are not only for the pot; they also provide cover from SA Police Service (SAPS) helicopters which, since 1996, have sprayed the area and plantations with chemical defoliants as far inland as Lusikisiki.
Others, bolder, have ganja hedges surrounding their gardens. The plants are two and a half months away from harvesting; some are waist high and starting to develop the fruit – known as heads – that provide the intoxicating high sought by those who smoke it.
Stats SA’s unemployment figures for the whole of the Eastern Cape stand at 29%, but the situation in Pondoland’s villages and towns is far worse. Some 66% of Lusikisiki’s adults are unemployed, according to its Ingquza Hill Local Municipality.
Port St Johns is slightly better off, at 50.3%. At Mpande, which falls under the OR Tambo District Municipality, the figures – a staggering 77% unemployed – reveal why so many are involved in the dagga trade for survival.
Maqela’s village is no exception. The rutted and potholed road looks as if it has never been surfaced. The thoroughfare runs out and morphs into a path up the hillside, winding past a series of homesteads made up of mud and grass rondavels. There’s no running water. No electricity. No flushing toilets. Very few livestock. The nearest spaza shop with a fridge is down the hillside in the direction we came from.
A long, skinny beanpole of a man, Maqela looks almost like a cartoon stoner in his shorts, knee-length socks and flip-flops. In the blazing heat, he is wearing a black, long-sleeved T-shirt under a long-sleeved camouflaged shirt, emblazoned with Rastafarian emblems. His undernourished dreadlocks are topped with a red, gold and green woollen hat. A pair of black wraparound shades finishes his look.
Maqela, introduced by a stoner friend from Port St Johns, may have hammed it up for the camera ahead of our meeting. He is unwilling to talk without compensation. He is broke, has no stock left and is waiting for his crops to mature. He plays along in the hope of either some cash, commission from a sale on behalf of somebody else who has stock left to see them through the year-end dry season, or lunch.
A healthy knee-high dagga bush grows out of a crack in the red earth compacted around his front doorstep. He crushes all hope of a picture of him waist-deep in his weed. The man is deeply paranoid: dagga farming is illegal and can land him in jail for a long time, let alone cause the loss of his livelihood.
“I can talk to you, but no pictures,” he says. “Somebody came here and took pictures and put them on Facebook because he wanted the cops to lock me up. People know me. People are jealous. There’s another boy who is a grower here. His ganja is kicking. His father’s father called the cops to burn his plants because he was jealous. The old man grows ganja. I can’t take a chance.”
Maqela has two strains in the ground that will be harvested between March and April. The local impondo, often incorrectly referred to as Durban poison, takes four months to mature and provides a lower price per kilogram than the skunk, grown from imported seed sourced via “a guy in Cape Town”, which has a seed-to-spliff cycle that’s a month shorter; it is also far more potent.
The impondo gets him about R2 000 per kilogram from an Mthatha merchant. The skunk earns him twice that and is way more popular with retailers from East London, who buy most of his harvest.
“I like to supply one or two people. It’s better than selling one, one, but I also do that,” he adds.
“That’s more dangerous, but selling to the tourists like that is right. They pay a lot of money for small ganja. Even the guys in East London pay big money for one gram. Even R100. But it is dangerous.”
Maqela has never been arrested.
“A lot of people know me, but they don’t know I am growing. No police have ever found me. I am scared of going to jail.”
Maqela’s area was spared last February when the SAPS Air Wing conducted spraying operations.
“They never spray here. We were lucky. They sprayed the people over there,” he says, pointing to the village across the valley.
Maqela has the seed of a third strain, known as cheese, that he will plant after his April harvest.
“The cheese will be kicking,” he says. “It’s the very good strain. Strong. They also call it high grade. It grows nicely here. It doesn’t need too much rain. The soil is right. It can be ready in less than three months.”
Maqela tends his plants daily with home-made compost. He feeds them molasses mixed with water, which makes the heads denser and improves the drug’s strength.
He watches for worms – and goats.
Cattle are no problem because they do not eat ganja.
He does not know if the herb makes the goats high, but says they are capable of destroying a plantation in hours.
“This is work. If you look after your fields, you will grow kicking ganja,” he says. “If you leave them, you grow s**t.”
If Maqela, who smokes dagga once a day before bedtime, is making big money, it is hidden in a hole in the ground. His two-roomed house is built from wattle and daub. Only the bedroom is furnished. His nameless dog is as undernourished as his dreads.
Maqela says he would willingly pay tax to the state if the industry were legalised.
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’ The custodians of legislation to decriminalise marijuana for medicinal use hope the new law will be enacted by the end of the year. But it will be longer still before medicinal marijuana becomes legal, because the law will prescribe that a series of research centres be set up before any kind of production or dispensing can take place. The Medical Innovation Bill, which will in effect amend existing legislation classifying dagga an illegal drug – to allow it to be prescribed for medicinal purposes – is now with Parliament’s health portfolio committee. It was tabled in 2014 by IFP MP Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, who used marijuana for pain relief in his battle with cancer. Narend Singh, the IFP MP who piloted the bill after Oriani-Ambrosini’s death, said he was “hopeful” it would become law within the course of this year. The committee will soon take a vote of desirability on the bill as the next step towards piloting it through the legislature. After that, there will be hearings with specialist health agencies, and time for public comment. Singh said he has had “sensitive” talks with the ANC about the bill. “Discussions are at a sensitive level, but I believe they are going well. It has been a task to get people beyond the stoner image of cannabis and to understand that it contains other agents that are of very great medicinal value,” he said. “But for the moment, people need to remember that any person caught in possession of cannabis will be arrested,” he said
“I am a farmer. This is not a drug; this is a herb,” he says. “If I can go and pay for a licence, I will be very happy to pay. If the government wants me to pay tax, I can pay. No problem.”
Eastern Cape agriculture MEC Mlibo Qoboshiyane says he welcomes the move to legalise medicinal marijuana through the so-called Ambrosini bill, which is currently before Parliament.
“Marijuana has been known to have a lot of medicinal properties. Any research that seeks to create an awareness of its medicinal value, control and preventative measures to stop illegal use stands supported,” he says.
“The challenge South Africa has been faced with is the longtime existence of an illegal marijuana trade, which by now may have an established system of illicit practices that will be difficult to tame.
“We need to unmask fear and reorient society to understand the plant positively. It must never be the opening of a floodgate for abuse.”
*Not his real name
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Notre travail de restitution de la lyre gauloise s’organise autour de plusieurs points.
La stèle gauloise de Paule
Retrouvée dans les Côtes d’Armor et datée du 1er siècle av-Jc, cette sculpture en ronde-bosse figure un personnage appartenant vraisemblablement tout à la fois à la classe aristocratique et sacerdotale et portant le torque, une coiffe ainsi qu’un instrument. Cette sculpture réalisée dans la Méthahorblendythe étant la plus précise et la plus remarquable représentation de la lyre gauloise jamais mise au jour.
S’en suivra une étude approfondie dirigée par le Dr Tinaïg de Clodoré Tissot ainsi qu’une première reconstitution qui ouvrira la voie.
En 2015, les archéo-luthiers de l’Atelier Skald fondent le PRIAE (Pôle de Recherche et d’Interprétation en Archéologie Expérimentale) réunissant plusieurs chercheurs internationaux afin de pousser plus loin l’étude de cette statuaire et de la lyre gauloise, notamment grâce aux technologies de pointe telle que la numérisation 3D (voir article archeologia n°523-cliquable). Menée en collaboration avec le Service Régional de l’Archéologie de Rennes (35), cette mission de numérisation 3D et de photogramétrie produira un document sans précédent dont la précision apportera une nouvelle lumière sur ce patrimoine millénaire et sur lequel figure le plus ancien instrument retrouvé sur le territoire de Bretagne. |ci-dessous, un aperçu via l’animation 3D (basse définition et sans la texture) |
Animation 3D -Essayez moi!
Les représentations
Il existe peu de représentations de l’instrument et bien souvent, c’est dans la symbolique que nous la retrouvons placée sous le regard de l’artiste, généralement dans un style expressionniste laissant peu de piste quant à la réelle nature de l’instrument, ses proportions ou encore, ses caractéristiques. Toutefois, au cours des dernières années, nous avons réuni un important corpus d’informations, notamment sur la numismatique gauloise sur laquelle figure de nombreuses lyres que nous nous sommes attachés à inventorier et à étudier.
Les Citations
Les peuples gaulois utilisant peu l |
.”
The issue of mental health is extremely prominent at the University of Bristol this year, with five students – two males and three females – having taken their lives since September 2016, three of them first years.
Most recently, third year student Elsa Scaburri died at her home near Salisbury earlier this month, with the 21-year-old’s family saying she took her own life.
(Image: Jack Willingham)
Olivia said she was surprised to find, among the male sports players she spoke with, their sport society friends would be their first port of call if they faced issues with mental health, despite the stereotype of a ‘lad culture’ at universities which prevents young men in societies talking about their problems.
“Recently they have found their sports teams are their closest friends and would be the people they would confide in if they chose too,” she said. “For a lot of them sport was the main tool helping their mental health.”
For most, it was overcoming the difficulties opening up about their mental health which was the main hurdle.
Olivia said since launching her campaign she has been contacted by other people who have shown it to men in their lives as a means of revealing how common it is for males to face issues with their mental health.
(Image: Jack Willingham)
“Because of the reaction I would like to carry it on,” she said, adding how she hopes to turn Be ManKind into a community at the university, with events and fundraisers to encourage men to talk about their mental health.
See all of the photos on Facebook here, along with links and details of support services available to men.Huge crowds have turned out to pay their respects to Police Constable Keith Palmer as he is laid to rest in Southwark Cathedral.
PC Palmer, a Royal Regiment of Artillery veteran who served for 15 years on the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command, was murdered by Westminster terrorist Khalid Masood while directing members of the public to safety.
Thousands turn out to pay their respects to PC Palmer as his hearse made its way to Southwark Cathedral
Police observed a two-minute silence for their fallen colleague as his hearse made its way from the Palace of Westminster, the site of Masood’s deadly attack, to the cathedral, escorted by a “black guard” of mounted officers.
Flowers and Union flags laid in tribute to PC Palmer, described as a “perfect policeman” by colleagues
Long-time colleague PC Shaun Cartright told Sky News: “If you could paint a picture of a perfect policeman you’d be painting a picture of Keith Palmer. One of the kindest people you will ever find. Very giving, very loyal, a true friend and a fantastic policeman.”
Police line the path of PC Palmer’s funeral procession
“It’s hit all of us so hard, what’s happened to him and what his family have to go through now,” said PC Greg Rainey, who knew him for 13 years.
“He took his job really seriously. The reason Keith came to work was for his family but he was so proud to be a police officer.”
Police and Fire boats line up on the River Thames
The new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Cressida Dick, read W. H. Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ at the service. The poem was selected by PC Palmer’s family, who asked not to be filmed or photographed.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.Originally published October 22, 2013 at 7:39 PM | Page modified October 23, 2013 at 11:19 AM
A city panel on Tuesday signed off on Amazon.com’s design for a five-story office building formed by three intersecting spheres, perhaps the most eye-catching element of its massive, three-block Denny Triangle campus.
A city design-review board on Tuesday unanimously endorsed Amazon.com’s plan for a five-story office building formed by three intersecting spheres, perhaps the most eye-catching element of its massive, three-block Denny Triangle campus.
Once the city’s planning and development department formally approves Amazon’s application, typically four to six weeks after the board’s approval, a building permit can be issued, city officials say.
Amazon also plans a 38-story tower on that block, which is bounded by Blanchard and Lenora streets and Sixth and Seventh avenues.
Slight changes
The design of “the Spheres” has evolved slightly since August, according to Amazon’s architect, NBBJ.
In the repeating steel module from which the spheres are built, subtle changes now create an effect that “is visually lighter, and geometrically organic and sculptural,” the latest design proposal states.
The spheres still would range in height from 80 feet to 95 feet and feature a mix of flex work space and an atrium of plants and trees.
The area between the spheres and a 38-story office tower would still include a dog park, a walkway and an open field.
Responding to criticism that the public would want to interact with the unique structure, the design presented Tuesday to the review board suggested there would be areas at the private building’s entrances allowing anyone to “experience the Spheres close up.”
The revised design includes a total of 18,000 square feet of retail. The largest space is about 6,300 square feet.
Amazon also added a 5-foot-wide cycle track on one side of Blanchard Street, connecting to the cycle track planned for Seventh Avenue.
Since Amazon’s early proposal for the three spheres was published last spring, the public reaction has been swift and mostly enthusiastic.
“Refreshing”
“Amidst the current building boom of glass boxes and low-rise metal-clad apartments, it is so refreshing to see a design that reaches outside of Seattle for some ‘global’ architectural inspiration, and yet it is well designed and tailored to our own urban environment,” one letter to the design board said.
“These glowing, sculptural orbs will provide an ‘organic’ and very human-scaled focal point to the heart of the high-density Denny Triangle.”
Another letter writer cautioned the city not to push Amazon too hard on designing the spheres to meet the highest goals for “green” buildings.
“Seattle has no shortage of boxy buildings and the recent trend of green engineering leaves the newer ones with busy faces in the name of reducing solar loading,” the commenter said. “I find them dull at best.”
Amazon already has started construction on the first phase of the 3.3 million square-foot campus.
It has not indicated when it may start on the spheres but already has applied for an excavation permit, according to the city.
Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or [email protected] On Twitter @sbhattWASHINGTON - A man clad in black who was obsessed with President Barack Obama pulled his car within view of the White House at night and fired shots from an assault rifle, cracking a window of the first family's living quarters while the president was away, authorities said about their still-developing investigation.
The U.S. Secret Service found two bullets had hit the White House and agents caught up with Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez in Pennsylvania on Wednesday after a four-day search. Police arrested the 21-year-old Idaho man at a hotel after a desk clerk recognized his picture. Ortega was scheduled to make his first appearance at 2 p.m. Thursday in federal court in Pittsburgh and many questions remained about his motive and background.
Sources tell CBS News Ortega-Hernandez was not on the radar of the Secret Service before Friday's shooting. But investigators believe he may have targeted the White House due to a hatred of President Obama. Businessman Monte McCall, said Ortega-Hernandez compared the president to the "Antichrist" when they met recently.
"He seemed very sincere in what he believed but seemed rather troubled," McCall said.
Bullet hits White House window; Suspect sought
Police probe possible shots fired near W.H.
Authorities are investigating the man's mental health and say there are indications he believed attacking the White House was part of a personal mission from God, according to two different law enforcement officials who spoke with The Associated Press. There are also indications the man had become obsessed with Mr. Obama and the White House, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
Shots were fired at the building Friday night. Agents discovered Tuesday that one of the two bullets hit the exterior and a second cracked a window on the second floor residential level, just behind the rounded portico visible from the south side of the White House.
That bullet was stopped by protective ballistic glass. The window that was hit is in front of the so-called Yellow Oval Room, which is in the middle of the family's living quarters.
CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports ballistics tests are being run to match the bullets found at the White House with the rifle. Prosecutors say they're considering charges of attempted assassination, even though the incident presented no threat to the president.
Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle were on a trip to California and Hawaii at the time of the shooting. The president has since traveled on to Australia on a nine-day Asia-Pacific tour. The Obamas were in California without daughters Malia and Sasha, but the White House had no immediate comment on the shooting or who may have been home at the time.
Investigators believe Ortega fired the rifle from his vehicle Friday, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation. Gunshots were reported that night on Constitution Avenue about 9:30 p.m. Soon after, U.S. Park Police found an abandoned vehicle, the assault rifle inside it, near a bridge leading out of the nation's capital to Virginia. The car led investigators to Ortega, and they obtained a warrant for his arrest Sunday, officials said.
This is not the first time the White House has come under attack.
In the last 40 years, the landmark has faced threats ranging from a stolen helicopter that landed on the grounds in 1974 to a man who wielded a sawed-off shotgun on a sidewalk outside in 1984. In 1994 alone, there were five threats including a plane crash on the lawn and a suspected drive-by shooting. Another man fired at least 29 rounds from a semiautomatic weapon, with 11 striking the White House.
Dan Bongino is a former Secret Service agent who served on the presidential details for Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush. He said Friday's shooting would likely mean tighter security and coordination.
"They do an exhaustive review of their security procedures every time something like this happens," he said. "Nothing ever works perfectly. They will undress this completely and then they will find out when they rebuild the incident exactly what they could have done better."
Bongino, who recently left the Secret Service to run for U.S. Senate in Maryland, said it was doubtful that a gunman could strike a target such as the White House from a moving car at the distance investigators suspect he shot. It would require "an incredible amount of training to pull that off," he said, suggesting it was more likely Ortega stopped his car to fire.
An official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing said Ortega used a knockoff of an AK-47. Late Wednesday, however, authorities had not conclusively linked his gun to the rounds found at the White House.
In the days after the gunfire, police distributed photos of Ortega. He had been stopped and questioned Friday morning just across the Potomac River from Washington in Arlington, Va. Arlington police said they stopped him after a report of suspicious behavior but released him after photographing him because they had no reason to make an arrest at that time.
Subsequently, a U.S. Park Police crime bulletin said he was known to have mental health issues.
"Ortega should be considered unstable with violent tendencies," the bulletin stated.
Ortega was arrested Wednesday afternoon without putting up resistance at a hotel near Indiana, Pa., about 55 miles east of Pittsburgh, the Secret Service said. He was in Pennsylvania State Police custody.
State troopers said Ortega had visited the hotel in recent days, and investigators believed he was back in the area Wednesday. The Secret Service passed out photographs and a desk clerk recognized his picture and stalled him while notifying police.
Ortega is from Idaho Falls, Idaho, and was reported missing Oct. 31 by his family. A message left for Ortega's mother Wednesday at an Idaho Falls restaurant where she works was not returned. Phone listings for family members in the city were disconnected.
Ortega has an arrest record in three states but has not been linked to any radical organizations, U.S. Park Police have said.MONEY raised from BBC licence fees north of the Border should be entirely ring-fenced for native Scottish programming within five years, a group chaired by a former BBC Scotland controller has said.
In a report on the future of the national broadcaster, experts from the Screen Sector Leadership Group (SSLG) - which is comprised of industry figureheads - stressed that resources channelled into Scottish content was disproportionate to the licence fees generated from the population.
SSLC chair John McCormick, who used to oversee the Edinburgh International Film Festival and was vice-chair of Scottish Screen, wrote: “As a new BBC Charter is introduced there are high expectations for a significant increase in the amount of licence fee collected in Scotland being invested in Scotland.
Read more: Scottish Six - BBC chief to face grilling over 'dropped plans' for news programme
“In a devolved UK it is also time for more responsibility for commissioning programmes to rest here in Scotland, not London.”
The paper adds: “Fifty five per cent of the licence fee revenue raised in Scotland is spent in Scotland compared with 95 per cent in Wales and 75 per cent in Northern Ireland.
“The industry would be transformed if this deficit, equal to some £140m, were invested in work in Scotland.”
The paper adds that the BBC should develop a five-year strategy to achieve the objective of all the licence fee revenue “raised in Scotland being spent in Scotland.”
On Thursday, a committee of MSPs will question Tony Hall, director general of the BBC, over its Scottish and the fate of plans for a potential Scottish hour-long bulletin, dubbed the “Scottish Six”.
Read more: Scottish Six - BBC chief to face grilling over 'dropped plans' for news programme
Reports at the weekend suggested Mr Hall will rejected the concept of a separate hour long bulletin filmed and produced by BBC Scotland,
BBC Scotland staff remain in the dark over the future of the Scottish Six plans, and expect Mr Hall to announce a new project on Thursday when he sits before the committee.
SNP MSP Joan McAlpine, who convenes the Scottish Parliament’s Culture, Tourism and External Affairs Committee, has said Mr Hall is likely to face “difficult questions” if it emerges he has sunk the idea of the Scottish Six, which has been extensively trialled at Pacific Quay, the BBC’s headquarters in Glasgow.
Mr Hall could, it has been rumoured, form of compromise offer by extending the length of Reporting Scotland with the bulletin switching to a 6.20pm start and lasting 40 minutes.
A second regional radio channel to accompany Radio Scotland has also been mooted. It is thought this new station would broadcast mainly music and cultural programmes, allowing Radio Scotland to concentrate on news and speech.
Read more: Scottish Six - BBC chief to face grilling over 'dropped plans' for news programme
BBC Scotland pilots for a Scottish Six have been trialled for months and were a key project for both the new director of BBC Scotland, Donalda MacKinnon, and its head of news, Gary Smith. Individuals comprising the SSLG group include Alan Clements of STV, Bruce Malcolm of BBC Scotland, and Natalie Usher, head of screen at Creative Scotland, among others.Donald Trump: Will the United States and the presidency ever recover?
Posted
When I decided to hang up my mantle as ABC North America correspondent and head home to Australia, there were still nine Republicans battling it out for the right to represent their party in the 2016 election.
Four weeks ago, I came back. The only difference: Donald Trump is now in the Oval Office.
Nothing looks any different — not that you'd expect it to. DC is still DC, and I'll always have a soft spot for it in my heart.
I arrived just in time for July 4, and an Independence Day barbecue at bureau chief Zoe Daniel's house in the suburbs.
It felt good to return to that steamy Washington heat — especially having escaped a Melbourne winter only days before.
A jog through the presidents of past
DC's monuments continue to inspire. On my first day back, I went back to see them.
First stop: The monument to George Washington, who stepped down after two terms in office — despite the pleas of the new nation — to avoid becoming the kind of monarch he'd just fought a war to get rid of.
When he did, he enabled the first transition of power in the Western world that was not the result of inheritance or war.
Then, the path goes past the cherry trees to Thomas Jefferson's rotunda — the man who wrote the remarkable document that is the Declaration of Independence.
Inside, quotations from the man are engraved onto the walls, including one that is sadly often overlooked in a country that holds tight to the words of the founding fathers like Jefferson.
Jefferson had this to say about how future generations should adapt the laws those Founding fathers set down:
"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.
"We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilised society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
Then, the path winds through the beautifully designed FDR memorial, and the monument to Dr Martin Luther King Jr.
Until you reach my favourite place in Washington, the Lincoln Memorial.
On its walls there are just two inscriptions: The Gettysburg Address, and Lincoln's second inaugural speech, given after his unexpected re-election as president.
As the long and bloody civil war was coming to an end, he faced the daunting task of not only reconstructing the devastated south, but bringing its people back into the fold of the union he fought to preserve.
Lincoln said: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.
"To bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
Gazing on a presidency of chaos up close
It's probably a bit unfair to hold modern presidents, in a modern news cycle, to that kind of standard.
But going back to those memorials was something I needed to do. I knew that this time my job would be different.
That I'd be seeing up close, in real time, the chaos of the Trump presidency.
Watching him push to the limits the institutions and laws that have, on the whole, served this country well for 230 years.
Institutions and laws that allowed the miracle of that first peaceful transfer of power — from George Washington to John Adams — to continue on all the way to Mr Trump.
So DC is the same as it was when I left in late 2015. But the job of North America correspondent is not.
I loved my three years here, and they were never dull.
But the steady, controlled predictability of Barack Obama's presidency does seem like a bygone era.
First of all, you can now never really let down your guard. When I was living here, my phone was always on me, and never switched off — ready for the call to jump on a breaking story: a riot in Ferguson, a mass shooting in Charleston, or a dam burst in Brazil.
But they didn't happen that often.
Now, when you leave the office, you know there's a solid chance you'll be filing again later that night if the President's been hitting the tweets.
The sheer amount of news generated by Mr Trump is mind blowing.
On one day this week, there were three simultaneous major stories running — something I can't ever remember happening under Mr Obama.
In the morning, Mr Trump's son in law arrived at Congress to be interviewed about his contacts with Russians during the campaign.
Later that day, the President's major campaign promise was on life support in the Senate.
Republicans needed the Vice-President's casting vote just to keep it alive for another few days — but the prognosis was dire.
Swirling around all this was the President's bizarre attack on his own attorney-general, trying to force him out of the job.
That prompted fears Mr Trump was gearing up to fire the Special Counsel investigating the Trump campaign and its ties with Russia — potentially sparking a crisis to rival Watergate.
At around seven at night, when all that had calmed down, the final task of the day was to watch Mr Trump appear at a rally in Ohio — just to see if he dropped any nuggets about the Russia investigation, or his feud with the attorney-general.
There wasn't. Instead, he delivered a classic Trump moment and asked the crowd if they thought his face would end up on Mount Rushmore.
Congress design 'depends on honour'
With any other President, that kind of hubris would have been the most interesting thing to file on that day.
But under Mr Trump, it was a marginal footnote to a long day of chaos and drama. Or, as it's known here, a Tuesday.
The next day, the news cycle kicked into an even higher gear, with Anthony Scaramucci's colourful and expletive laden descriptions of his West Wing colleagues.
That night, the President's health care bill was defeated by his own party — and the next day, his chief of staff quit the White House.
Someone recently said that the founding fathers designed a system that predicted a president like Mr Trump — but pointed out that their design depends on an honourable Congress, willing to perform its role as a check on a rogue chief executive.
And this Congress is taking its sweet time on that one.
My Republican friends here in DC say their president is a narcissist, and even "crazy".
But they say the public service is ploughing on under its own power, getting the job of running the country done while the White House spins its wheels ever deeper in the mud.
A run around the monuments to past presidents restores my faith that this system is strong enough to come through, that there will be another peaceful transition of power, and a rebalancing of the institutions.
But as my colleague Chris Uhlmann has noted, America's prestige has taken a hit — as Mr Trump would say, bigly.
Topics: donald-trump, government-and-politics, world-politics, history, united-statesA former African-American studies professor thinks Temple University’s proposed football stadium is an example of white supremacy.
Temple University’s Board of Trustees has decided to construct a new football stadium on the 1500 block of Norris Street in North Philadelphia. Last week, however, Dr. Anthony Monteiro, a former professor, and a group of students and community members irately claimed the stadium is harmful to them.
"Who's running the show? White corporate men."
Critics of the stadium, which would reside on university property, are worried the new attraction will harm the community; the new stadium would replace a recreation center, a playground, a swimming pool, and artificial turf athletic field. Additionally, residents have concerns over parking and traffic.
Temple’s football team currently plays at Lincoln Financial Field, the home stadium of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles, which is located miles away from the urban campus.
Dr. Monteiro, a former professor at Temple whose contract was not renewed, allegedly because he had complained about another instructor not qualifying for a chairman position in the College of Liberal Arts, has criticized Temple’s trustees and says the stadium issue is one of race.
"This is an issue of white supremacy," he told a crowd of protesters according to Philadelphia Magazine. "Who's running the show? White corporate men. This is an institution founded on white supremacy. They tell students when they come here that they should be afraid of the black people."
Monteiro also delivered a message to the President of the Philadelphia City Council, Darrell Clarke, in hopes that he can stop the stadium’s production.
"Darrell Clarke, get on the side of the people. Speak up. How are you going to give all of this away with nothing in return?" Monteiro reportedly said. "This is a form of genocide. North Philadelphia is not just a location. It's a spiritual universe."
Philadelphia’s mayor-elect Jim Kenney has come out against the idea of a new stadium, even though it would be on school property.
“If the Eagles were living up to their commitment to Philadelphia and our public university, just as the Steelers live up to their commitment to Pittsburgh by renting their stadium for free to Pitt's football team, there wouldn't be a need for a stadium at Temple University," Kenney told Philadelphia Business Journal in an email. "There'd also be a winning team down at Lincoln Financial Field for a refreshing change.”
The university has reportedly put its plans for a new stadium on hold.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @C_Spencer_North Face Continues To File Questionable Legal Claims Against Parodies
from the again? dept
Dear mr.smashy,
We have received a Notice of Infringement from The North
Face VF Outdoor, Inc. via the Yahoo! Copyright/IP Team and
have removed the following photo(s) from your photostream:
"Hey Fuck Face":
www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/3239565297/
"hey fuck face":
www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/230342956/
"AR-15 A4 MWS":
www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/3466868577/
"Buttstock Mag Pouch":
www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/3274481679/
"BWUSA": www.flickr.com/photos/wmode/1425898484/
Subsequent Notices of Infringement filed against your
account will result in further action that may include
termination without warning.
Remember outdoor clothing company The North Face's ridiculously counterproductive war against The South Butt parody line of clothes? That involved a bogus lawsuit with a variety of twists and turns, eventually leading to a settlement. There was an epilogue, however, as the guy who had started The South Butt reformed as Butt Face. And, of course, all this did was make The North Face look silly and unable to take a joke.It appears that the company has not developed a sense of humor yet. Jake Rome points us to a story of how The North Face has filed takedown notices to Flickr/Yahoo, because a guy had posted some photos of parody patches for "Hey Fuck Face." You can see the main image here This photo was taken down, as were a few other photos, mostly of the patch attached to a gun. The fact that those images are up is because the user, "mr.smashy," filed a counter notice and so far it appears that The North Face has chosen not to go the legal route.mr.smashy notes that his counter notice claimed fair use, pointing out that the patch is a parody and that he's not actually selling anything, so there's no issue of commercial usage. He also sent the takedown to ChillingEffects (good move!). This really seems like yet another overzealous move by lawyers at the North Face misinterpreting the need to "protect" their trademark. Let the parodies live and people will love your brand. Go after them like this and it just turns people off completely.
Filed Under: fuck face, parody, trademark
Companies: the north faceAverage television audiences for the Stanley Cup finals are down 18 per cent year over year although the games are still the most watched programs of the night in Canada, broadcast rights holder Rogers Media said Monday. The first three games of the championship series between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the San Jose Sharks averaged 1.86 million viewers for Hockey Night in Canada, with game three averaging 2.1 million, Rogers Media communications director Andrea Goldstein said in an email.
The star power of the PittsburghPenguins led by Sidney Crosby (r) and Russian forward Evgeni Malkin have brightened the playoff picture for Rogers. ( Justin K. Aller / Getty Images )
So far, the Stanley Cup finals have reached 10.1 million Canadians while the subscriber base in Rogers NHL GameCentre LIVE streaming service is up 19 per cent year over year, she added. The first 20 NHL playoff games in April reportedly drew an average of just 513,000 viewers on the CBC and Rogers Sportsnet’s cable channels — a 61-per-cent decline from the first round in 2015 that featured five Canadian teams. All seven Canadian based teams failed to quality for the playoffs this year, the second season of Rogers $5.2 billion, multi-year broadcast rights deal with the NHL that gave Rogers Sportsnet control of the CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada brand.
Article Continued Below
Ratings have “ticked up,” compared to earlier rounds, Rogers Media business unit president Rick Brace said, adding that the tradition and star power of the Pens led by Sidney Crosby and Russian forward Evgeni Malkin have brightened the picture. Audience measurement service Numeris said the third round of the NHL playoffs on CBC placed 20th among the top 30 programs aired on English-language conventional TV and specialty channels in Canada for the week ended May 22. Competition from the NBA playoffs as well as the lack of a major U.S. market entry in the final present ratings challenges in the U.S while in Canada hockey has faced off against the Toronto Raptors in the NBA eastern conference series and the Rogers-owned Toronto Blue Jays MLB team that has seen strong fan interest after winning the American League East in 2015. Speaking at an event in Toronto, Scott Moore president of Sportsnet and NHL properties for parent Rogers Communications, said the Jays have averaged more than a million viewers 10 times this season versus only one game that drew a million at the same point in 2015. “Viewership is up substantially,” he said.
Read more about:Editor’s note: Links to images for download appear at the end of this release.
David Ruth
713-348-6327
[email protected]
Mike Williams
713-348-6728
[email protected]
Rice lab synthesizes cancer-killing compound
Chemist K.C. Nicolaou and team achieve first total synthesis of shishijimicin A
HOUSTON – (July 13, 2015) – Rice University scientists have achieved the total synthesis of a scarce natural marine product that may become a powerful cancer-fighting agent – the molecule shishijimicin A.
A group led by world-renowned Rice chemist K.C. Nicolaou announced the successful synthesis this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The complex organic molecule was discovered in a rare sea squirt, Didemnum proliferum, more than a decade ago. Lab tests at the time proved it to be more than 1,000 times as toxic to cancer cells as the anticancer drug taxol (aka paclitaxel), but its scarcity did not provide amounts sufficient for extensive biological studies and clinical trials.
For that, chemists needed to design and develop the many steps required to synthesize the molecule, a specialty for which Nicolaou is well-known. Nicolaou, who joined Rice in 2013, is noted for achieving the first synthesis of taxol as well as the synthesis of the highly cytotoxic compound calicheamicin, which was used in the first antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) for targeted chemotherapy.
Nicolaou said shishijimicin shows just as much potential – and perhaps more – for cancer treatment via “Trojan horse”-style ADCs tuned to target specific types of cancer. “Because it’s so potent, you may only need one or two molecules to get into a cancer cell to do the job,” he said.
Such toxins kill cancer cells by cleaving their DNA or freezing their cytoskeletons to prevent them from replicating, he said.
The path to synthesis took a rapid two years because much of the groundwork had already been set by Nicolaou’s basic work three decades ago in the total synthesis of calicheamicin.
“All the fundamental science for the shishijimicin project was done in the 1990s,” he said. “What we synthesized then was too toxic to be used, but now it has revitalized the whole field because biologists and clinicians can selectively target cancer cells (with ADCs). If we hadn’t done the fundamental science so many years ago, it would have taken us so much longer to come to the same point.”
Nicolaou said his prime concern, in addition to facilitating biology and medicine, is to advance the field of synthetic chemistry. “If we don’t advance it now, we won’t be able to make the complex molecules of the future,” he said. “We have to continue to sharpen the tools of organic synthesis.”
Nicolaou said the next steps for shishijimicin are to streamline its synthesis and add chemical handles so it can be attached to antibodies for delivery to cancer cells. “We’ve established the beachhead with the first total synthesis,” he said. “Now we aim to optimize the process to make it more practical and apply it to synthesize variations of the molecule.”
Then it will be up to partner pharmaceutical companies to develop the compound for eventual clinical trials. They won’t need much, Nicolaou said. “If they have a few hundred milligrams – a fraction of a gram – they can take it to clinical trials, because it’s so potent,” he said. “And now they have hundreds of antibodies selected for different kinds of cancer. My hope is that our molecule will lead to an effective drug for personalized medicine.”
Rice postdoctoral researchers Zhaoyong Lu, James Woods and Te-ik Sohn and graduate student Ruofan Li are co-authors of the paper. Nicolaou is Rice’s Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor of Chemistry.
The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas and the Welch Foundation supported the research.
-30-
Read the abstract at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.5b05575
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews
Related Materials:
Nicolaou bio: http://chemistry.rice.edu/FacultyDetail.aspx?p=736D6ADC0CF5EA6C
Wiess School of Natural Sciences: http://naturalsciences.rice.edu
Images for download:
http://news.rice.edu/files/2015/07/0713_SYNTHESIS-1-WEB.jpg
The molecule known as shishijimicin A, discovered more than a decade ago in a marine animal known as a sea squirt and found to be highly toxic to cancer cells, has been synthesized by the Rice University laboratory of chemist K.C. Nicolaou. (Credit: Courtesy of K.C. Nicolaou/Rice University)
http://news.rice.edu/files/2015/07/0713_SYNTHESIS-2-WEB.jpg
Rice University researchers have achieved total synthesis of shishijimicin A, which shows potential as a powerful cancer-fighting agent. From left, Zhaoyong Lu, James Woods, K.C. Nicolaou, Ruofan Li and Te-ik Sohn. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
http://news.rice.edu/files/2015/07/0713_SYNTHESIS-3-WEB.jpg
Synthetic chemist K.C. Nicolaou holds a model of shishijimicin A. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,888 undergraduates and 2,610 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked among some of the top schools for best quality of life by the Princeton Review and for best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/AboutRiceU.Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers (12) throws during the fourth quarter against the Minnesota Vikings at TCF Bank Stadium. (Photo: USA TODAY Sports)
MINNEAPOLIS — The NFL won't be handing out a Lombardi Trophy next week after the Green Bay Packers play the New England Patriots.
But for a regular-season game, this will be a big one, if for no other reason than to get a truer read on these 2014 Packers.
They've won seven of their last eight games, including grinding out a 24-21 win over the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday at TCF Bank Stadium. Most of those wins have been by big margins — an average margin of victory of 25 points. But anyone looking for caveats doesn't have to work hard to find them.
Five of the wins have been against teams under.500 (Chicago and Minnesota twice, and Carolina). Another was over a good Philadelphia Eagles team playing its backup quarterback. And the most difficult circumstances the Packers have faced in this stretch, at New Orleans in one of the toughest primetime venues in the league, ended in a sound defeat.
Now the 9-2 New England Patriots, rolling on a seven-game winning streak, come to Lambeau Field in a matchup of probably the two hottest teams in the NFL. No caveats for this one.
"That's what you live for in the NFL," said T.J. Lang, the Packers' right guard. "It's a good way to measure yourself, kind of give you some confidence. It's going to be a big challenge for us. I think everybody's looking forward to it."
The Packers go into this week in a much different place than they were for a good part of this season. The Patriots' home blowout 34-9 win over Detroit on Sunday means that the 8-3 Packers are a game ahead of the Lions for first place in the NFC North Division. Who even remembers the Packers' 1-2 start anymore?
If the playoffs started today, the Packers would be the NFC's No. 2 seed |
reminders to them on HackerOne here: yahoo.pdf.
Status: Still vulnerable/No Reply | Date Disclosed: 2014-04-29 13:46:16 UTC
Disclosure to Authy & Duosecurity
I was very quick to assume that the services that provide 2FA commercially were bound to be vulnerable. However, I was very incorrect - as they were well informed and had long thought of issues related to pins going to voicemail.
You can read the emails to and from Authy and Duosecurity, here: authy.pdf and here: duosecurity.pdf.
Both services replied to me within 24 hours or so, and both services were extremely helpful with the disclosure.
Authy | Status: Not vulnerable | Date Disclosed: Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 1:27 AM
Duosecurity | Status: Not Vulnerable | Date Disclosed: 2014-04-29 13:46:16 UTC
Authy leaves a blank voicemail on Phone Calls and Duosecurity requires user interaction before verification.
Thanks Authy and Duosecurity!
Mitigation Techniques and Disclosures to Telco's
To all readers of this blog post, I have been able to collate some information below, containing the endpoints of various customer services for various mobile networks around the world.
Since I can't check telco's overseas myself, I know people around the world are also concerned to see if their telco is vulnerable.
To see if you can get into your voicemail service without a pin by spoofing, simply follow the exploit flow, replacing the endpoint number with the one for your telco for voicemail, from the list below.
Please do let me know if your telco is also vulnerable by simply emailing me here or by simply leaving a comment below.
Mitigating this vulnerability isn't quite as straight forward as one would expect as it requires the remodelling of the 2FA Phone Call feature. Here are some of the suggested mitigation techniques (also present in all of my disclosures to companies).
Requiring user interaction on phone call as verification (recommended)
Ending call on Voicemail detection (unreliable)
and last but not least:
Removing the phone call ability completely (decreased user experience)
Disclosure to Optus
I had the pleasure of working with Ben Grubb (Deputy Tech Editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age) who assisted me in disclosing these issues to Optus and along the way was extremely cooperative and helpful in the disclosure of this issue.
When I first found that Optus was vulnerable, my research led me to this article: Is your Voicemail Hackable? Optus, Telstra and Vodafone respond from Australian Business Traveller.
"Optus takes the privacy of our customers very seriously. Customers must set a unique PIN to activate their voicemail system. When their PIN is reset by a customer service representative, they are advised to reset their PIN to something that only they will know. "With regards to spoofing, we are looking at multiple options to address this emerging industry-wide threat, including technical solutions and customer education."
This article was dated "22 Jul, 2011". It's been almost three years since then, and surprisingly, this issue is still around and a massive privacy risk!
Ben and I first disclosed the issue to Optus on Fri, May 2, 2014. Since then, 7 or so days later Optus fixed the issue.
However, within hours of the fix being issued, I was able to determine an alternate method to access any Optus customers voicemail without a pin, once again. This bypass is currently also being worked on by Optus, but until further notice - please assume that your voicemail is insecure if you're with Optus OR with any of their reseller networks e.g. Vaya, LiveConnected, Amaysim, Exetel, Yatango etc.
Notes
Just like my previous obsessions with captchas, SSRF and rate limiting, I think voicemail and general mobile network security is going to take up a lot of my future time.
Everyone knows that mobile network security is poor, but with nothing being done, we don't know how important it is until we are breached due to it.
If you want to stay up to date on my voicemail security disclosures, I shall be updating my twitter regularly with any responses from Telco's.
The following services below may also be affected by the 2FA bypass, but have not been thoroughly checked:
Snapchat
Egnyte (Uses DuoSecurity 2FA and hence is not vuln until further notice)
(Uses DuoSecurity 2FA and hence is not vuln until further notice) Amazon
Dynadot
Airbnb
Elance
Chase
Discover
Fairwinds
Additionally confirmed as vulnerable:
Zoho.com (Found by David Vo)
Thanks for reading this post, I hope you found it somewhat informative and useful.
Shout out to Aleksa Sarai, Gibson Security and Nathan Wakelam for helping me throughout this disclosure.
This has been featured in Sydney Morning Herald / Sun Herald here: http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/security-it/optus-left-customers-mobile-voicemail-accounts-exposed-20140517-zraz7.htmlBy Wu Hsin-tian and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff writer
Environmental groups yesterday said that the nation is exceeding the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s suggested daily intake of meat and that it is directly impacting the environment.
The ministry urged people to reduce their intake of meat as the nation gears up to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival, which typically sees high sales of meat products for barbecuing, the most popular way to celebrate the holiday.
The groups said the amount of wastewater from the nation’s swine industry annually is enough to fill a space two-thirds of the size of Taipei 101.
Environmental and Animal Society of Taiwan director Chen Yu-min (陳玉敏) said the ministry suggests about two servings, or 70g, of meat for an adult per day.
With a national population of 23 million and a suggested daily meat intake of 70g, meat production per year should be about 587,000 tonnes, Chen said.
However, according to the Council of Agriculture, 380 million animals were slaughtered in 2013, producing 1.48 million tonnes of meat, he added.
Chen said that the statistics did not include imported meat, adding that over-consumption of meat directly impacts the environment.
An adult pig weighing 100kg produces about 5kg of excrement every day, Chen said, adding that 5.81 million swine — the total number recorded in the nation in 2013 — would produce 10.6 million tonnes of excrement per year.
Large-scale farming of animals has normalized preventive use of animal medication, but has also led to nearly 10 percent of animal farms, from 2011 to 2013, failing to meet Food and Drug Administration standards, Chen said.
Chen urged the public to reduce meat consumption and to opt for eco-friendly products, adding that this would encourage farmers to produce higher-quality food and might also lead to a decrease in waste produced by the farming industry.SSDP are proud to present its 4th annual national conference, which brings together, student activists, drug-researchers, harm reduction experts and doctors from around the world, to discuss the ever changing world of drug policy.
Our wide range of guests will explore the worlds best harm reduction methods, drug testing strengths & limitations and how to frame a campaign which will produce real-world results in transforming Ireand's archaic drug policy.
We will also explore the devastating impact drug policy has had on our environment, including drug-litter and the severe limitations on growing hemp around the world.
Speakers Include:
- Katy MacLeod - Chill Welfare
- Suzanne Sharkey - Law Enforcement Against Prohibition UK
- Dr. X, Fernando Caudevilla - Dark web & Harm Reduction
- Guy Jones - Limitations of Drug Testing Kits
..And more!
Non-Student tickets: €10
Students: Free
The conference kicks off at 12pm and is easily accessible from the city centre and airport.
The 11, 13, 16, 33, 41, 41b and 41c will bring you all right there!
The 16 and the 41 go to and from the airport to Drumcondra road, and all other buses can be caught at the end of O' Connell street (the street with the giant pointy metal needle)
Once on Drumcondra road, depending on what side you approach from, (Town) you'll see a pub, railway station, bridge, Tesco, Abrakebabra, (Airport) Skylon hotel, Ivy House, Spar, lots of restaurants. Once on Drumcondra road, you can hop off the bus and you'll see St Pat's.
Directions to the auditorium where the conference will take place will be up around the campus.
We can't wait to meet you all!
#SSDPIreland #SSDPConferenceDigital Album Digital Album Streaming + Download Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app. Purchasable with gift card Buy Digital Album name your price You own this Send as Gift
Limited Edition LP Record/Vinyl + Digital Album First pressing LP, limited edition of 400, from Per Koro Records.
Black Vinyl. Comes with great artwork, thick inside-out cover, black innersleeve, top notch lyricsheet and includes digital download card.
Includes unlimited streaming of Book Of Grief via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ships out within 3 days Buy Record/Vinyl €8 EUR or more You own this Buy again Send as Gift
Book Of Grief - The Red Tape Cassette + Digital Album limited tape edition of book of grief. released by dvvm records and dark omen records. edition of 100.
Includes unlimited streaming of Book Of Grief via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Sold Out
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Austria might be famous for quite a few things in this world – mountains, delicious food and a weird dialect for example – but Doom Metal is not exactly one. However IRON HEEL hailing from the country’s capital Vienna have all the darkened potential to change this, bringing misery and sweet leaf-ish epicness upon us with their debut full length Book Of Grief.
Already turning heads with their demo, IRON HEEL kept evolving in an absolutely exemplary manner. The predominantly screamed, harsh vocals of the band’s early days are almost gone completely (except for a few moments when gastly cries mirror the ugliness of this world, like in Sleepwalker), giving way for truly epic, dramatic vocals raised in the school of Candlemassionism. If you listen to this and don’t want to stand on a mountain top with a 6.5 ft long sword in your hand something is seriously wrong with you.
The music is more than a mere backdrop to the vocal performance. The pounding riffs are the foundation everything else is built upon, and there are plenty of truly awesome ones here: Powerful, simple and slugishly dragging along the guitar work reminds me quite a bit of Electric Wizard. However IRON HEEL doesn’t only rely on the blatant riff delivery but also show off great skills when it comes down to tasteful guitar leads and innovative ideas – just check out Mountain Throne halfway through the song: an almost quiet moment that owes as much to Doom Metal as it does to Post Rock, but in a very untypical, non-sucking way.
I do not know if IRON HEEL took their name from Jack London’s novel, but the quote above just perfectly outlines the atmosphere present on Book Of Grief. Of course there’s darkness, misery and pain present on this record, but in the end of the day IRON HEEL also manage to let tiny bits of hope gleam through all the plight.
There’s no doubt about it: Book Of Grief is an absolute gem of the Doom genre, adapting enough of the traditional elements to remain true to the game but including just the right amount of progressive ideas and influences from other genres to remain interesting throughout the whole 40 minutes of the album. If you like your riffs heavier than heaven, don’t look any further.
-CVLT NATION
There’s something inside of a well-crafted doom riff — some active ingredient — that has gotta be like a time-released heavy dosage of feel-good, burrowing deep into your brain stem and jettisoning its payload of relaxing chemicals. Maybe it’s the mountain of fuzz with a bass-y foot that’s powerful enough to jumpstart a stopped heart. But, really, you could play that trippin’ stoner progression on nylon strings strapped to a hunk of plywood and I still think I would meet every bend with an “Ahhhhhhhhhhh, yeah, that’s the stuff.”
Iron Heel has “the stuff.” They have a lot of the stuff. They’ve been busy stockpiling the collected venom from Goatsnake, injecting it straight into their songwriting pens. The result is Book of Grief, which introduces itself with a shake as crushing as Windhand’s. Iron Heel, though, doesn’t attempt the gaussian blur of pharmaceutical dependancy. For all of the doom they down, their eyes are pretty clear. It’s almost more of a rock record, in the same way Acid Bath would slough off sludge for glam and power pop. In fact, this might be the best way to sneak some serious heft by fickle shorthairs if you’re stuck being the office taxi for happy hour later.
Take a track like “Sokushinbutsu.” Starting with the obligatory, though rarely unsatisfying bass foreshadowing, the Heel stomps its foot on the distortion pedal, nailing a nasty NOLA riff. Then, there it is, the singin’ surprise. The vocalist is much closer to, say, Witchcraft than your typical method actor smack-abuser trying to push away from the pit with every over-anguished larynx-rattler. Still, it’s not like he’s cheery. He matches the shot-through-with-blues tweener notes of the strums, filling up the gutbucket until its overflowing. That’s why Iron Heel works so well. It does everything doom needs to do, but it also isn’t afraid to get cocky with a Jesus Christ pose in tight jeans. It may take a few spins for it to settle right. When it does, it’s Wall of Sleep nice, finding a fresh way to deliver the slow, low, and gloom.
Gloom on a Friday? If you have to ask, you’ve never FELT one of these riffs. Mate, turn this up and recalibrate.
-TRAMPLETHEWEEK
This only came out yesterday and apart from the sometimes clicky bass drum, it's absolute heaven. It has a very traditional doom metal feel to it, while also maintaining a crossover, stoner element to it's vibe. That all said, apart from a few surprises everything is kept in a Vitus like pace. I guess it kind of reminds me of Goatsnake or Serpent Venom with the big heavy riffs and powerful vocalist.
It has been a good while since I've heard riffs truly as heavy as these whilst remaining incredibly groovy throughout. As a first release proper release (y'know, not a demo), Iron Heel establish both maturity with a genuine love and understanding of the cavernous riff.
-ASTRAL DOOM
More stoner doom! Iron Heel, hailing from Vienna Austria, ja, released their full-length debut Book of Grief back in September. Somehow, this went completely under my radar until a few days ago.
No offense to other stoner doom bands at all, but you know what you’re gonna get when something is labeled as “stoner/doom.” Iron Heel makes an effort to stand out from that though. One of the things that stood out most to me was the lyrics. The lyrics on this album were actually pretty interesting to go back and read; esoteric, open to interpretation (is Sleepwalker about zombies?!) The vocals are the star of this album to me though. Think epic, wailing Candlemass meets Electric Wizard, with some harsh screams bordering on sludge territory, thrown in there. It’s all there.
-HARDBOILEDOWL
There was a time when Electric Wizard was really heavy, people will hate me for this, but the new stuff just doesn’t cut it for me, I’m more of a Dopethrone dude, when I first heard that album, my ears just exploded, and I couldn’t listen to anything for a whole month, it was pure heavy. Since then Electric Wizard have gone their own path, but without a doubt Dopethrone influenced the sound of a lot of bands, one of them is Iron Heel.
Iron Heel is a relatively new band from Vienna, Austria, they play basically a heavy mix of doom, stoner and black metal, but with an accent on the doom. Their first LP ever, Book of Grief, just dropped a couple of weeks ago, self released by the band.
Book of Grief is just 5 songs short, but the amount of distortion and heaviness make it seem like it’s crawling forever, which is not a bad thing, if you love slow distorted songs, you’re gonna love that feeling, somewhat similar to the feeling a Saint Vitus record gives you.
The production is excellent, the guitars sound larger than life, the bass is just so bassy, that it makes your stomach rumble, and the drums destroy your eardrums. Vocals wise, I was really surprised, from the first riff, I was expecting someone to start screaming in my ear, but apparently most of the vocals are clean, expect for two songs, where they sound like someone who’s competing with Mike Williams for who has the most acute throat cancer.
The dynamic of the songs don’t change that much, they are mostly doom, with a stoner tone, playing in a tripplety bluesy feel, but sometimes they hit you in the face like the song Séance which starts out with a fast beat, yet played with a lazy feel, somewhat similar to what Winter used to do, actually some parts of some songs sound close to doom death bands such as Autopsy and Coffins.
All in all this is a great release, something that sounds like Electric Wizards’s Dopethrone, yet it somewhat reminds you of Coffins having intergalactic sex with Eyehategod, has to be pretty damn good, right? Well it is, and it’s even more. Really hope this gets put out on vinyl sometime soon, cuz that’s where this music needs to be, until then, go download it on their bandcamp page, it’s pay what you want, and you know you want to pay.
-TZEEEAC
Iron Heel is:
Bogad - bass
Kastner - drums
Lippmann - voice
Zehetner - guitar
Ott - Guitar
credits
released September 11, 2013
license
all rights reservedA flaw in Microsoft's Azure cloud platform could have been exploited by an attacker to gain admin rights to instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and storage accounts hosted on Azure.
The vulnerability was discovered by Irish software engineer Ian Duffy and reported to Microsoft as part of its bug bounty programme. Duffy discovered the glitch while working on a hardened RHEL image for use on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Part of the spec was that it should operate under a metered billing pricing model, consuming software updates from a local RHEL repository owned and managed by the cloud provider.
Both AWS and Azure utilise a deployment of Red Hat Update Infrastructure comprising the Red Hat Update Appliance and Content Delivery Network, to supply software updates for their regions. One copy of the Red Hat Update Appliance is created per region.
The clients ought to be isolated from the Red Hat Update Appliance but while AWS achieve this by requiring that an instance is booted from a machine image that contains the billing code, Azure did not have this safeguard.
Duffy noticed that some Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) files contained client configurations for each region. From this, he was able to discover the URLs of all regional Red Hat Update Appliances on Azure and obtain access to archives containing logfiles, configuration files and SSL certificates that could be used to gain full administrative access to Red Hat Update Appliances.
"It was possible to copy the SSL certificates from one instance to another and successfully authenticate. Additionally, if you duplicated a Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual hard disk and created a new instance from it all billing association seemed to be lost but repository access was still available," wrote Duffy in his blog.
He continued: "Despite the application requiring username and password based authentication, It was possible to execute a run of their 'backend log collector' on a specified content delivery server. When the collector service completed the application supplied URLs to archives which contain multiple logs and configuration files from the servers."
It may also have been possible to access storage accounts, Duffy said.
"Given some poor implementation within the mandatory Microsoft Azure Linux Agent (WaLinuxAgent), one is able to obtain the administrator API keys to the storage account used by the virtual machine for debug log shipping purposes," he wrote.
"At the time of research, this storage account defaulted to one shared by multiple virtual machines. If the storage account was used by multiple virtual machines there is potential to download their virtual hard disks."
Microsoft has since taken action to prevent public access to the log monitoring application and the Red Hat Update Appliances.
It is not known whether the bug was ever exploited in the wild. μCody Van Meter struggled to breathe as the 270-pound Franklin County deputy sheriff pinned him to the ground with a knee planted across his neck. One, two, three jabs in the ribs. Van Meter became disoriented as the deputy applied a bear hug on the ground. Then the deputy hoisted Van Meter into the air and body-slammed him like a professional wrestler delivering the knockout blow.
Cody Van Meter struggled to breathe as the 270-pound Franklin County deputy sheriff pinned him to the ground with a knee planted across his neck.
One, two, three jabs in the ribs. Van Meter became disoriented as the deputy applied a bear hug on the ground.
Then the deputy hoisted Van Meter into the air and body-slammed him like a professional wrestler delivering the knockout blow. It worked. Van Meter didn't know who he was supposed to be fighting when he got back to his feet.
Van Meter was not a criminal suspect. He was training to be a deputy.
"The whole scenario is made for you to fight and lose," he said. "They said if you give up, you're fired."
Deputy James Dishong wasn't investigated or disciplined for hurting Van Meter in 2015, but he could lose his job after another trainee went to a hospital in March with bruises under his eyes so deep that the cadet thought he had broken eye sockets.
Dishong is one of seven training-academy deputies or supervisors whom the sheriff's internal-affairs bureau has accused of violating policy this year while they prepared the first class of jail deputies for other jobs in the department.
One deputy described the training scenario to investigators as "almost like a gang initiation." Some of the trainers nicknamed themselves the "Spartans," according to trainees.
The sheriff's office plan disciplinary hearings for all those deputies in the coming weeks.
Trainees and instructors contacted by The Dispatch declined to comment for this story. Records show that Sheriff Zach Scott ordered them to not talk about the incident. Scott also declined to comment.
The sheriff's internal-affairs division recommended suspension or firing for all seven employees involved. Several of them should have stopped the incident in March, according to the investigation report.
Deputy Tory Hardesty was one of 14 who needed to pass a final test to graduate from patrolling jail cells to policing crime on the streets. But the internal-affairs investigation determined that Hardesty was singled out.
Weeks before Hardesty's final training scenario, Dishong allegedly told other deputies that Hardesty would have a "bad day."
One of those deputies filed the complaint that triggered the investigation. Others told investigators that they didn't remember Dishong threatening Hardesty.
For the test, deputies ran through an exhausting exercise before they fought to keep their gun from an attacker.
Dishong volunteered to be Hardesty's attacker for the test.
Dishong is accused of intentionally harming Hardesty by continuing to punch him in the face after his headgear came off. Other deputies should have stopped the scenario and gotten Hardesty immediate medical attention, according to the report.
Supervisors who improperly signed off on paperwork after the class also could face discipline.
"After reviewing the report, we had some questions and concerns about the information provided, which we plan to address during the disciplinary process," said Jason Pappas, president of Fraternal Order of Police Local No. 9, which represented both the cadets and the trainers in the incident.
Dishong told the investigator that Hardesty threw the first punches. Dishong said he only mirrored the cadet's force.
He tried to use a cold spoon afterward to keep blood from pooling under Hardesty's eyes.
Dishong said Hardesty was "a real standup guy to be able to take punches like that," according to one cadet.
Hardesty eventually went to a hospital, and Dishong was removed as a trainer for that class of cadets.
The trainers disputed much of what the cadets alleged, according to the documents.
Dishong told the internal investigator that he never called himself a "Spartan" and that instructors "were only to go 30-40 percent of their full force." Dishong said they didn't discourage cadets from reporting injuries.
There is no video of Hardesty's March training fight.
Van Meter's training fight in 2015 was caught on cellphone video. Van Meter said that when he completed the test, he was afraid to seek medical attention because he thought doing so would cost him his job.
Van Meter was later fired during his job's probationary period. While in uniform, he had tried to claim his dog at the county dog shelter after it had gotten loose. He was fired for using his position as a deputy to avoid a citation; Van Meter disputes that finding.
A sergeant in the academy recently filed a report saying that Van Meter planned to use the video of his training to "falsely accuse Deputy Dishong of trying to hurt him during his training-academy class."
"What's there to make up? There's video," said Dan Klos, Van Meter's attorney.
The training academy did have problems.
Most other academies, including that of the Columbus police, record official videos of their training scenarios, but the sheriff's office did not.
Records also show confusion about who had authority over the academy. Chief Deputy Michael Flynn took over that responsibility after the investigation began in March. Flynn said a captain has been installed to oversee the academy, but he declined to comment further about the investigation.
The State Highway Patrol and Columbus police both stop training sessions when a cadet or trainer loses his or her headgear. The sheriff's office didn't. Hardesty lost his head protection before Dishong hit him in the face.
The sheriff's training academy didn't stop sessions when equipment came off because it could create bad habits for deputies when they are in a real fight, a source said. Deputies had been warned that the session would continue even if their headgear fell off.
"The stoppage can be seconds. It doesn't have to be a real lengthy stoppage," said Columbus police Cmdr. Bob Meader, who oversees the city's training academy.
The internal-affairs investigation said Hardesty's session should have been stopped.
The city training academy also hires a medic during training to treat injuries, Meader said. On test days, a doctor and a nurse are available. No medic was at the sheriff's training academy when Hardesty was hurt.
The state gives training academies broad guidelines, but it's up to the departments to develop specific policies, said Pappas, the union president.
Once the internal-affairs investigation is completed in the upcoming weeks, it will be presented to the state agency that oversees training guidelines. Then the state will determine whether any instructors should lose their certification, said Jill Del Greco, spokeswoman for the Ohio attorney general's office.
After the sheriff's office opened an investigation into the treatment of cadets, the state learned that trainees who passed the final scenario didn't complete the proper paperwork, Del Greco said. The internal-affairs investigation pointed to the incomplete paperwork as a reason to punish some of those involved in the incident.
State trainers readministered that session, this time recording the tests on video.
"They need to be able to show not only that they know how to do the different things, the handcuffing, takedowns, ground defense, but that they know when to do it and when it's appropriate," Del Greco said.
[email protected]
@RickRouanPiece is a smartphone companion which helps in managing the Second SIM on a smartphone which supports single SIM only. Yes, you read it right, with Piece you can handle Two SIM cards on a phone which supports Single SIM. Piece comes with a lot of other features which will really change the way you use your smartphone.
Remember when we used phones only for calling? Smartphones have actually changed the way we used phones. There are a lot of new features added to the smartphone with every launch, Fingerprint sensor in the smartphone is another addition which helps us to keep the devices secure.
Ever wanted to use your Second SIM in your High-end phone? Most of the High-end phones other than the OnePlus Two & YU Yutopia don’t come with a Dual SIM card and that’s the reason why many people settle with companies like OnePlus or YU.
What is Piece?
Piece in English means a part of something, well it means the same here also but in different context. The ‘Piece’ is a smartphone companion which manages the second SIM on a phone which supports single SIM only using Bluetooth. It is very thin, that it easily fits into the wallet.
It basically allows you to add an extra number to your existing device. There are many people who either buy a Dual SIM phone or many carry two phones though they might not be liking any of the above. With Piece you can avoid carrying both of the phones & buy the smartphone you like.
Support & Buy Piece External SIM Card Adapter
Piece not just adds an extra SIM to your Existing device But it is bundled with a lot of other Features.
You are supposed to insert the second SIM into ‘Piece’ and connect ‘Piece’ with your smartphone via Bluetooth. So whenever you receive a call on Piece you will get notified on your Mobile phone. Besides acting as a Dual SIM adapter for your existing device ‘Piece’ also comes with a lot of other features you may love.
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We people have the habit of forgetting things when we are engaged in some stuff. We don’t do it voluntarily and we can’t avoid such acts. But with ‘Piece’ we can protect ourselves from the loses that might occur from such events.
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We all buy iPod’s to have fun time, listen music and play some small games. Though smartphones have everything in them, but there are many parents who still prefer giving an iPod to their children over smartphones. ‘Piece’ can add calling facility in the Apple iPod also.
Being a parent, if your child who has an iPod is going for a tour and will return back in some days, you don’t have to give your phone or buy him a new phone for contacting him, just buying ‘Piece’ will add calling facility to his Apple iPod, thereby saving a lot of money!
‘Piece’ External SIM Card Adapter Specs.
Sadly, If you are someone who is thinking that Piece can fit inside your smartphone, It actually doesn’t fit inside the smartphone. However, if you are having a good back cover or a case which has a space to keep one extra battery then Piece can fit in that space. The above diagram shows where you will find different slots, keys and the dimensions.
It is good to know the Technical specs before buying the products, so the below Image displays the Technical specs of ‘Piece’ SIM adapter. Previously it just supported the iOS based devices, However, after reaching the stretch goal, The ‘Piece’ development team have also add support for the Android OS.
So if you are someone who is already fed up of carrying two phones or someone who has bought a Dual-SIM phone just for the extra SIM functionality & not because you liked the phone then this device is going to change the way you are going to ever use your Smartphone. Loved it right? We also loved it! Buy Piece from the Below Link.
Support & Buy Piece External SIM Card Adapter
Source: IndiegogoKenny McLean signed a new two-year contract in the summer
St Mirren have rejected an offer for former Scotland Under-21 midfielder Kenny McLean from Fleetwood Town.
The Scottish Premiership club said on their website that "the offer does not come close to the club's valuation of the player".
They also revealed that on-loan winger Adam Drury has returned to parent club Manchester City.
League One outfit Fleetwood are believed to have offered £150,000 for 22-year-old McLean.
Adam Drury has made 16 appearances for St Mirren
The product of the Paisley youth system signed a new two-year contract in the summer despite reported interest from English clubs.
Meanwhile, 21-year-old Drury has followed Manchester City team-mate Ellis Plummer in being sent back early to the Etihad Stadium after signing a season-long loan deal in August.
Plummer had missed a number of games through injury, while Drury wanted guaranteed first-team starts as he is out of contract in the summer and likely to be looking for a new club.
Drury, who had a previous loan spell with Burton Albion, made 16 appearances for St Mirren, scoring three goals.Julie Bishop says intelligence gathering with US is vital, accuses Edward Snowden of treachery
Updated
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop used a major speech in Washington to defend Australia's joint intelligence operations with the United States and criticise American whistleblower Edward Snowden for his "treachery".
Sandwiched between meetings with US vice-president Joe Biden and top security officials, Ms Bishop delivered the keynote address to the Alliance 21 conference, organised by the US Studies Centre.
Before an audience of American and Australian business and trade leaders and former senior ministers, she made it clear what she thought of Snowden, the former US intelligence analyst.
He "continues to shamefully betray his nation while skulking in Russia", Ms Bishop said.
"This represents unprecedented treachery. He is no hero.
"I am surprised that any responsible entity or organisation or people could label him as some kind of hero.
"This is unprecedented treachery."
While in Washington, Ms Bishop met with president Barack Obama's national security adviser Susan Rice.
Ms Bishop is convinced shared intelligence gathering will remain a pillar of the relationship between the two allies.
"I am confident that intelligence cooperation will remain one of the core elements of our alliance in the 21st century," she said.
"But we must be prepared to make the public case for the importance of this work because the safety of our citizens depends on it."
Documents leaked by Snowden last November caused a major rift between Australia and Indonesia, with revelations the country's president and his close advisers had been targeted by Australian spies.
At an earlier press conference, Ms Bishop revealed she is working as closely as possible with her Indonesian counterpart to manage the impact.
"Indeed Minister [Marty] Natalegawa and I are in constant contact," she said.
He [Snowden] is no hero. "This is unprecedented treachery. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop
"We've put in place a process and we're halfway through that process - that is developing a joint understanding of these issues."
But she again stressed there will be no backing away from intelligence gathering activities undertaken by both the US and Australia.
"I take this opportunity to remind people that our intelligence activities are about our national security, our national interest and protecting the safety and security of our citizens," she said.
"It's about saving lives and Australia will continue putting the interests, the safety of our citizens first.
Ms Bishop says she also shares Prime Minister Tony Abbott's confidence that there is adequate and robust oversight of Australia's intelligence services.
Topics: security-intelligence, federal-government, foreign-affairs, united-states, australia
First postedEd Blaylock, voice of Fuhrer King Bradley from Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood television anime series passed away on Wednesday. WRR 101, radio staton from Dallas, Texas revealed the news on Thursday. Ed was 64 year old and was battling cancer when he died.
After giving voice in FMA & FMAB, Blaylock had reprised King Bradley's role in the Fullmetal Alchemist: Premium Collection and Fullmetal Alchmist: Seven Homunuli Vs State Alchemist video anime series. He additionally played Fritz Lang in the Fullmetal Alchemist: The Movie - Conqueror of Shamballa film.
Ed is also known for giving voice for, Sengoku in One Piece, Director in Barakamon and Sebas Tian in Overload. He also played minor roles in more than 40 anime, including Attack on Titan, Blood Blockade Battlefront, Dragon Ball, Fairy Tail, tokyo Ghoul, Toriko and more...
Apart from bein a voice actor, Blaylock was the weekday evening announcer for WRR 101, and he worked for the station for more than 10 years. He also appeared in stage plays in Dallas, and acted in the "Living History" program where he portrayed real-life historical figures in period costume to give talks to schoolchildren.Samsung hasn’t received a single report of a Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8+ bursting into flames, according to The Korea Herald. For comparison, the Galaxy Note 7 had already been subject to a recall in a number of regions around the world, including the United States and South Korea, when it was on the market for the same amount of time.
It’s safe to say that Samsung’s new safety measures are paying off, and seeing as they span across its entire smartphone lineup and not just its flagship devices, all customers should be a little bit safer when using their handset, regardless of how much money it set them back.
We’re particularly impressed with the way Samsung has handled things. The Galaxy Note 7 debacle could have had a long-lasting effect on its reputation, but the introduction of several new procedures, like an 8-point battery safety check, has helped restore confidence in the |
cuts hit that much harder.Ernest A. Canning Byon 1/27/2010, 8:16am PT
Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning
As the community group ACORN, which is accused of no federal felonies, awaits a decision on the release of federal funds that they were unconstitutionally barred from receiving, according to a federal judge, the man who apparently videotaped some of their employees illegally and then released highly edited and misleading versions of those illegally obtained tapes now faces federal felony charges related to wiretapping a U.S. Senator....
On Nov. 12, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging that separate House and Senate Resolutions to bar all funds to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) were unconstitutional Bills of Attainder.
We initially covered the ACORN lawsuit in "ACORN Sues Congress Over Defunding Legislation." The lawsuit directly pertained to House and Senate Appropriations Resolutions which singled out ACORN for a cut-off of federal funds. These were passed after James O'Keefe's illicitly taped videos emerged, purporting to depict some ACORN employees giving advice to individuals posing as a prostitute and a pimp.
As Brad Friedman noted in "ACORN Cleared YET AGAIN of Wrongdoing," former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger issued an independent report following the release of the tapes, finding incidents of mismanagement by ACORN but "no criminal wrongdoing." CCR noted that Harshbarger, who reviewed the "complete transcripts," concluded that "the infamous videotapes had been doctored and fully misrepresented the actions of the workers shown."
On Dec. 11, U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon granted ACORN's motion for a preliminary injunction [PDF], ruling that it was likely ACORN would prevail on the merits of its claim that the House and Senate Appropriations Resolutions were unconstitutional Bills of Attainder.
Although no doubt fully aware of ACORN's pending lawsuit, on Dec. 10 & Dec. 13 the House and Senate enacted the "FY 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act," an amalgam of six separate bills which the President signed into law on Dec. 16. The Act contains a provision which is virtually identical to the earlier resolutions passed, cutting off ACORN from federal funds.
In response, ACORN filed a motion [PDF] to expand the previous preliminary injunction to the "FY 2010 Consolidated Appropriations Act."
As of this posting, we are still awaiting word from CCR on the fate of ACORN's pending motion.
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, James O'Keefe, who posed as the pimp in the ACORN sting video, along with three others, was arrested and "charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony," in relation to an alleged plot to tamper with the telephone system in the office of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA).
Despite repeated, often whiffed attacks by Republican partisans and operatives, ACORN has been instrumental in helping millions of low and middle-income American citizens to legally excercise their franchise to vote, as well as helping them take steps toward living the American dream by owning their own homes.
It remains unclear as to what O'Keefe and friends have done, other than to have harmed a voter-friendly organization unfairly and now having allegedly committed a federal felony offense.
===
Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California state bar since 1977. Mr. Canning has received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science as well as a juris doctor. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).The criticism of any Republican almost always grows in proportion to his effectiveness. One of the media’s principal missions is to serve as a dispensary of unsolicited and destructive advice to the GOP. And until Trump came along, the stupid party usually took it. Trump won not in spite of his utter indifference to the media’s self-serving counsel but because of it. If a Republican candidate follows the media’s advice, he typically loses; if a Republican in office takes the media’s advice, he governs fecklessly, makes no meaningful gains, and loses re-election.
Always do more of what the media forbids; always do less of whatever it counsels. Trump, who is already inclined to follow these rules, should observe them even more robustly. The media, for example, is instructing him “not to criticize Mueller.” Trump should launch even more attacks on Mueller, detailing day in and day out his conflicts of interest (which far exceed Sessions’ s insignificant meetings with the Russian ambassador) and exposing all the partisan hatchet men he has assembled to nail the Trump campaign on process crimes.
Even the media’s hair-on-fire hysterics about the prospect of a fired Mueller isn’t worth taking seriously. If Trump were to fire Mueller, the media/ruling class would throw temper tantrums for a few months, the American people would shrug (the Russian fable is white noise to them at this point), and Trump would win re-election easily. The sky would not fall, except on the cowards in the GOP who joined the Dems in calling for Trump’s impeachment.
Beneath all of the blather about “what Trump should and shouldn’t do” on this front is an outrageous principle, one that the media would never extend to a Democrat, namely, that a duly elected president isn’t permitted to run his own executive branch. Who elected Mueller again? Who elected the Justice Department officials who signed off on Mueller’s Kafkaesque investigation? All of the unsolicited advice to Trump amounts to saying: You may not run your own Justice Department! To which Trump should say: “Why not? If the American people don’t like my decisions, they can drop me in 2020. But until then, they will get the government they voted into office, not the government by ‘D.C. ruling class’ (of which Mueller, a Comey pal, is a classic emblem) you propose to impose on them.”
Incidentally, did you catch the other day that John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director who supported the Soviets during the Cold War and the Muslim Brotherhood during the present hot one, is back to his radical ways, calling in effect for the overthrow of a duly elected U.S. president? Naturally, the media, which has spent decades normalizing left-wing radicalism, cast his disgraceful comments as evidence of high patriotism and statesmanlike sagacity. No, they are the despicable musings of a shaggy-haired Gus Hall voter who still hasn’t grown up. CNN seized upon his remarks, reporting:
Former CIA Director John Brennan says government officials should refuse orders to fire special counsel Robert Mueller if they are told to by the White House. “I think it’s the obligation of some executive branch officials to refuse to carry that out. I would just hope that this is not going to be a partisan issue. That Republicans, Democrats are going to see that the future of this government is at stake and something needs to be done for the good of the future,” Brennan told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer at the Aspen Security Forum.
In the end, there is no difference between the treasonous John Brennan who voted for the Soviet plant Gus Hall in the 1970s and the “patriotic” John Brennan flailing against Donald Trump today. They are both calling for mutiny against the elected head of a US government. They are both anti-American socialists of breathtaking presumption.
Nor has the media in all of its hostility to the American people (former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis once let the cat out of the bag and said that the country needs a “new people”) changed from its baby boomerish nihilism. Those who voted Trump into office shouldn’t worry a moment about the volume of criticism from these perennial whiners and malcontents (who can’t rest until their willful liberalism dominates every dimension of the country). They should only worry if it stops.I’ve developed such an iron stomach when it comes to digesting rotten movies that it really says something when it takes me multiple sittings to make it all the way through one, as happens to have been the case with A Cure for Wellness. This plodding Judaic dud concerns a corporate creep (Dane DeHaan) who travels to Switzerland to retrieve an insane executive who is reportedly recuperating in a mysterious clinic. Switzerland essentially being a piece of Germany, the place is naturally being run by crypto-Nazi perverts with all sorts of deep, dark European secrets. Boringly perverted director Gore Verbinski and his collaborators are so determined to give the setting and characters an air of coldness and clinical inhumanity that these qualities, unfortunately, end up attaching themselves to the film itself, making it about as appetizing as a gore popsicle. Even the effort to liven things up with would-be shocks like sadistic dentistry, eels in a toilet, masturbation, and incestuous rape only make the movie more of a yawn-inducer. Even the Blu-ray menu is irritating, with its horror movie cliché of a little girl’s monotonous singing. Throw in the fact that this is yet another mean-spirited production of Israeli intelligence asset Arnon Milchan (opening with a shot of skyscrapers, to boot) and A Cure for Wellness goes straight into the biohazard bin.
2 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that A Cure for Wellness is:
3. Assimilationist, showing the inspiring ability of blacks and Indians to ape European dress and mannerisms.
2. Judeo-capitalist, casting a financial criminal as the protagonist.
1. Anti-white and pro-miscegenation. Early in the movie, a white woman makes a reference to a “twelve-inch” black penis, suggesting congoid sexual superiority. The pathology of a racially homogeneous community is conveyed by icy-eyed Europeans whose sterile paleness is amplified by their all-white wardrobe. National Socialist notions of racial hygiene are parodied as a form of isolationist inbreeding. The protagonist learns that the clinic occupies the property of a nobleman who determined that the only woman pure enough to bear him a child was his sister. Sad to report, we have now actually plumbed the cultural depth at which audiences are sufficiently debased to tolerate the casual horror of a father (Jason Isaacs) sticking his hand up his daughter’s crotch and then sniffing his fingers for the camera. Hitler is never explicitly referenced, but the entire backstory of fiendish medical experiments and fields full of emaciated corpses are intended to evoke the specter of the persecution of the Jews. A Cure for Wellness functions as “Holocaust” revenge porn, with the viewer expected to exult in the sight of a sheltered European girl (Mia Goth) cleaving her father’s skull with a shovel and riding into the night on a bike with the evilly grinning New York crook who has rescued her from the Swiss ethno-dystopia.
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
AdvertisementsWASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton is set to play a central part in the Democratic convention, aides said, and will formally place President Obama’s name into nomination by delivering a prime-time speech designed to present a forceful economic argument for why Mr. Obama deserves to win a second term.
The prominent role of Mr. Clinton, which is scheduled to be announced on Monday, signals an effort by the Obama campaign to pull out all the stops to rally Democrats when they gather for their party’s national convention in Charlotte, N.C. An even more important audience will be the voters across the country who will see the address carried by television networks.
“There isn’t anybody on the planet who has a greater perspective on not just the last four years, but the last two decades, than Bill Clinton,” David Axelrod, a top strategist to the Obama campaign, said in an interview on Sunday. “He can really articulate the choice that is before people.”
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will appear on the final night of the convention, making the case for Mr. Obama before the largest audience of the week during an outdoor speech at the Bank of America Stadium. The vice president and Mr. Obama will appear together on stage before they accept the party’s nomination for a second term in the White House.
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It is unusual in recent election cycles, although not without precedent, for the vice president not to get the stage to himself during a night at the convention. But in his speech, aides said, Mr. Biden is expected to remind Americans about the last four years and the administration’s accomplishments in a difficult economic climate.
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The invitation for Mr. Clinton to be center stage at the convention signifies another milestone in the complicated and evolving relationship between the two presidents.Samsung’s long-awaited Galaxy Note 7 refurbishment project is nearly upon us – and we’ve now heard a rumour on pricing.
Last year, Samsung was forced to recall the Galaxy Note 7 after some units started exploding. Soon after, the tech giant announced plans to eventually sell refurbished versions of the phone at discounted prices. According to local Korean news outlet The Investor, that’s going to happen as early as this month or next.
But the report goes on to suggest that the refurbished handset pricing will be about 50% cheaper than the discontinued Note 7. In the UK, the Galaxy Note 7 launched at £749, so that would put the refurb pricing at around £375. Assuming the phone doesn’t explode anymore, that seems like a real steal.
When we originally reviewed the Galaxy Note 7, we gave it a respectable 4.5/5 score, praising the handset’s glorious screen, great camera, fun S-Pen stylus, water-resistant body, and excellent battery life. Our verdict was: “Fantastic in pretty much every way, but all that tech comes at a steep price.”
If the Galaxy Note 7 refurbs do price at below £400, they could provide a seriously compelling alternative to the new Samsung Galaxy S8 and Samsung Galaxy S8+, which currently cost £689 and £779 in the UK respectively.
Unfortunately, Samsung hasn’t actually confirmed any official pricing details for refurbished Galaxy Note 7 models, nor have we heard about a proper release schedule yet. Until then, we recommend taking such leaks with due caution.
Related: Best Android phones
Would you be interesting in buying a refurbished Galaxy Note 7? Let us know in the comments.Yesterday marked the 109th anniversary of the first aviation photograph ever snapped. Back on December 17th, 1903, an amateur photographer named John Thomas Daniels Jr. captured the now-iconic photograph above showing the Wright brothers’ first flight.
“Amateur photographer” is used quite loosely when discussing Daniels’ role in creating this particular photograph — it was actually the very first photograph Daniels’ had ever taken!
When the Wright brothers traveled to the small town of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina to test their glider, Daniels was one of three men from the Life-Saving Station (think “coast guard”) in that town to help out with the test.
The camera, a Gundlach Korona 5×7-inch glass plate view camera, was actually owned by the Wright brothers. Prior to launching the Flyer, Orville Wright set up his tripod, focused the camera to the correct distance, and prepared the film holder. He then gave Daniels instructions on how to trigger the camera’s shutter by squeezing the shutter release bulb.
The Wright brothers flipped a coin to see who would pilot the first flight. Wilbur won but botched his attempt, so Orville’s the pilot in the iconic photograph, while his brother is seen running at the wingtip.
Daniels had never used (or even seen) a camera prior to capturing the historic shot. When the Flyer went airborne just minutes after he was taught how to operate it, Daniels was so excited that he almost forgot to squeeze the bulb. Luckily for the Wright brothers (and for all of us), he didn’t forget.
This all happened way before the days of digital photography, so neither the Wright brothers nor Daniels had any idea how the photos turned out (a total of three plates were exposed that day) on the day of the flight, and it would be some time until they would find out. Weeks passed before the Wright brothers returned to their home in Dayton, Ohio and developed the plates in their darkroom.
We’re guessing the brothers were very pleased with the job Daniels had done.
P.S. If you’d like some further reading, Ohio public radio station WYSO has published a great article and audio commentary that provides a closer look at the camera used for this photograph. Vintage Aircraft also has a much closer examination of the photograph itself.
Thanks for sending in the tip, Howard!
Image credits: Sculpture photo by RadioFan/Wikimedia CommonsAbout This Game Origins
Phinnegan's Factory is set in an original universe, The Sky-High City of Steampuff – first created by Steelehouse. We are a small studio of artists, animators and gamers working in Tulsa, OK and we've been making content for other folks for the last 17 years. For a very long time, we'd wanted to make an animated series – in 2012, we did. We created the Sky-High City of Steampuff and in doing so, created a lot of artwork and lore. When we decided to make our first game, we knew our universe and its unique aesthetic would be a fantastic VR experience – so Phinnegan's Factory was born.
Features
• BEAUTIFULLY CRAFTED - You'll experience an immersive world that is wholly unique, both in tone and style. Every detail has been painted and placed for you to explore.
• FRANTICALLY FUN GAMEPLAY - This isn't a game you can win by standing or sitting still. You'll need to duck, dodge, shimmy and leap out of danger.
• BREATH-TAKING LOCALES - Fight back the devious mechanical hordes in the sweltering Furnace Room, the moonlit Trainyard, and in the cavernous belfry of the Clocktower!
• DUAL DISASSEMBLY - Experience twice the fabulous firepower with a Farraday Model 53 in each hand! Focus your fire or split your salvo while you expertly pace the perimeter … otherwise you are just doubling the danger of being a bad shot.
• COVER SYSTEM - As decorated Rear Admiral Alexi Asminov famously said, “The best defense is a good sturdy something to hide behind.” Well now YOU can experience that maxim first hand with your very own “something" to cower behind. Trigger the hiding hole with a single shot. Enjoy your cowardice while it lasts.
• LOCAL LEADERBOARDS - Everything is more fun with friends, especially winning.
• IMAGINATIVE ENEMIES - You will face waves of mechanized monstrosities. Every robot is unique in design and function – each enemy has its own attacks and weaknesses.
• POWER-UPS - Ever wished for a little more oomph? Perhaps you’ve lamented the loss of health! The new power-up system gives you the flexibility and longevity necessary to face the factory and live longer … perhaps.Israel and Hamas on Monday accepted an Egyptian ceasefire proposal meant to halt a bruising month-long war that has claimed nearly 2,000 lives, raising hopes that the bloodiest round of fighting between the bitter enemies could finally be coming to an end.
Still, both sides signalled a rough road ahead, with an Israeli official expressing skepticism given previous failures, and a Palestinian negotiator saying "it's going to be tough."
A last-minute burst of violence, including a deadly Palestinian attack in Jerusalem, continued bloodshed in Gaza and the reported execution of a number of suspected collaborators with Israel, served as reminders of the lingering risk of renewed violence.
After weeks of behind-the-scenes diplomacy, Israel and Hamas both announced late Monday that they had accepted the proposal for a preliminary 72-hour truce, beginning at 8 a.m. Tuesday. Egypt was then set to host indirect talks to work out a long-term truce over the next three days.
"At 8 a.m. local time tomorrow a ceasefire starts and Israel will cease all military operations against terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip," said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev. "Israel will honour the ceasefire and will be watching to see if Hamas does to."
'Tough negotiations'
The war broke out on July 8 when Israel launched an air offensive in response to weeks of heavy rocket fire out of Hamas-controlled Gaza. It expanded the operation on July 17 by sending in ground forces in what it described as a mission to destroy a network of tunnels used to stage attacks. Israel says the last of the tunnels has nearly been destroyed.
The war has taken nearly 1,900 Palestinian lives, most of them civilians caught in fighting inside Gaza's crowded urban landscape, according to Hamas medical officials. Sixty-four Israeli soldiers have also died, as well as two Israeli civilians and a Thai labourer who worked in Israel. The heavy death toll has eclipsed that of previous rounds of fighting in 2009 and 2012.
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A delegation of Palestinian officials from various factions, including Hamas, has been negotiating with Egypt in recent days. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said the group had accepted the plan.
"It's clear now that the interest of all parties is to have a ceasefire," said Bassam Salhi, a member of the Palestinian delegation. "It's going to be tough negotiations because Israel has demands too. We don't have any guarantees the siege will be removed."
Hamas is seeking a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, an end to an Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the territory, the release of Hamas prisoners held by Israel and international assistance in the reconstruction of Gaza.
Israeli ground forces withdrawing
Israel says the blockade is needed to prevent Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to its destruction, from arming. But the Palestinians and members of the international community have criticized the blockade as collective punishment. The blockade, known to the Palestinians as "the siege," has ground Gaza's economy to a standstill.
Israel has demanded that Gaza become "demilitarized," requiring the unlikely cooperation of Hamas in giving up its significant arsenal.
A construction vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian and overturned the bus on a main street in Jerusalem on Monday in what police suspect was a Palestinian attack. (Ammar Awad/Reuters)
"We will be putting first on our agenda preventing Hamas from rearming," Regev said. "Ultimately the Palestinians have a written commitment that Gaza should be demilitarized and it's time the international community held them to that commitment."
Israel had been signalling in recent days that it was winding down its military campaign. On Sunday, it withdrew most of its ground forces from Gaza, and the army said the pullout was continuing Monday.
In addition, Israel declared a seven-hour pause Monday in its air campaign for what it called a "window" to allow much-needed humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Supermarkets were open for business and more cars were on the streets than during any of the short-lived ceasefires since the war began. Fresh fruits and vegetables were available in outdoor markets.
Despite a drop in military activity, Israel still attacked 38 targets, though well below the levels of recent days.
At least 20 people were killed Monday, including three children — an 8-year-old girl in the Shati refugee camp and a 12-year-old boy and his 5-year-old sister in the southern border town of Rafah, according to Palestinian medical officials. Still, that was far below the levels during the heaviest fighting.
Israel's chief military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Moti Almoz, disputed Palestinian claims that the vast majority of the dead were civilians.
"We estimate that between 700 and 900 terrorists were killed in direct contact with Israeli soldiers," he told Channel 2 TV. "That's a number that could rise because there were many terrorists inside the tunnels that were probably killed when the tunnels were blown up."
'The resistance will show no mercy'
Almoz said Israel expected to destroy the last of the tunnels, allegedly built by militants to stage attacks across the border, in the coming hours.
As the fighting appeared to be tapering off, a Palestinian website close to the Hamas internal security service in Gaza said an unspecified number of Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel were executed.
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It said the alleged collaborators were caught "red-handed" providing information to Israel, including details on certain houses and alerts about planned ambushes. "The resistance will show no mercy to anyone tempted to provide information to the enemy," the al-Majad website said.
In Jerusalem, an assault carried out with a construction vehicle served as another reminder of the tense climate.
Israeli TV stations broadcast a series of amateur videos of the attack, in which a Palestinian man used the front shovel of a construction excavator to ram a bus and tip it over.
Police said a man who worked at the site was run over and killed by the construction vehicle. He was identified as a 29-year-old religious inspector whose job was to ensure that ancient graves were not damaged by construction work.
A policeman who happened to be in the area shot the driver, who was identified as a resident of a Palestinian neighbourhood in east Jerusalem. The man's uncle, Hisham Jaabis, said the incident was a traffic accident and that his nephew had been gunned down in cold blood while trying to dodge the bus. "All of them started shooting at him," he said.
In the past, Palestinian attackers have gone on deadly rampages with bulldozers in Jerusalem traffic.
Shortly after the excavator attack, a gunman on a motorcycle shot and seriously wounded an Israeli soldier in Jerusalem. Police called it a "terrorist" attack, signalling alleged Palestinian involvement, and searched for the shooter in east Jerusalem.Sitting in Boston Logan International Airport, the Orlando Pride surrounded a laptop.
The team watched Sky Blue FC take on Seattle Reign FC. Orlando took care of business against Boston winning 2-1, moving into fourth place in the National Women’s Soccer League standings above Seattle.
The Pride needed Sky Blue to get at least a point to stay in fourth. However, Seattle took a 3-0 lead into halftime. Sky Blue stormed back, tying the game at 3, and ultimately completing a dramatic comeback win.
“It was funny at three each, it always looked like there was going to be more goals in this game,” Pride coach Tom Sermanni said.
He was right. The final 10 minutes consisted of pure chaos. Three goals between the two clubs, and a missed penalty by Sky Blue’s Sam Kerr. Eventual heartbreak for Seattle and exaltation for Sky Blue and Orlando. In the 85th minute, Kiersten Dallstream put the Reign up 4-3.
“When Seattle went up 4-3, I said that’s it, it’s all over,” Sermanni said.
But the game only started to delve deeper into its insanity. In the first minute of added time, Sky Blue Maya Hayes diverted a cross into the bottom left corner to square the contest at four.
More than 200 miles away and waiting to return home, the Pride players couldn’t contain their excitement.
“Sky Blue scored to tie and we were all screaming,” defender Kristen Edmonds said. “I think everyone in the airport kind of turned around to look at what we were doing.”
Two minutes later, Seattle conceded a penalty. Kerr, who was looking for her fourth goal of the match, stepped up to take the kick. She hit the crossbar. Thirty-five seconds later, Kerr got her goal, heading in a corner kick. Sky Blue’s improbable 5-4 comeback win was complete.
“They scored the winning goal, and we literally went nuts because we knew we had that fourth spot,” Edmonds said.
Orlando is two points ahead of Seattle in the standings. Sermanni texted Kerr after the match. The two have a connection through the Australian women’s national team. Sermanni managed the squad from 2005-2012, and Kerr has been a member of the team since 2009.
He wanted to thank her for giving Orlando breathing space between the Pride and Seattle.
“I sent her a wee text and she sent a nice little message back to me,” Sermanni said. “I said I can't believe you only scored four goals against Seattle, they're rubbish.”
He jokingly added, “… It was quite unreal, to be honest.”
Edmonds adds stability
Changing positions is nothing new for Edmonds.
She grew up playing striker and on the wing before being moved around the pitch. After playing out wide and in the midfield for Orlando last season, she’s been deployed at right back.
While Steph Catley makes forward runs from her left-back position, Edmonds stays back, creating a back 3. She provides cover if opposing teams break for an attack.
“It's just easier for me to tuck in just in case we do lose the ball,” she said. “And then if we need to switch it, I can easily release and then Steph can come back as well.”
Her versatility and willingness to play anywhere is infectious. Sermanni loves having options at different positions, and Edmonds is one he can use in a variety of ways.
“She's really quite comfortable playing any position apart from maybe center back and as a playmaker in the center of midfield,” Sermanni said. “But anything sort of wide whether it's wide up front or wide at the back or even centrally up front, she can go in and play competently. I don't have any concerns about her at right back.”Image: iStock
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has made its final decision regarding the regulation of high-speed internet services supplied by non-NBN fixed line networks - and if they can pass the "NBN tax" charge to customers.
In a change from the draft decision, the ACCC is letting non-NBN networks to pass on the Government's proposed Regional Broadband Scheme charge on their customer lines to help fund NBN's supply of non-commercial regional fixed wireless and satellite services.
The Government Wants You To Pay An NBN Tax The government is pushing for a $7.10 levy to be implemented on the ISPs that deliver Australia's superfast fixed-line broadband, to help pay for the wireless and satellite portions of the National Broadband Network. That Read more
The internet services subject to the decision are called the superfast broadband access service and the Local Bitstream Access Service. These are wholesale "superfast" fixed-line broadband services capable of download speeds of normally 25 Mbps or more. They are supplied on non-NBN networks and provide similar services to the NBN.
"Our view is that the regulated prices based on the NBN prices may not have allowed these network providers to recover their reasonable costs if they were also required to absorb the proposed RBS charge," ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said. "One of our main aims has been to ensure that internet retailers and their customers supplied via the non-NBN networks will not be worse off than if they were supplied internet services by the NBN."
Under the final decision, the initial prices for providers other than Telstra will be $27.00 per port per month plus between $8.00 and $17.50 per Mbps per month for aggregation to a point of interconnection. The aggregation price payable will vary by retail service provider depending on the average amount of aggregation capacity that a RSP purchases per port.
Sims says the prices have been set in line with NBN prices, and will change with NBN prices over time to reflect the growth in traffic across the high speed internet sector. Sims says this will continue to drive down the average cost of supplying services.
"We expect that these price changes will help deliver better service performance for customers of non-NBN networks as they will allow retailers to provide faster services at a lower average price."
The ACCC says the very small providers of some high-speed internet services (supplying less than 12,000 customers) will not be regulated under this decision on the basis that it would apply an unreasonable burden to them with little benefit to customers. Terms set in the final decision only apply if access providers and access seekers cannot reach their own commercial agreements on prices and other terms for the relevant services.
The networks largely supply high-speed internet services in new housing estates and apartment buildings in central city locations. In many areas they supply internet services where the NBN does not offer services and provide customers in these areas with a limited choice of retailers of internet services. The major providers of these services are Telstra (South Brisbane and Velocity Estates fibre networks), TPG, Vocus, LBN Co, Opticomm, and OPENetworks.
The ACCC says the decision sets wholesale prices and other terms and conditions "that are expected to provide customers with a larger number of retailers to choose from and deliver them better prices and services".
The full final decision can be read here.SANTA CRUZ >> Authorities are searching for a man who called 911 for assistance Tuesday morning, claiming Dominican Hospital either killed or mistreated his wife and that he intended to shoot up the hospital, according to Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.
The hospital was placed on lockdown shortly after the call about 9:50 a.m., Sgt. Chris Clark said.
Hospital spokeswoman Claire Henry confirmed the lockdown had been lifted by late morning but was unable to provide an exact time.
“What I can tell you is that hospital operations are not affected,” Henry said.
The man made the threat “because of how upset he was (and) he threatened to bring a weapon to Dominican Hospital,” Clark said.
The hospital, which initiated the lockdown, lifted the order later Tuesday, Clark said.
“We have committed a number of resources for the safety of the staff and clients,” Clark said. “We are investigating leads to determine who the caller was and to substantiate any of the information.”
The Sheriff’s Office notified the hospital about the threat.
“We take these incidents very seriously,” Clark said.
The Sheriff’s Office asks anyone with information about the threat to call dispatch at 831-471-1121.The Man Code Thou shall not rent the movie Chocolate. Under no circumstances may 2 men share an umbrella. Any man who brings a camera to a bachelor party may be legally killed and eaten by his fellow partygoers. When you are queried by a buddy's wife, girlfriend, mother, father, priest, shrink, dentist, accountant, or dog walker, you need not and should not provide any useful information whatsoever as to his whereabouts. You are permitted to deny his very existence. Unless he murdered someone in your immediate family, you must bail a friend out of jail within 12 hours. You may exaggerate any anecdote told in a bar by 50% without recrimination; beyond that, anyone within earshot is allowed to call B*LLSH$T. (Exception: When trying to pick up a girl, the allowable exaggeration rate rises to 400%) If you've known a guy for more than 24 hours, his sister is off-limits forever. The minimum amount of time you have to wait for another guy who's running late is 5 minutes. For a girl, you are required to wait 10 minutes for every point of hotness she scores on the classic 1-10 babe scale. Complaining about the brand of free beer in a buddies refrigerator is forbidden. You may gripe if the temperature is unsuitable. No man is ever required to buy a birthday present for another man. In fact, even remembering a friends birthday is strictly optional and slightly gay. Agreeing to distract the ugly friend of a hot babe that your buddy is trying to hook up with is your legal duty. Should you get carried away with your good deed and end up having sex with the beast, your pal is forbidden to speak of it, even at your bachelor party. Before dating a buddy's "ex", you are required to ask his permission and he in return is required to grant it. Women who claim they "love to watch sports" must be treated as spies until they demonstrate knowledge of the game and the ability to pick a buffalo wing clean. If a man's zipper is down, that's his problem - you didn't see nothin'. The universal compensation for buddies who help you move is beer. A man must never own a cat or like his girlfriend's cat. When stumbling upon other guys watching a sports event, you may always ask the score of the game in progress, but you may never ask who's playing. When your girlfriend/wife expresses a desire to fix her whiney friend up with your pal, you may give her the go-ahead only if you'll be able to warn your buddy and give him time to prepare excuses about joining the priesthood. It is permissible to consume a fruity chick drink only when you're sunning on a tropical beach... and it's delivered by a topless supermodel... and it's free. Unless you're in prison, never fight naked. A man in the company of a hot, suggestively dressed woman must remain sober enough to fight. If a buddy is outnumbered, out manned, or too drunk to fight, you must jump into the fight. Exception: If within the last 24 hours his actions have caused you to think, "What this guy needs is a good ass-whoopin", then you may sit back and enjoy. Phrases that may NOT be uttered to another man while weight lifting: "Yeah, baby, push it!", "C'mon, give me one more! Harder!", "Another set and we can hit the showers." " Nice ass, are you a Sagittarius?" Never hesitate to reach for the last beer or the last slice of pizza, but not both. That's just plain mean. If you compliment a guy on his six-pack, you better be referring to his beer. Never join your girlfriend/wife in dissing a buddy, except when she's withholding sex pending your response. Never talk to a man in the bathroom unless you're on equal footing: either both urinating or both waiting in line. In all other situations, a nod is all the conversation you need. Unlocking a car door for another man is polite. Opening it is gay.Introduction
Specifications
One core with a color screen
Two buttons
Three dials
Two sliders
Palette was founded in 2013, when a few Canadians decided they were not satisfied with the current state of human computer interaction and set about developing a modular input device for content creators in particular. A successful Kickstarter campaign followed by the public release in 2014 led to the startup now having an international presence and focusing on their MIDI controller system. Thanks go to Palette for providing a review sample of their intermediate Expert kit for us to take a look at today.The astute reader may have by now figured out that this is not a keyboard, although you can actually use it as one if you are so inclined. The Palette solution is a collection of buttons, dials, and sliders that use the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technical standard to perform a variety of functions that can be assigned to them. This is not a new thing, mind you, with similar products having been created for musicians and artists alike. However, Palette has also put additional effort in to simply make that one of several possible functions, with other modes directly translating raw data streams from the core module to work with specific programs, including Adobe Premier Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Capture One, etc. As such, Palette uses either HID or OS-level media playback APIs (M |
by liquid iron circulating in its outer core; as the iron moves through the planet’s magnetic field an electric current is generated, which, in turn, reinforces the magnetic field—the self-sustaining geodynamo. (For an Internet guide to planetary magnetic fields, see my March, 2008 column, Journey to the Core.) On a much smaller scale, magnetic fields are created by single, spinning electrons orbiting inside an atom. As the primer on the classes of magnetic materials at The Institute for Rock Magnetism at the University of Minnesota explains, “This may be a surprise to some, but all matter is magnetic.” There are, however, five different types of magnetic materials, determined by how the atoms are configured and whether or not their “magnetic moments” act in concert or cancel each other. Of all the minerals, by far the strongest (and important to geologists) is magnetite. For a brief description of that mineral, go to Geology.com. And for a fun, experiment-packed primer on all kinds of magnetism, go to Paul Doherty’s lecture at the Exploratorium, 2000 Years of magnetism in 40 minutes.
As I already mentioned, the plate tectonics revolution was launched largely on magnetic mineral data, first on land and then at sea. On the Internet I came across an inaugural article by Edward Irving in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on his pioneering work in paleomagnetism, entitled The Role of Latitude in Mobilism Debates. (In the early days, “mobilism” was used before “plate tectonics” became the accepted term.) By measuring magnetic signature recorded in ancient rocks, Irving deduced that the continents had once been at different latitudes. Be sure to scroll down to the bottom and click on Irving’s biography by freelance science writer Tinsley H. Davis; it’s worth reading just to see how Irving eventually shamed Cambridge University into giving him his doctor of science degree—a case study in the difficulties of breaking new ground. For a good summary of how the magnetic minerals in the seafloor basalt became a key piece of evidence in the plate tectonics revolution, go to this page at the Moorland School in the United Kingdom.
The first article in Elements magazine reporting on new research is by John A. Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester. Entitled {http://www.elementsmagazine.org/archives/e5_4/e5_4_art_tarduno.pd}Geodynamo History Preserved in Single Silicate Crystals: Origins and Long-Term Mantle Control, it reveals how minute magnetic particles, frozen in ancient silicate crystals, are opening a window on the early history of our planet’s inner core and the formation of the geodynamo. Without those “magnetic time capsules” recording Earth’s magnetic field more than three billion years ago, that history would have remained forever in the realm of conjecture.
The second feature article in Elements pushes the magnetic record further back than I could have imagined, back to the formation of the planets in the early solar system. Magnetism of Extraterrestrial Materials, by Pierre Rochette and Jérôme Gattacceca, at Aix-Marseille University in France, and Benjamin P. Weiss at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explores the information that can be teased from magnetic minerals in meteorites—rocks from worlds shattered in the early chaos or representing the stuff from which they formed. For a quick look at the magnetic fields of other planets, go to this page by Paul Doherty at the Exploratorium.
The third article in Elements is about two disparate, yet remarkable new sources of magnetic mineral data: the largest deposit of wind-blown dust in the world, which stretches across China in a layer that is, in places, more than a thousand feet thick; and the leaves of trees along busy highways. Barbara A. Maher, a professor of physical geography at the Center for Environmental Magnetism and Paleomagnetism at the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom, is the author of Rain and Dust: Magnetic Records of Climate and Pollution. In the first case, she reports on how the magnetic minerals deposited by the wind can be used to reconstruct a record of the Asian summer monsoons, spanning the glacial and interglacial periods of the last 2 million years—perhaps the best land-based climate record. In the second case, Maher examines how magnetic particles emitted from vehicles and industry are trapped by tree leaves, offering a new way to monitor the environment.
The fourth article in Elements is somewhat of an anomaly, venturing outside the geosciences and into biology. In Magnetic Nanocrystals in Organisms, Mihály Pósfai, a mineralogist at the University of Pannonia in Hungary, and Rafal E. Dunin-Borkowski, an experimental physicist at the Technical University of Denmark, report on the frontiers of biomagnetism. Many organisms, from bacteria to pigeons to humans harbor tiny crystals of magnetite or two other magnetic minerals. Experiments have show that some can also sense the Earth’s magnetic field for the purposes of navigation. But figuring out where the magnetoreceptors are hidden in an organism is no simple task. In pigeons, magnetite grains arrayed in six points in the birds’ beaks seem to do the trick, but in other animals the search has just begun. New transmission electron microscopy techniques, including “electron holography,” are beginning to reveal how tiny magnetic particles function in biological systems, but mysteries still abound.
For more on “magnetotactic” see professor of physics emeritus Richard B. Frankel’s page at Cal Poly State University at San Luis Obispo in California. For more on the homing pigeon’s newly discovered organs for detecting Earth’s magnetic field, go to science blog Neurophilosophy’s entry Researchers Identify putative magnetoreceptors. Click on the link at the bottom of the entry for details on how the pigeon’s use their magnetoreceptors. For a history of how traces of ancient life have been identified from the magnetic minerals it leaves behind, go to Caltech professor of geobiology Joseph L. Kirschvink’s Magnetofossil Homepage. The last entry cites the debate over whether or not the magnetic minerals found in a Martian meteorite are evidence that life existed on the Red Planet.
In the last article in the “magnetic” issue of Elements, Crustal Magnetism, Lamellar Magnetism and Rocks That Remember, geophysicist Suzanne A. McEnroe at the Geologic Survey of Norway in Trondheim and her colleagues report on a new type of magnetic memory recorded in the rocks called “lamellar magnetism.” It promises to reveal much more about the structure of the deep crust on Earth and on other planets, like Mars. It is also points to a way of making better data storage devices in the future. Magnetic minerals, in the form of lodestones, helped spur the scientific revolution, but they still have much to teach us.Meet our amazing Herbie of the Week, Sarah! Sarah has lost well over 100 lbs. and was amazed at how easyit was for her to get healthy and happy through a plant-based lifestyle.
Back in January, Sarah sent me the following email:
"This is not a question, this is a THANK YOU! Thank you for your recipes, your blogs, your stories, your meal plans. I adopted a plant-based/vegan lifestyle back in February of 2012. I had been overweight my entire life, topping out the scale @ 290 lbs. When I changed to a plant-based diet, I was at 267 lbs. Your cookbooks did more for me than I could have imagined. They showed me how EASY it is to be this healthy and this happy — on a budget! Thanks to you, I now weight 173 pounds, with about 40 left to go before I am at my goal weight. Also, because of my weight loss, I was featured on HLN Morning Express with Robin Meade as one of their "New Year, New You" inspiration stories. So thank you, thank you, thank you!"
I just had to know more, so I asked Sarah if she would be willing to share more details about losing weight and getting healthy as part of our Herbie of the Week series. She agreed, and her response brought me to tears. We are sharing Sarah's inspiring story with you today, in her own beautiful words.
"Ooh, long story lol... I have been overweight pretty much my entire life. There are pictures of me from when I was younger depicting a skinny, healthy, playful young girl. I can't pinpoint the exact time when the weight started piling on, but when it did, it didn't stop. Junior high, high school. college — it just escalated. When I graduated nursing school and started out in the ER in 2008, I was around 290 lbs. I was scared to DEATH to go to a doctor at that point — I knew what I would hear. "Sarah, you need to lose weight, this isn't healthy, yadda yadda yadda." I didn't want to hear it. I had heard it enough from my family. Especially my father.
My father, for as long as I can remember, was overweight — morbidly obese, to be more exact. His weight had been a struggle since I was a small child. He had high blood pressure and a cardiomyopathy (an enlarged heart). He was on medications for his BP and had tried every diet you could imagine — the Atkins diet, the Cabbage Soup diet. He would lose some weight, it would be great, and then he would gain it all right back. You'd think watching him struggle with his weight for so long and seeing the health troubles it gave him would have motivated me to lose weight, to reclaim my life. Well, it took something much more drastic than that.
"This is me and my dad when I was much younger(left)and one of the last pictures I have with him(right), at my nurse pinning ceremony in December 2007. This is the man whose unfortunate and untimely demise caused the radical change in my life. I felt it was only proper to add this."
On the day that my father died, September 23, 2009, he was 48 years old. I was 24 at the time, and I had just walked into work to start my shift. My manager was there to meet me in the hallway and pulled me back to her office where I was told the news. I was told that he had suffered a massive heart attack and was instantly gone. There are no words to describe that moment in my life. It's hard for me to remember what was going through my head those next few days, but there is one thought that stuck with me forever — I will never forget. I remember thinking "My dad was 48 years old. I'm 24. If I keep living the life that I am, continue on the road that I am on, I only have half a life left." That single thought scared me more than any doctor, my family, my friends, ever could. To imagine that I could miss out on so much, leave this world so soon. I couldn't — I WOULDN'T — have it happen.
Fast forward to 2 years later (yeah, it took me that long to finally get it all through my thick head). For insurance purposes at work and to receive a discount, we had to submit for a health screening, including a weigh-in, blood pressure check, and lab work including a hemoglobin A1C (for diabetics), cholesterol levels, etc. Of course I wanted the discount, but I hadn't had blood work done for YEARS! I didn't want to know what the levels were — if I actually saw them and they were bad, that would make it all real. I figured if I hid from it, the problem would never catch up with me. So I went, begrudgingly, stepped on the scale (270 lbs.!), let them take my blood pressure (normal, thank God), and let them draw my blood.
A few weeks later, I received the results. I can't remember all the numbers, but everything was NORMAL. I couldn't believe it. The way I lived, the way I ate. How could the numbers be normal? Most people would have said "eh, then I'm okay. I don't need to change anything. I'll keep living exactly the way I am." I'm not one of those people. In that moment when I saw those numbers, I heard a little voice in my head say "Sarah, you are only going to go so long on God's good graces before the s*** hits the fan." So that's where the ball started rolling. I knew I needed to do something before it got bad — but what?
"This is a picture of me with my niece at her birthday party December 2011…This is one of those pictures that I looked at and went, 'How did I let it get this far?'(left). Me with my niece Halloween of last year — what a difference almost a year makes! So happy that I can now be a more positive influence in her life.(right)"
Fast-forward to January 2012. A couple of people I worked with in the ER had recently gone vegan. I myself had entertained the idea of adopting a vegan/vegetarian (once upon a time, a LONG time ago), but thought that it would be too hard (I'm from Texas — we love meat and potatoes! For crying out loud, the majority of my family hunts and eats what they get!). I asked them about it, why they had done it, what motivated them, etc. It sounded good, but I just didn't feel I could commit to it.
The one person who finally got through to me was Julie, one of the nurse practitioners I worked with (I'm not sure that Julie realizes that she was the one who helped me start this all!). Julie had always mentioned things to me concerning my health, especially since the passing of my father. I always brushed them off, never paid any attention. I heard her having a conversation one day with one of the radiology techs about a documentary, Forks Over Knives. I was intrigued.
"Taken in February while on a visit to Texas."
She began to tell me her story — her father had suffered from angina for more than 20 years. Multiple medications and several diet changes, yet it never went away. Seven months prior, he had read The China Study by Dr. T. Colin Campbell and decided from that moment on to adopt a vegan diet. His angina went away — no more chest pain, no more medications. When Julie saw what it did for him, she decided to give it a try. She told me about how she had never felt better in her life, how she had so much more energy, how she had always thought she was healthy until then. She then suggested I give it a try — she said something along the lines of "For someone with your family history, it's the best thing you could do for yourself." I don't know why her saying it changed my perspective, but it did.
In February, I went on one last omnivore bender with a friend from Dallas (figured I would go out with a bang!). I then went back to Austin, cleaned out my fridge, and started on the vegan way. Here I am, officially 116 lbs. lighter and feeling more amazing than I ever have. I strive to inspire those I know and love to adopt a vegan diet, and I actually have some of them giving it a shot, which makes me so happy! I have recommended your cookbooks to every single one of them (and so far, they all LOVE THEM)."
"Hiking in Arizona — something I could NEVER do before."
UPDATE (May 22): "Not much has changed since we last spoke. Still living the plant-based lifestyle and reaping the benefits! Down to 164 lbs. at this point — an AMAZING feat for me in and of itself. Just recently moved to Tucson, Arizona from Texas. Decided that the new life needed a new area as well! I'm currently working as an RN in an ER out here and loving every minute of it. I love people's reactions when they discover what my life used to be like — they can hardly believe pictures when they see them!"
"Me crossing into my new state! Here's to new life experiences!"
Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your incredible story with us! You are an inspiration. Good luck in Arizona!HILLARY CLINTON had probably hoped to avoid the usual rollercoaster of American presidential campaigns, in which candidates must first swing towards the party base in primary elections only to veer back towards the centre for the general election. Yet the Democratic frontrunner has had no such luck, owing in part to a tenacious challenge from Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist senator from Vermont. Judging by her speech on the economy on July 13th, Ms Clinton is feeling the pressure to lean leftward.
Ms Clinton says her economic priority is to raise wages. That is welcome. The real median household income is lower than in 1996 (see chart). Wage growth, says Ms Clinton, is the best barometer of economic success. In a dig at Jeb Bush, a Republican frontrunner who wants to raise the country’s growth rate to 4% per year, Ms Clinton said boosting wages is better than an “arbitrary” growth target—especially when the link between GDP and wages has been weak since the recession.
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The first part of Ms Clinton’s plan for wages is, nonetheless, continued growth. More growth, she explained, will create jobs and force firms to compete more aggressively for workers, which should bid up wages. Yet she omitted to mention that the kind of demand management necessary to tighten the labour market is usually the domain of the Federal Reserve. The Fed must steer the labour market back to equilibrium—and no further, lest inflation surge. A presidential plan to boost wages cannot rest on a tight labour market.
Much better to grease the wheels of the economy’s supply-side. Ms Clinton promises to do as much by improving America’s woeful infrastructure. Like President Barack Obama, she wants to establish a government-backed infrastructure bank to finance investment (such banks already exist at the state level). She also promises more training for workers of all ages; one of the only definitive policy announcements in the speech was a $1,500 tax credit for every apprentice a firm hires. Finally, Ms Clinton wants to increase labour-market participation among women—which has mostly fallen since 1999—by providing more affordable child care.
Where Ms Clinton had most to say, though, was on how to divide the spoils of growth more fairly. For instance, she lamented the decline in union power, which she partly blames for rising inequality. She emphasised that trade deals should be scrutinised to ensure that they benefit American workers. And she promised to crack down on firms who “wrongly” classify their employees as contractors rather than employees—rhetoric which is sure to worry Uber and other techno-middlemen. The digital revolution, Ms Clinton said, is sparking innovations and bringing flexibility but also threatens to undermine labour regulations.
Ms Clinton’s ideas are not confined to boosting pay; she also wants workers to have more capital. In the most eye-catching part of the speech, she promised tax breaks for firms which promote employee ownership. Details will be revealed later.
Taken as a whole, Ms Clinton’s plan is an eclectic grab-bag. It is as if her advisors brainstormed every possible policy to boost wages, and then kept them all. Some—such as greater investment in skills and infrastructure—are welcome. Wages, ultimately, reflect workers' productivity. Ms Clinton is also right that the impact of technology on the labour market presents a huge and perplexing challenge for policymakers. But greater union power and more protectionism are comfort-blanket polices for which the economy—and most Americans—would pay a price in the long-run. Ms Clinton’s speech contained plenty of ideas. Perhaps when Mr Sanders exits the stage, some of the duds will be dropped.My amazing Santa got me some very thoughtful gifts. 5 great video games!
MURI is a retro game about a Martian attack and a superpowered suit of armor.
OutDrive is about a woman hooked up to a car engine, you have to go fast and avoid hitting things to keep her alive! It has amazing aesthetics and even more amazing music.
NeonDrive is completely different to any other driving game I've played, it's kind of like Tetris with cars, and you have to change lanes constantly in order to guide your car through blocks in the road. It's really interesting and also has great music!
Retro Game Crunch is really interesting because it's like a bunch of retro games in one, except they aren't retro, they're new! The one I've played so far is called Wub Wub Rescue and appears to be about a pug rescuing it's owner.
Hotline Miami is really interesting, it seems to be about some sort of mobster in Miami. However, there are also a bunch of humanoid animals, including a rooster and a unicorn, that you can play as. The music is awesome and it's actually surprisingly difficult!
All these games look great and really interesting. I dig the music and aesthetics in all of them. Thank you Santa!
UPDATE: My Santa is the very best Santa of all Santas.
I mentioned that my favorite movie was Top Gun, on account of it's the best movie that ever was or ever will be made. So anyways, my Santa hand made an amazing purse from a VHS tape of of Top Gun! It's so badass and I can't believe my Santa went through so much effort to make this!
As if that weren't enough, they also got me this joystick you can put on your tablet to play games on, a bottle of glitter (definitely going to think of a creative use for that lol), and an awesome card that hits on my love of big 80s hair.
Thank you so much Santa, you've made this my best batch of exchanges yet!Google Photos is really good at recognizing people in a photo and grouping their pics together. It's one feature I've come to rely on to find all the photos I have of specific friends or family members and even photos of "person X and person Y and person Z" together. But there were still a couple of small things missing from Photos' facial recognition like the option to manually tag a person in a pic or the ability to see who Google had recognized in a photo from the photo itself, not their dedicated page.
But the latter is now implemented. Actually, it was implemented at some point in the last few versions: I can confirm that it wasn't there in 2.10.0.148909749 but it is live in 2.12.0.151124741, so it was added to Photos sometime between March 13 and 30. Small details aside, this is a simple but nice change. When you tap in the Info icon on any photo while you're browsing your library, you will see a new People section below Description and above Details.
In it are thumbnails of all the people Google has recognized in your pics. You can tap the thumbnail to immediately go to that person's dedicated Photos page with all the albums and pictures they're in.
Zaher is a very dear friend with an undying love for Android. I'll make him pay for the free publicity.
This is a great way to see who Google has tagged in your photos and to jump to individual people's photos without searching for them first. It still doesn't seem to be possible to manually tag someone in your Photos but I'd imagine the function is coming at some point. Google Photos 2.12.0.151124741 has been live on the Play Store for a few days but it's also on APK Mirror if you prefer to grab it there.The Timing of Decisions
If you have ever played Zilean on League of Legends you will be familiar with his quote “All in good time” – unless you’re playing without sound! There is no big discussion that Zilean’s concept is all about time. But as Season 4 closes upon us let's take a look at the lessons we should take from a year of Summoner’s Rift and how Zilean was right all along.
Time in League of Legends has grown to become a much more established notion since the early days. Today in a game, be that a simple solo queue contest or a professional match, much of what influences the outcome of the game is deeply linked with Timing. Conceptually we can play out a game beforehand, but execution is the real deal breaker. Whilst thinking the game helps us predict and approach the game with better knowledge of what we are doing, it’s executing our thoughts that actually matters. A common example of this is simply looking at two teams right at the end of champion select and make a prediction on the outcome of the game just by looking at teams and players. Sometimes we get it right, the picks were perfect on one side and that side eventually wins. But we don’t get it right all the time, and that makes League of Legends beautiful. The trick is to transfer into your execution what you have conceived as a strategy, and this comes down to the two main attributes of a player: Technical Skill and Decision Making.
If Technical Skill is something unique to each player that comes down to how gifted you are and how much mechanical work you put into your own development as a player, Decision Making is all about having the ability to quickly decide the best course of action to use ( obviously! ) and when to use it. It’s about Timing. Often we find ourselves in the awkward position where a carefully devised plan turns out to be slightly off, we die and the enemy champion survives with 10hp. We can analyze whether we played that fight properly or not and maybe we didn’t. But often when we put some thought to it, it was really hard to do it in another way, and we blame our dear Luck.
Some aspects of League of Legends are bound with Luck, but making an excuse out of it is as common as it is wrong. During the game it is almost never about luck, certainly not as many times as we make it to be, it’s about Timing. Poor Timing. And Timing can be improved by experiencing the game - aspects and situations of it – and learning from that. Learning to an extent that once we are confronted with the same situation in another match we know how this will play out, because we have seen it before. We adapt our play, we adapt our decisions and the Timing of our decisions to make it work and, often, we don’t even know that we have just been through this process of improvement.
The ability to use Time ( and consequently Timing ) in our favor can make a huge difference in how our matches unfold. Playing your game with awareness for your surroundings and interpreting that information is literally the difference between a win and a loss - And I suspect that with what we have been able to preview so far from Season 4, reading the game you see will be even more important. In League of Legends very often winning games comes down to how to take advantages and how to use them in order to see the game out, both of these are incredibly related to Timing aspects – This is Execution.
We value Technical Skill a lot, as we should: It is a defining feature of a player. The more mechanically skilled a player is, the better a chance he has at getting really good. Mechanical skill also makes a great difference throughout the match itself: From small aspects like farming gold to spectacular kiting skills with Vayne. But Technical Skill for a really good player is not enough. Without the aptitude to make sharp decisions with little time and under pressure, part of that Technical Skill alone goes to waste. Decision Making is about Timing: Having the right strategy on how something is going to play out and apply it at the exact moment of time in order for it to be as successful as it can be. The rest is about mechanical skill and play, as the board game moves before your eyes exactly like you predicted and unfolds at the desired ending. Decision Making walks side by side with Technical Skill and to be really great you need to master both.
If in theory Time and Timing may seem pretty standard ideas to understand, although not always perceptible, how does it change the practical side of my game? I’ll leave out the obvious discussion on how important it is to know jungle camps spawn time or the occasional enemy Shen's Stand United ultimate. Understanding Time in a League of Legends game goes beyond that, to the point where to fully grasp some champion’s potential you have to be intimately aware of Time and be very clinical with your play. Failure to understand these concepts and to be able to see and apply them to game analysis will result in dismissing champions that otherwise are viable and may very well suit our play style more.
Assessing the game and our champion picking
In the past year League of Legends Meta game, especially in the professional scene, has developed from the standard “Controlling the Game and Team Fights” way to win to a more clinical approach to the match. Objective control became an early key word in the beginning of 2013 and since then other concepts have been introduced to us like Vision Control through Mass Warding or Rotations. But this doesn’t affect concepts alone. Champions who were once stoic first picks or first bans like Morgana, Amumu or Malphite have fallen through the ranks and despite the occasional ban or pick on one of these, we don’t see them chosen as often.
How we approach our champion select is often dependent on how we view the professional scene to be developing, we absorb the conceptual play shown to us by professional players and we try and replicate it by picking or banning these famous flavor of the month champions, whilst dismissing other champions simply because they were not shown to us as potential picks. Doesn’t mean they are not good, doesn’t mean we stop seeing them: simply means we award them less value. This happens because, for once, the pro players don’t play these champions and they obviously know a bit more about certain aspects of the game than the rest of us mortals.
Understanding how a champion works is the key to making it viable, even if it is only in clutch situations. There will be times when a pro player actually comes up with a new champion for a specific action or strategy and it has tremendous success, not because the champion got super buffed or others got badly nerfed but because this champion was used in a way that fits the Meta and was good for that current match.
So how do we evaluate and decide how is a champion made to be played? In theory we don’t. We play it, and play it the right way: we thought about it hard and devised a plan for it to work. We can’t answer this question in a straightforward way being 100% sure with every champion. We can talk about the champion’s kit, what it offers, what potential can it reach depending on builds and roles and how will it fit the meta. And then we try and match this champion versus others, what they offer and what they don’t. The important issue here is to know what can this champion do and what he can’t do, which in game translates into what you should try to do with it and what you shouldn’t.
Clockwork Aggression and what we’re missing out on
Season 3 was about efficiency. Being able to have a positive impact in one’s team was a measure of the ability of a player. It was about dedicating time and resources to achieve a certain goal, to gain an important advantage and as such, ultimately, it was about how well you managed to put the resources you chose into use during a specific scenario. But more than that, many times it was about being good enough to use your abilities to have such an influence in the game that you actually set the pace of the match: When to be aggressive, when to force fights, when to siege. Dictating the pace of the game is only possible through well thought play and clinical execution and often we neglect the importance our own play can have in dictating the plays.
A common example of this is Warwick. It is not an unusual pick ( especially outside of the Pro Scene ) yet often appears to be a champion that fails to live up to its potential, especially when it comes to dictating the game. Warwick has a 90 sec cooldown ultimate at level 6, which takes about 6 to 7 minutes for the average jungler or top lane to reach. From then on, every 90 sec Warwick has a spectacular chance of causing something to happen in another lane, very much likely a kill if well played, thanks to a 1.8 sec suppress where the target, if he is unable to cleanse it, will stand literally still for 1.8 sec, enough time to combo burst damage or any kind of hard to land CC as a follow up to Warwick. This becomes even more evident if you consider that Warwick is a pretty decent champion to tank a turret, even at lower levels.
This ultimate called Infinite Duress can be potentially game breaking, especially if used to gain significant advantages such as mid lane control or stealing an enemy jungle buff. Consider that Infinite Duress has a 90 sec cooldown at level 6, half the time a pink ward lasts. Failing to set up such plays as Warwick is fully wasting this champion’s ability to greatly influence the game. The early game is Warwick’s time to shine thanks to this power, compared to the mid and late game where teamfights are more common. Warwick is lackluster in some teamfights, since he is easily interrupted and chain CCed. To win games you must understand when you need to shine and you need to engineer how you will do it, and this comes from understanding the Meta game, understanding the game you’re playing, what is happening and what are playing with and against.
There are other champions whose abilities work on the clock to turn the game in your favor and, surprisingly, most of them get often dismissed, with the exception being Twisted Fate, whose ultimate provides his game style with similar aspects to the ones described above. Malzahar is another great example: His ultimate has a longer cooldown than Warwick’s but, both work rather poorly in team fights since they are easily interrupted and both can be critically successfull. Malzahar makes up for some weaknesses with a decent silence CC, decent damage and good laning. Malzahar is a pusher, which works wonders if you’re trying to do work somewhere once the clock hits midnight.
All you need is vision, awareness of both your jungler and enemy jungler, and awareness of time. Every 120 seconds that ultimate should be doing work in somewhere. Not doing so is wasting power and opportunity in a game that is about efficiency, not waste. Some champions are not made to shine in teamfights, in particular when it comes to their ultimates, but they are still made to shine somewhere else. Champions may have a stronger kit or weaker kit, but to properly judge that we need to properly play them and understand to what extent can they influence the game.
Working the clock to attempt to dictate the pace of the game early is sometimes a strength that we relinquish without noticing, by trying to play these champions in similar ways to other champions, when in fact they have this clutch feature that we are not using that would allow us to change the game. Warwick and Malzahar were two examples but there are more that follow the same philosophy like Pantheon, Urgot or Rengar.
Some champions have abilities we dismiss because of how little they might affect our own laning phase compared to Tryndamere’s Undying Rage, or because of how we simply do not value their team fight contribution compared to, for example, an Amumu’s ultimate. But we fail to comprehend how powerful they can be when used somewhere else. These “time-bomb abilities” ( nothing to do with Zilean this time! ) become stronger and more impactful the more you correctly use them to help your team and ultimately to help you. Sometimes we surrender our judgment to the big numbers on damage or ratios, neglecting that an ability is not all about these factors. They may have the power to be really impactful, but they have to be used at their own time.
Closing: A year after
League of Legends is such an extraordinary game: It is fun, tense, filled with joy for success and tears for the unlucky ones. All of these ingredients combined together with our passion for the plays formed an incredible Season 3. But what I would single out as impressive was the speed. Not only the rate at which LoL has grown but speed at which the games themselves were played. They were increasingly fast-paced, hard to call, filled with preparation and strategies, sneaky plays that end in big climactic victories or turnarounds that resulted in unexpected losses. It is a vibrant game and this is not just the excitement around the professional part of the game with the Kassadin backdoor, the LCS, All-Stars, EU vs NA or the World Championship with Faker: Watching the game is fantastic, but so is playing it.
Sometimes we even get caught by the pace of the game itself, lost and wondering what to do. An easy double kill in the first two minutes can be a mountain too high to climb, even for professional teams in the Quarter-Finals of a big tournament. But that’s how frenetic this game has become: You need to be on your guard at all times or risk defeat at a game you no longer control. How many times have we not seen a decision to go for Baron Nashor, right there out of nothing, that proved to be exactly what we needed to win that game? How many times have we not seen the same decision prove our undoing?
The beauty of LoL is that it can change in a second. It will if you’re not paying close attention. Split second moves can decide a battle, even a game. That’s how much Time and Timing have grown as a concept we must understand and work with in order to improve. League of Legends grew, much because of how much the e-Sports side evolved. But it wasn’t all about that; the game itself changed. This year I think Time was more important than ever. How do you rotate to Top lane and when to do it? How do I gank this lane and when do I do it? Maybe next year the game will be even faster! Maybe next year Zilean will be banned or picked in most games, and then clocks gain a whole new dimension of importance! Who knows? Only Time will tell, and that’s part of the beauty.Sep 12, 2016
Suicides in the Frum Community
Op-Ed by Rabbi YY Jacobson: We must ask ourselves, 'Are we not responsible for this person's mental and psychological deterioration?'
By Rabbi YY Jacobson for COLlive.com
The last few months have seen a staggering number of untimely deaths of young people in the Jewish community. Since last Rosh Hashanah, more than 80 young men and women under 35 years of age have died from suicide or overdosing and the like.
This is beyond devastating. If for |
'm a nudist for a lot of reasons. Our culture looks down on nudity, especially when it comes to women. Being OK with our bodies and our looks is a great thing.”
Pappajohn said she’s identified as a nudist since her days at Western Washington University, where she worked on a project about nudity for a cross-cultural psychology course.
“As a woman, I think it’s important to realize a man and a woman can do a physical activity naked together that’s completely nonsexual,” she said. “It's a really great feeling to do something naked that requires your full attention, to the point you forget all about being naked. It’s a really empowering thing to do.”
Contact Guy McCarthy at [email protected] or (209) 588-4585. Follow him on Twitter @GuyMcCarthy.
17438289The American Hope Act 2017 provides the legislative solutions to permanently protect young undocumented immigrants regardless of educational level, military service or work history. Below is a description of the Act, created by the immigrant youth at United We Dream.
The American Hope Act 2017 Creates a Three-Step Path to Citizenship
Step 1: Conditional Permanent Residence (CPR): The bill provides Conditional Permanent Resident (CPR) status to undocumented youth who: (1) entered the United States before the age of 18, (2) have since been continuously present* since Dec. 31, 2016, (3) pass a background check, and (4) have not been convicted of certain crimes or immigration violations** *For “continuously present,” the individual cannot have departed US for more than 90 consecutive days or 180 cumulative days, unless authorized by DHS. **A violation of one of the following grounds of inadmissibility under Section 212(a) of the INA: criminal grounds of inadmissibility (INA 212(a)(2)), national security grounds (INA 212(a)(3)), evading the draft (INA 212(a)(8)), polygamy (INA 212(a)(10)(A)), child abduction (INA 212(a)(10)(C)), and renouncing one’s own US citizenship (INA 212(a)(10)(E)). The Secretary is granted the power to permit anyone who has committed a non-violent crime involving moral turpitude to receive CPR status. About CPR: CPR status lasts for up to 8 years. DHS cannot deport anyone who has CPR or appears to be eligible for it. Anyone who is eligible must be given the chance to apply for CPR. Authorizes a grant program that can provide funding to eligible applicants to help them apply for CPR If DHS terminates someone’s CPR, that decision is reviewable in immigration court and they are responsible for the burden of proof and demonstrating a “preponderance of evidence,” that the individual has become deportable under Section 237(a) of the INA
Step 2: Lawful Permanent Residence (LPR – green card): Anyone who maintains CPR status for 3 years can petition 6 months in advance for LPR status (i.e. a green card) if they meet the following requirements. Maintains CPR status for 3 years without abandoning U.S. residence* *Cannot be absent from the country for more than an aggregate of 365 days during period of CPR status
Any time spent with DACA counts towards the 3 years.
Has not been convicted of any of the crimes or immigration violations detailed above
Passes a background check
Step 3: Citizenship: After maintaining LPR status for five years, an applicant can apply to become a citizen. The time spent with CPR status can be applied to the 5-year LPR requirement prior to citizenship. This essentially provides a 5-year path to citizenship for most applicants (CPR for 3 years⇛ LPR for 2 years⇛ Eligibility for U.S. citizenship)
The American Hope Act Contains Clear Confidentiality Provisions
DHS cannot pass along documents submitted for these applications, or refer applicants, to federal immigration enforcement agents except for investigations relating to crimes of inadmissibility or national security concerns (i.e. INA 212(a)(2) and INA 212(a)(3)), or for purposes of identifying a deceased individual.
The American Hope Act 2017 provides a path to citizenship that is based on human rights and dignity and not just one’s ability to work, join the military, or go to school.The winter window opened Jan. 2. As always, Transfer Talk has its finger on the pulse when it comes to all the latest rumours and gossip. See the latest deals here.
TOP STORY: Lavezzi in London, Everton say Lukaku fee £65m
Paris Saint-Germain forward Ezequiel Lavezzi is in London, with Chelsea interested in signing him according to Sky in Italy. The 30-year-old's contract expires in the summer so he could be available on the cheap and the Blues would bag themselves an Argentina international with 22 goals in over 100 appearances for the French champions.
Everton are enjoying Romelu Lukaku's red-hot goal-scoring form safe in the knowledge that every strike brings them more points while adding a few extra million to the Belgian's asking price. The Sun reports that with Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Chelsea seemingly interested in a deal for the 22-year-old, likely favourites Manchester United would have to pay £65 million to land the striker.
Calciomercato reports the Red Devils could raise funds after setting Marouane Fellaini's asking price at £20m (€26m) ahead of talks with AC Milan, and they may need all the help they can get after it was revealed Anthony Martial's eventual fee could eclipse Angel Di Maria's British-record figure of £59.7m. What's more, Louis van Gaal may not be around long enough to worry about any of it as the Mirror reports that the coach could quit a year early due to the constant pressure.
LIVE BLOG
22.00 GMT: That will do it for Transfer Talk on this Wednesday! Be sure to check back in a few hours for the start of Thursday's transfer activity.
21.06 GMT: DONE DEAL Championship side Reading have added to their fleet of strikers, with the signing of Yann Kermorgant. The Frenchman joins from Bournemouth.
BREAKING: Royals complete signing of French striker Yann Kermorgant from @afcbournemouth. More to follow... pic.twitter.com/8XLRmUT1HT - Reading FC (@ReadingFC) January 20, 2016
19.54 GMT: Fiorentina continue to be active, with SportItalia reporting that former Barcelona winger Cristian Tello, who has seen little playing time at Porto, will join the Serie A club.
19.08 GMT: Swansea, Sunderland, Norwich City and Crystal Palace are all evaluating Roma's Seydou Doumbia as a possible reinforcement, according to Tuttomercatoweb. The striker is playing on loan at CSKA Moscow, where he has 11 goals in 21 games.
18.49 GMT: Keko has been a big part of Eibar's success and according to Marca, Sevilla are keen to pry the right winger away with a €4million offer.
18.41 GMT: Help could be on the way for Gary Neville's Valencia, with SuperDeporte reporting that Jeremy Toulalan of Monaco and Lass Diarra of Marseille could be on the way to shore up the defence.
18.26 GMT: West Ham striker Mauro Zarate has his sights set on Fiorentina. Brother and agent Rolando Zarate told Radio Bruno that despite interest from Real Betis, Mauro "wants Fiorentina".
17.48 GMT: Looks like Giuseppe Rossi is headed back to Spain. After three years in Italy with Fiorentina, the injury-plagued New Jersey native will return to La Liga first to play at Levante before joining Villarreal this summer, according to reports in Italy. Rossi spent six-and-a-half seasons with the Yellow Submarine from 2007-13.
17.40 GMT: DONE DEAL Three in a row! Colchester United have signed Nicky Shorey to boost their survival battle. The defender played twice for England back in 2007.
17.29 GMT: DONE DEAL Leicester striker Andrej Kramaric has joined Hoffenheim on loan until end of season.
17.16 GMT: DONE DEAL Elliott Ward has left AFC Bournemouth and joined Blackburn Rovers in a two-and-a-half-year deal. He joins Danny Graham in arriving at Ewood Park today.
Rovers have completed their second deal of the day with the signing of Elliott Ward. https://t.co/jpYKEWB9ct pic.twitter.com/kmtz8pHPVg - Blackburn Rovers (@OneRovers) January 20, 2016
17.02 GMT: According to Globo Esporte, Leicester are in a three way tussle with PSV and Malaga to close a loan deal for Manchester United midfielder Andreas Pereira.
16.45 GMT: How do Manchester United scare off David De Gea desirers Real Madrid?
With the national team, apparently. De Gea's future at United looks set to hinge on whether he starts for Spain at Euro 2016, with sources telling ESPN FC that the Old Trafford club are confident of keeping the goalkeeper if he gets Vicente del Bosque's No. 1 spot.
Read the full story here.
16.33 GMT: West Ham will look at Marseille striker Michy Batshuayi for the summer, according to The Daily Mail.
Michy Batshuayi: Has scored or assisted 16 of Marseille's 28 goals in Ligue 1 this season (57.1%) pic.twitter.com/bV5MExMNcF - WhoScored.com (@WhoScored) January 10, 2016
16.18 GMT: Well, Derby County have been busy... Luke Thomas along with Lewis Walker, Jayden Bogle and Jayden Mitchell-Lawson have agreed to join the club.
16.07 GMT: The Metro are reporting Portuguese media claims that Renato Sanches has very nearly signed for Manchester United.
Sanches, 18, burst onto the scene just this season attracting attention from some of Europe's biggest clubs. His release clause is £61.4m.
Renato Sanches should complete Manchester United transfer this summer, say Portuguese media https://t.co/7MqjamZHM0 pic.twitter.com/kbV7c15ZYs - Man United News ⚽️ (@SirAlexStand) January 20, 2016
15.53 GMT: Sunderland are set to offer Swansea £6m plus Fabio Borini for Andre Ayew, according to The Daily Mail.
15.37 GMT: According to the Sunderland Echo, Will Buckley wants to extend his loan spell at Birmingham until the season's end.
The winger -- who scored 19 in 96 games for Brighton -- has struggled since he moved to the Stadium of Light in 2014, and has made just 27 appearances for three different clubs since then.
15.25 GMT: Former Liverpool defender John Arne Riise has told the Liverpool Echo he is targeting a return to England as his next transfer move and wants to play until he is 40.
Read the full story here.
15.15 GMT: "I'd never play for another European club," Messi told France Football. "Barcelona is my home and I want to retire here."
15.00 GMT: Croatian midfielder Ljuban Crepulja is in Glasgow for talks with Celtic, as being reported by the BBC.
The 22-year-old midfielder -- who has represented Croatia at under-20 level -- plays for Slaven Belupo.
14.44 GMT: Cheick Tiote is still eyeing a move to Shanghai Shenhua.
The Chronicle are reporting that the delay in a potential deal being done is not related to a wage dispute as the midfielder is supposed to have already agreed terms last week.
14.32 GMT: DONE DEAL Serie A club Sassuolo have signed former Fulham and Brentford striker Marcello Trotta. Full story is available here.
14.05 GMT: DONE DEAL Sam Byram has left Leeds United and joined West Ham. Full story here.
BREAKING: @sambyram93 is delighted to have been given a chance to play @premierleague football with #WestHam! pic.twitter.com/EZgVN6opPn - West Ham United FC (@whufc_official) January 20, 2016
13.59 GMT: Schalke have said they have not received any offers for attacking midfielder Leroy Sane. Full story here.
13.46 GMT: West Ham United are lining up a move for Fenerbahce's Nigeria international striker Emmanuel Emenike, sources have told ESPN FC. Full story available here.
13.36 GMT: Juventus coach Massimiliano Allegri has said Simone Zaza will not be going anywhere this month, adding that he would like to play him more in the second half of the season. Read the full story here.
13.30 GMT: DONE DEAL Werder Bremen have signed Laszlo Kleinheisler from Videoton.
Laszlo #Kleinheisler has signed for #Werder! The Hungary international has signed a contract until 2019! pic.twitter.com/evB5WcjCyN - SV Werder Bremen EN (@werderbremen_en) January 20, 2016
13.24 GMT: After Hartlepool's heroic great escape at the of last season, they once again find themselves at the wrong end of League 2.
Manager Ronnie Moore has made a couple of signings so far this January transfer window, but he told the BBC that they still have to perform to keep their place in the side.
He said: "They've come to us to get games, but if they don't give us what we're looking for, then they don't play."
13.09 GMT: Spanish newspaper Marca claim Chelsea have offered Christian Atsu and £15m to Leicester City for their star player Riyad Mahrez.
The Daily Star are also reporting...
12.52 GMT: Chelsea are closing in on a deal to sign Alexandre Pato from Corinthians, multiple sources have told ESPN. Full story here.
12.50 GMT: According to Croydon Guardian, Watford have reservations over a move for Emmanuel Adebayor. However, Crystal Palace are still said to be interested in the former Spurs striker.
12.37 GMT: Has Mauricio Pochettino hinted Saido Berahino to Spurs could be a no-go.
He told Standard Sport: "We want to find good players but also good people. People who share our philosophy, behave well, show respect to the club and their team-mates and supporters; respect the badge."
12.25 GMT: DONE DEAL Besiktas have completed the signing of FC Dnipro goalkeeper Denys Boyko.
Denys Boyko'nun transferi ile ilgili olarak Kulübü FC Dnipro ile görüşmelere başlanmıştır. pic.twitter.com/yqauOEVp5J - Beşiktaş JK Kurumsal (@BesiktasJK) January 20, 2016
12.10 GMT: Swansea have been linked with a move with Southampton's Uruguayan midfielder Gaston Ramirez, according to South Wales Evening Post.
The 25-year-old has struggled for game time on the south coast and his contract expires in the summer, hinting at a possible early exit.
11.56 GMT: Simon Francis is set to sign a new three-and-a-half-year contract at Bournemouth, sources have told ESPN FC
11.48 GMT: DONE DEAL Sunderland forward Danny Graham has joined Sky Bet Championship side Blackburn Rovers on loan until the end of the season.
Danny Graham has moved to @OneRovers on loan for the remainder of the season - https://t.co/CAI161j8lG pic.twitter.com/dswQm3X2pM - Sunderland AFC (@SunderlandAFC) January 20, 2016
11.37 GMT: Milan to initiate a spending spree?
According to Sport Bild, Borussia Dortmund are thinking of recruiting both Ben Arfa & El Shaarawy. - AC Milan 100% (@Planetmilan) January 20, 2016
11.25 GMT: DONE DEAL Jose Angel Crespo has joined Rayo Vallecano on loan from Aston Villa until the end of the 2015/16 season.
11.15 GMT: The Daily Star are reporting Chelsea have offered Pedro back to Barcelona.
However, Barcelona are said to be interested in Nolito, Jonathan Soriano and Denis Suarez more than a return for the Spanish winger.
11.04 GMT: Manchester City's Wilfried Bony has come out and addressed the speculation that he's on the way out of the Etihad...
"I'm happy at the club, all this speculation is not true," Bony said.
Man City rumours are false - Bony: Wilfried Bony has told BBC World Football there is no truth in the rumours... https://t.co/Wj66fUpEIY - BBC Football (@BBCFtbl) January 20, 2016
10.50 GMT: Former Arsenal defender Emmanuel Eboue has issued a come-and-get me plea to clubs in France. Full story here.
10.40 GMT: Pedro Obiang's agent -- Jose Miguel Gonzalez -- claimed the player "would be perfect" for table-topping Napoli, according to The Evening Standard.
Obiang signed for West Ham from Sampdoria in the summer for £4.3 million.
10.28 GMT: Branislav Ivanovic has agreed a new contract with Chelsea. Full story here.
10.25 GMT: Borussia Monchengladbach midfielder Granit Xhaka could be on his way to Arsenal in the summer, according to The Telegraph.
"I don't know what will happen in the summer," Monchengladbach director Max Eberl said.
#AFC transfer news and rumours: 'Arsene Wenger edges closer to signing Bender and Xhaka' - https://t.co/DGEi10lTCy pic.twitter.com/Guae6lqaiO - Telegraph Football (@TeleFootball) January 20, 2016
10.14 GMT: Wales Online are reporting Cardiff City are chasing Feyenoord midfielder Lex Immers.
The 29-year-old has been playing for the Dutch outfit since the beginning of the 2012/13 season after moving from ADO Den Haag.
09.58 GMT: Barcelona forward Lionel Messi says he cannot rule out moving from the club one day but stressed that he has no interest in leaving the European champions.
09.26 GMT: Reported Real Madrid target Rodrigo Bentancur is happy at Boca Juniors for the moment, according to his father.
Madrid have been tracking Uruguayan playmaker Bentancur, 18, according to reports, with Serie A side Juventus also said to have shown an interest.
09.03 GMT: Radamel Falcao has not given up on playing for Chelsea again this season as he battles the latest setback in his recovery from a thigh injury. Falcao has made just 11 appearances in all competitions for Chelsea this season, scoring one goal, but remains positive about featuring in the first team again before he returns to his parent club in the summer.
08.28 GMT: Barcelona forward Lionel Messi says he cannot rule out moving from the club one day but stressed that he has no interest in leaving the European champions.
08.01 GMT: Liverpool to let Christian Benteke go? It doesn't seem likely. Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has said he rates Benteke and scouted the striker when he was Borussia Dortmund boss.
Benteke, 25, has recently struggled for regular playing time in Klopp's starting XI, despite forwards Daniel Sturridge and Divock Origi being sidelined.
07.37 GMT: Yaya Toure's agent has suggested that the Manchester City midfielder is ready to listen to offers from other clubs when the Premier League season comes to an end.
Toure, 32, said last summer he is happy with Manuel Pellegrini's side but with reports linking the player with a move to Chinese Super League side Shanghai SIPG, his agent Dimitri Seluk has indicated a move at the end of 2015-16 could be in the offing.
06.48 GMT: Good morning! There's plenty of transfer news out there so let's get started! China's Jiangsu Suning FC have tabled a bid for PEC Zwolle defender Trent Sainsbury, according to Fox Sports. The move comes just hours after AC Milan striker Luiz Adriano reportedly backed out of a €14 million move to the Chinese Super League side.
PAPER ROUND
Liverpool to swap Sturridge for Morata?
It was less than two years ago that Liverpool's fearsome front line of Luis Suarez, Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling almost fired the club to a Premier League title, but now the final member of the trio still at Anfield is in danger of leaving Merseyside. Suarez and Sterling left of their own volition for Barcelona and Manchester City, respectively, but the Brentwood Gazette reports that West Ham are plotting a surprise £18 million move for Sturridge as Jurgen Klopp looks to offload the injury-prone striker.
Sturridge's fitness problems have been a constant source of frustration for Klopp, who could cash in on the England international despite his obvious talent. Should the 26-year-old depart, Gazzetta dello Sport reports, Klopp wants to replace him with Juventus striker Alvaro Morata. However, even a €60m (£46m) bid and the prospect of replacing Morata with PSG's Edinson Cavani may not be enough to tempt the Serie A champions to sell.
Chelsea eye Watford striker
With Tuesday's reports that Chelsea could lose a host of key players this summer -- including the likes of Diego Costa and Eden Hazard -- it makes sense that the Premier League champions are being linked with a host of players ahead of a potential squad overhaul. The Mirror reports that Watford's star striker Odion Ighalo is among the Blues' main targets, with the Stamford Bridge club "impressed" by the Nigerian's 13 goals in 23 league games for the Hornets this term.
While Ighalo could make a move to Chelsea at the end of the season, the Star reports that the Blues may also have to wait for long-term target Alex Teixeira. According to the paper, Shakhtar Donetsk's billionaire president Rinat Akhmetov is refusing to sell the free-scoring Brazilian playmaker this month, with a "source close to the negotiations" quoted as saying: "I know Shakhtar well and they will not let this happen in this window."
And Chelsea could still be rid of Radamel Falcao this month, with the Telegraph reporting that the striker's parent club Monaco are again looking at the possibility of the Colombian striker returning to the principality from his London loan six months early.
One man staying in West London is Branislav Ivanovic. The Mail reports that the defender will sign a one-year contract extension to see him through till summer 2017.
Cole closes in on Galaxy move
Ashley Cole edged nearer to becoming the latest former England star to join the LA Galaxy after Roma announced that the left-back's Giallorossi contract has been terminated by mutual consent.
The move clears the way for Cole to complete a long-reported move to the Galaxy, and the BBC reported on Tuesday that the defender had agreed terms with the MLS side. Cole had been frozen out at Roma after refusing to cancel his contract at the beginning of the current season. The former Chelsea and Arsenal defender may be getting on at 35 years old, but the Galaxy may well have landed themselves a bargain if he can find form in the U.S.
Cadena Cope reports that Roma are already plotting Cole's replacement, with the Serie A side willing to pay €8m for Real Madrid defender Nacho Fernandez.
Jackson Martinez's move to Atletico Madrid has not gone well and could soon be coming to an end.
Spurs after Atletico outcast
Jackson Martinez has found life tough at Atletico Madrid following a big-money summer move from Porto, with just three goals for the Calderon club this season -- but Tottenham's need for a striker could well save the Colombian from his Spanish slump.
Marca reports that Spurs have offered Atletico €30m (£23m) for the 29-year-old, but Los Rojiblancos are reluctant to lose the striker for less than the €35m they paid Porto less than a year ago. But with Mauricio Pochettino keen on a striker and Atletico likely to want to offload Martinez and recruit another forward before their impending transfer ban, it wouldn't be surprising to see a compromise reached before the winter window slams shut.
No easy bid for Nolito
Celta Vigo forward Nolito has been strongly linked with a return to Barcelona this month, though Arsenal and Liverpool have also been touted as potential rivals for the 29-year-old's signature. But any club hoping to get Nolito on the cheap have been told that he will cost the full €18m (£12.6m) buyout clause.
Celta's sporting director, Miguel Torrecilla, says: "In the case of Nolito, Celta will stick with the clause. It is something simple and easy to respond to -- there is a release clause and everything ends there. Whoever wants to take [Nolito] now must pay the clause, there is no other option."
TAP-INS:
- West Ham joint-chairman David Sullivan says his club should complete the signing of Leeds United's promising young left-back Sam Byram by Wednesday. Everton looked set to land Byram after reportedly agreeing to a fee with Leeds, but now the Hammers made a late approach to lure the 22-year-old.
- AC Milan striker Luiz Adriano is reportedly returning to Italy after a €15 million transfer to Chinese side Jiangsu Suning FC fell through at the last second.
The Brazil international arrived in China on Monday to complete his medical and sort out a work permit, but reports emerged on Tuesday via Brazilian media outlet GloboEsporte that the player had pulled the plug on the deal.
- Manchester City midfielder George Evans has joined Championship side Reading in a permanent deal. The 21-year-old, who came through City's youth academy, signed a 3½-year deal with the Royals.
- Gaston Ramirez has been told by Southampton boss Ronald Koeman that he can leave St Mary's this month, according to the Mirror. The Uruguayan joined the club for £12m in 2012.
- Man United could be on a tighter budget if they are after the likes of Romelu Lukaku, and with the Manchester Evening News reporting that 16-year-old Livingston striker Matthew Knox -- a target for Everton, Liverpool, Tottenham and Chelsea -- currently on trial at Old Trafford.
- U.S. goalkeeper Brad Guzan could be living on borrowed time at Aston Villa, with The Sun reporting that Remi Garde is set to sign Croatian shot-stopper Lovre Kalinic from Hajduk Split for £5m in the next two days.Fremont detectives fatally shoot girl, 16, in car that rammed them
Fremont police shot and killed a female passenger riding in a packed vehicle that rammed a detective’s car during a traffic stop in Hayward on Tuesday near an East Bay university, officials said. Fremont police shot and killed a female passenger riding in a packed vehicle that rammed a detective’s car during a traffic stop in Hayward on Tuesday near an East Bay university, officials said. Photo: Brian Feulner, Special To The Chronicle / / Photo: Brian Feulner, Special To The Chronicle / / Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Fremont detectives fatally shoot girl, 16, in car that rammed them 1 / 4 Back to Gallery
Fremont police shot and killed a 16-year-old girl riding in a packed stolen vehicle that rammed a detective’s car during a traffic stop in Hayward on Tuesday near an East Bay university, officials said.
The Antioch teenager killed by police was not immediately identified. Two other occupants in the car were taken into custody while a fourth person in the vehicle took off running from the scene.
The incident marked the third fatal police shooting in the Bay Area in five days.
The episode unfolded around 5:20 p.m. Tuesday when Fremont detectives discovered a vehicle that was reported stolen and linked to multiple armed robberies around the Bay Area in an apartment complex at 25200 Carlos Bee Blvd. near California State University, East Bay in Hayward, police said.
When officers tried to stop the vehicle at Campus and Oaks drives, and talk to the people inside, the driver rammed the police car, injuring two detectives, officials said.
The detectives opened fire into the vehicle, hitting the young woman in the passenger seat.
At least one man in the car got out and ran while a second woman and another man were taken into custody at the scene.
Paramedics took the teenager with gunshot wounds to a hospital where she died.
The shooting prompted a shelter-in-place order at an apartment complex near the university while they searched for the man who fled. He was not found.
The detectives were treated at a hospital for injuries from the crash and released.
Hayward police and the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office are investigating the deadly officer-involved shooting.
The shooting comes as the third fatal police shooting in the Bay Area in less than a week. On Monday, police in Napa shot and killed a knife-wielding man in a parking lot of a busy shopping center.
Police in Santa Clara shot and killed a 24-year-old man on Friday. The man’s parents had called 911 to report he was acting erratically, and police shot him dead after confronting him near his home and failing to subdue him with an electronic stun gun.
Anyone with information about the Hayward incident was asked to call police Detective Steve Riley at (510) 293-7034.
Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @EvanSernoffskyOn Aug. 15, the Pentagon announced the transfer of 15 Guantanamo detainees to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Twelve of the men are Yemenis and the remaining three are citizens of Afghanistan.
The leaked Joint Task Force – Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) dossier for one of the Afghans, Haji Hamidullah, contains intelligence connecting the Iranian and Pakistani intelligence services to the insurgency in Afghanistan. The intelligence reports cited by JTF-GTMO paint a complex picture of the insurgency, tying together various actors all opposed to the American presence.
The Long War Journal first profiled Hamidullah, relying on the allegations in the leaked JTF-GTMO threat assessment, in 2011. [See LWJ report, The Gitmo Files: An agent of Iran.]
In its threat assessment, dated Apr. 23, 2008, JTF-GTMO deemed Hamidullah to be a “HIGH risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” JTF-GTMO recommended that Hamidullah be retained in the Department of Defense’s custody.
President Obama’s Guantanamo Review Task Force later determined that Hamidullah should be held as a law of war detainee according to government’s authority under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). As the task force explained in its Jan. 2010 report, Hamidullah and dozens of other detainees were considered “too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution.”
Hamidullah was subsequently approved for transfer by a Periodic Review Board (PRB) in Feb. 2016. The PRB cited Hamidullah’s good behavior while in detention, as well as his “age and health problems,” as reasons for its decision. The PRB also concluded that Hamidullah “does not support a jihadist ideology” and there was a “lack of clear information regarding his involvement with al Qaeda or the Taliban.”
However, military and intelligence professionals previously assessed that Hamidullah led a group tied to both Hezb-e lslami Gulbuddin (HIG) and the Taliban that planned multiple attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan. They also found that Hamidullah was a key HIG commander with multiple ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda’s network.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s duplicitous fundamentalism
HIG has been one of the most duplicitous and adaptable organizations in Afghanistan’s bloody history, receiving the support of multiple state actors to achieve its goals. In some ways, JTF-GTMO’s dossier for Hamidullah is consistent with what is known about the career of the HIG’s founder and leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Hekmatyar first earned international infamy during the jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s. During his time in American custody, Hamidullah admitted to being a member of the HIG since the early 1980s.
Multiple sources confirm that Hekmatyar and his men were favored by Pakistan’s intelligence service. This became controversial for the CIA, which worked closely with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate to fund, arm and train the mujahideen.
Former CIA officer Milt Bearden helped oversee America’s shadow war in Afghanistan. In The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB (coauthored with reporter James Risen), Bearden described his meetings with Hekmatyar. Bearden noted that Hekmatyar refused to meet with President Ronald Reagan during a high-profile show of support for the Afghan war.
Bearden characterized his encounters with Hekmatyar as tense. Of all the mujahideen leaders he dealt with, Bearden wrote, only Hekmatyar would “count as an enemy, and a dangerous one.” Bearden continued: “And, ironically, I would never be able to shake the allegations that the CIA had chosen this paranoid radical as its favorite, that we were providing this man who had directly insulted the President of the United States with more than his share of the means to fight the Soviets.”
Whether the CIA was reluctant to partner with Hekmatyar or not, Hekmatyar and his men did benefit from American support, receiving shipments of Stinger missiles that proved crucial to the anti-Soviet effort. According to Bearden, one of Hekmatyar’s commanders led the “Stinger team” that brought down the first Soviet MI-24D helicopters in Afghanistan. In the end, Bearden claimed, Hekmatyar was disliked by both the Americans and the Soviets, with the latter spreading disinformation about Hekmatyar’s exploits. More conspiratorial accounts tried to portray Hekmatyar as some sort of double agent for the Soviets all along.
Hekmatyar’s group was supported by Pakistani intelligence through the early 1990s. By the middle part of the decade, however, the Taliban was ascendant. After briefly serving as Afghanistan’s prime minister, Hekmatyar lost the struggle for power. The Pakistani establishment preferred Mullah Omar’s extremists for its own reasons. Hekmatyar decamped for Iran in the mid-1990s, staying in the mullahs’ country for the next several years.
Hekmatyar opposed the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. The Iranians eventually “expelled” him in 2002. The CIA quickly tried, and failed, to kill him in a Predator drone strike that same year.
Like Hekmatyar, Hamidullah first fought in the war against the Soviets, spent time in Iran, and allegedly returned to the fight in Afghanistan after the US-led invasion.
The intelligence contained in JTF-GTMO’s leaked assessment provides important clues as to how the HIG evolved over time, including the support Hekmatyar’s men continued to receive from Iran.
An alleged “agent” of Iran
The most important allegations in JTF-GTMO’s threat assessment concern Hamidullah’s suspected ties to Iran. JTF-GTMO’s analysts described Hamidullah as an “agent of the Iranian Savama (Ministry of Intelligence and Security)” who was “closely associated” with the Taliban, the HIG and al Qaeda.
While in US custody, Hamidullah denied that he was member of the HIG from late 2001 onward. But JTF-GTMO concluded he was an active HIG commander at the time of his capture in 2003.
JTF-GTMO described Hamidullah as “one of the most significant former Afghan HIG members detained” at Guantanamo because of his extensive involvement in anti-Coalition activities. Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) identified him as a HIG “commander…closely connected to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”
The NDS also reported that Hamidullah “was responsible for explosions” and “murdered 71 people.”
HIG wasn’t the only terrorist organization Hamidullah served, according to JTF-GTMO. Intelligence reports cited in Hamidullah’s file demonstrate a high degree of coordination between the various insurgency groups, including al Qaeda, as well as the intelligence services that support them. While the Guantanamo PRB would later characterize Hamidullah’s ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda as suspect, some of the intelligence appears to be concrete. “In mid-February 2003,” JTF-GTMO noted, Hamidullah “communicated with other commanders and al Qaeda elements in Afghanistan and Pakistan using a Thuraya satellite phone.”
The post-9/11 story pieced together by JTF-GTMO analysts begins in January 2002, when Hamidullah and his father (described as a “HIG leader”) left Meshad, Iran – a common transit point for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters – for Kabul. They allegedly did so at the behest of Iranian intelligence.
Upon arriving in Afghanistan, father and son “stayed with Iranian supported warlord Ismail Khan.” Khan, a longtime mujahideen commander, had fled the Taliban’s Afghanistan for Iran in the 1990s. He returned to Afghanistan, became of the governor of the western province of Herat, and eventually assumed the title of Minister of Water and Energy. Khan’s relationship with Iran is well-known, but he has repeatedly tried to portray it in the best possible light, downplaying any nefarious implications.
However, if the intelligence cited in Hamidullah’s file is accurate, then Khan’s Iranian ties deserve reexamination. In December 2005, more than two years after Hamidullah was captured, representatives of Khan reportedly “met with two Pakistanis and three Iranians to discuss the planning of terrorist acts and to create better lines of communication between the HIG and Taliban.”
In Kabul, Hamidullah also reportedly stayed with his “close friend and fellow HIG operative,” Mullah Ezat Ullah, who was an “Iranian intelligence affiliated Taliban sub-commander in Kabul responsible for many terrorist attacks against coalition forces.” Ullah is “believed to be responsible for the 12 October 2005 rocket attacks on the Canadian |
Moments later, players brought bottles of champagne onto the field and began spraying them into the stands. Outside the aging Coliseum, car horns honked as this blue-collar city enjoyed its big moment on the baseball stage.
"Awesome! Unbelievable," Balfour said mid-celebration. "I want to keep doing it."
This Oakland team has surprised everyone from owner Lew Wolff to general manager Billy Beane and Melvin with its knack for late-inning drama from a long list of players who had barely been heard of before this season.
"I never thought we'd be here this time of year," Wolff said. "The last time we did this we had a mature group. We're in the best shape we've ever been for the future."
Parker pitched the A's back to the postseason for the first time since they were swept by Detroit in the 2006 AL Championship Series. He matched teammate Tommy Milone for the Oakland rookie record of 13 wins.
"Sky high," Parker said of his team's confidence. "This is a team that knows it can do a lot of things. It's no surprise to me. It might be a surprise to everybody else."
The right-hander is the latest in a rotation of rookies to come through for an Oakland staff that in trades last winter lost Gio Gonzalez to Washington, Trevor Cahill to Arizona and All-Star closer Andrew Bailey to the Boston Red Sox. Dependable catcher Kurt Suzuki was shipped to the Nationals during the season, and starter Bartolo Colon was suspended in August for testing positive for testosterone.
Melvin emerged as a Manager of the Year candidate with the way he mixed and matched and kept running out a winning club despite injuries to so many players and new faces arriving in the clubhouse seemingly every day for the small-budget A's.
Oakland moved a season-high 24 games over.500 for its best mark since ending that '06 season at 93-69.
"They play with no conscious. They're not afraid of nobody right now," said Rangers manager Ron Washington, Oakland's longtime third-base coach before leaving to manage Texas. "I'm never surprised what happens over in that clubhouse with the Oakland A's. They've always got pitching, and when you've got pitching, you never know what can happen."
This one sure had the feel of a fall October playoff game despite the unseasonably warm 82-degree temperature at first pitch.
The Rangers now must wait at least one more day as they try to clinch their third straight division title. Texas won the second game of Sunday's doubleheader at home against the Angels to secure a third straight playoff appearance for the first time in franchise history and sixth overall.
"I'm not sending any message. My team knows what needs to be done," Washington said. "The message was sent yesterday."
Then, the Rangers landed at the Oakland airport about 1:30 a.m. Monday and arrived at their hotel after 2 a.m. Washington said he finally got to bed around 3 a.m. local time.
Washington wasn't too tired to weigh in on Oakland's playoff chances, though.
"If they react like they react now, like, 'Who cares?' then it could be (a success)," Washington said. "Being in the postseason is a different animal."
The AL playoff lineup became a little more clear Monday, with two teams clinching spots. Detroit won earlier in the night at Kansas City to wrap up the AL Central crown.
Parker was done after allowing Napoli's leadoff homer in the seventh. Sean Doolittle retired the next three batters in order and Ryan Cook worked a 1-2-3 eighth through the heart of the Rangers' order. Balfour then earned his 23rd save.
Parker improved to 3-0 with a 2.70 ERA against Texas in his fourth straight winning decision and sixth in seven since a loss Aug. 14 at Kansas City.
Texas starter Martin Perez (1-4), facing the A's for the third time in his six major league starts, allowed back-to-back singles by Crisp and Jonny Gomes in the first before receiving a mound visit from pitching coach Mike Maddux. Perez then got Cespedes to ground into a double play before walking Chris Carter ahead of Reddick's single.
The left-hander also was called for a balk with the bases loaded to bring home Oakland's second run. Perez lost his second straight start to the A's after a 9-3 defeat his last time out in Texas.
Rangers third baseman Adrian Beltre was the designated hitter a day after coming out in the seventh inning when he aggravated his strained left shoulder while leaping for a ball with his arm fully extended. Washington said Beltre could play third base Tuesday night.
Game notes
Texas' Nos. 3-5 hitters went 1 for 12 with five strikeouts.... The A's are 5-2 vs. Texas at home this year and lead the season series 9-8.... Perez beat the A's for his first major league win June 30.... Washington gave Melvin his vote for Manager of the Year. "To take that group where they are right now, wow, you've got to admire him," Washington said. "They play like they belong."... It was the second-warmest game of the season in Oakland and hottest for a night game.... The attendance included approximately 5,000 walk-up tickets.Children already at risk may also risk further abuse if they are seen to be seeking help, hence this twist on lenticular printing – a message that reads one way to tall adults, and another to small minors.
The ANAR Foundation needed a way for potential victims to read their communication secretly (including the unspoken visual content – bruises on the portrait), without alerting those accompanying them on the street.
Shifting from one perspective to the other slowly reveals an increasingly different image as well as additional text, including the helpline phone number.
Lenticular images are often used to create dynamic billboards that shift as people walk or drive by, but this variant flips the typical format on its side and gives it a higher purpose than mere marketing.A Syrian opposition group on Monday rejected any interference by al-Qaida in the unrest-hit country after the extremist network's leader voiced support for their uprising in an Internet video.
In a video titled "Onwards, Lions of Syria", al-Qaida's Ayman al-Zawahiri criticized the Syrian regime for crimes against its citizens, and praised those rising up against the government, according to SITE Intelligence Group.
"We categorically reject these statements and any attempts by the al-Qaida network to interfere in our revolution," the opposition General Commission of the Syrian Revolution said on its Facebook page.
"We are a people struggling for freedom and dignity and for a democratic state," it added.
The General Commission, which was founded in August last year, aims to strengthen the opposition's political ranks and to bring down the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In the eight-minute video that appeared on jihadist Internet forums at the weekend, Zawahiri urged Syrians not to rely on Western or Arab governments, which he said would impose a new regime subservient to the West.
"Don't depend on the West or America, or the Arab governments and Turkey," he said, according to SITE. "(They) had deals, mutual understanding and sharing with this regime for decades.
"Depend on Allah alone and then on your sacrifices, resistance and steadfastness," he added, calling on Muslims to support the uprising and remove the current regime which he condemned as anti-Islam.
"I appeal to every Muslim and every free, honorable one in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, to rise to help his brothers in Syria with all that he can," Zawahiri was quoted as saying.
A U.S. media report citing unnamed American officials said al-Qaida's Iraqi branch was likely to have carried out twin bomb attacks that killed 28 people in Aleppo on Friday, along with attacks in Damascus in December and January.
The bombings appeared to verify Assad's charges of al-Qaida involvement in the uprising against his 11-year rule, said the McClatchy Newspapers chain.Copa America Home Soil Victories
The Copa America is the international football tournament for teams that are in the South American region of FIFA, known as CONMEBOL. Founded in 1916 it is the oldest of the continental international competitions that take place around the world and is full of rich history, with some of the greatest players of all time stamping their authority on the competition.
Up until 1975, the tournament was known as the South American Football Championship, although the name Copa America is now associated with the tournament and known by fans from all over the world. With so many South American stars playing in Europe, interest in the competition is global, not just from South America and that is what makes this competition so unique. People from all over the world tune in to see some of the greatest talents of our generation battle it out to become champion of South America, and that appeal is not replicated by any of the other continental competitions.
The next tournament will take place in 2019 and Brazil will host that event. After hosting a World Cup recently they certainly know how to throw a footballing party, so expect the 2019 Copa America to be a huge event that fans from all over the world take part in. Looking back to 2015, Chile were successful in their own country, beating Argentina in a penalty shootout to win the tournament, before winning an additional event in 2016 to mark 100 years of the Copa America.
Many teams have been successful during the Copa America era at winning the tournament they have hosted, and we have seen some very memorable performances amongst those. Home advantage can count for quite a bit in South America, but this tournament still takes a lot of winning and the past winners who have done so on home soil, still deserve a huge amount of credit for their achievements. Here is a look back at some of the memorable tournaments where the home nation have found success and lifted the trophy.
The 2015 Copa America
Chile hosted the 2015 edition of the Copa America and it was to be a memorable occasion for the hosts as they went on to win a tense final to lift the trophy in front of their home fans. This was the first victory for them in the tournament and a moment that those players and fans in attendance will never forget. It wasn’t easy for them though, and the fans watching on suffered too as the game went to extra time and then a penalty shootout.
The big names on their team sheet made Argentina favourites for the game, despite it taking place in Chile. There was big expectations in Argentina, but quietly Chile fancied they could upset the odds, especially after they had beaten two strong teams, Peru and Uruguay to get to the final. They did manage to upset the odds and lift the title thanks to some great penalty taking. They eventually won the shootout 4-1, with all four of the Chilean players scoring from the spot.
Lionel Messi scored for Argentina but he was their only scorer in a very disappointing ending for them after so much was promised both before and during the tournament. They went into the tournament with a team full of worldwide star names, including Barcelona star Lionel Messi and much was expected from them. However, it wasn’t to be and they would have to wait to add another title to the 14 they already had.
One of the big talking from the 2015 event was Brazil not making it to the semi-finals after a loss against Paraguay in the quarter finals. They qualified for the knockout stages despite not having a perfect record. They lost 1-0 to Colombia in the group stages, a shock to some but it was a sign of things to come for the Brazilians, who never got going throughout the tournament.
They faced Paraguay in the quarter finals and took an early lead in the game. However, a penalty gave Paraguay a way back into the game which they took, and that was how things ended which led to a penalty shootout between the teams. Paraguay were clinical, scoring four of their five penalties, while Brazil missed two to leave them with an early exit from the tournament.
Elsewhere another disappointment was Mexico, who went into the tournament on the back of a good performance at the 2014 World Cup to get to the last 16 stage. They were drawn in a group with the hosts Chile, but with Bolivia and Ecuador rounding off the group, qualification for the knockout stages looked to be well within reach. However, the Mexicans failed to win a game at the tournament, with draws against Bolivia and Chile starting the tournament before a loss to Ecuador sealed their fate.
Despite those two disappointments, Chile deservedly won the 2015 Copa America on home soil to register their maiden success in the tournament.
The 2001 Copa America
The 2001 Copa America came close to being cancelled due to security concerns in Colombia. The authorities were worried that violence would occur at the games and they wanted to stop the tournament going ahead. At one point, Venezuela offered to host the tournament but just days before the event, Colombia were given the green light to go through with plans to host.
This news caused something huge to happen when right on the eve of the tournament, Argentina decided to pull out due to safety concerns. They claimed their players had received death threats stating they would be in trouble if they played in Colombia, and with that in mind, the full team pulled out of the event. This was a strange start for the event, as many teams arrived at the tournament underprepared, and without the normal match practice ahead of a big competition.
Once the tournament got underway we saw some very good games, and the big surprise was that in the group stages, Colombia began with three victories out of three. They also didn’t concede a goal, beating Venezuela 2-0, Ecuador 1-0 and Chile 2-0 to qualify for the knockout stages with ease.
The quarter finals put Colombia against Peru and they found a way past them with ease, beating them 3-0 thanks to three goals in less than 20 minutes to stun their opposition. At that point, the hosts had a real belief and confidence in lifting the trophy, although they knew there was a chance that Brazil would be waiting for them in the semi-finals and would provide a stern test.
The shock of the tournament came in the quarter-finals though, as Brazil were dumped out by Honduras 2-0 in a game that will remain part of Honduras footballing history for a very long time.
That gave Colombia a great chance to reach the final, with Honduras standing in their way of making it. Colombia controlled the semi-final, with an early goal giving them a crucial advantage and making Honduras chase the game. The visitors continued to take risks and that allowed Colombia to score a second goal in the second half and that is how the game ended. Colombia had reached the Copa America final for just the second time in their history.
Colombia played Mexico in the final and going into the game, they had yet to concede a goal in the tournament. Their defensive play had been nothing short of fantastic. The Mexicans had also impressed in the tournament, they had beaten Brazil in the group stages, as well as Chile and Uruguay in the knockout rounds.
The stage was set in Bogota for a hugely exciting game, and the home crowd were desperate to see their team lift the Copa America trophy for the very first time.
The game was tense and neither team could break the deadlock in the first half. However, in the second half we finally saw a goal, as Colombia took the lead. The home fans went wild as their dream of lifting the trophy became a reality, they had a one-goal lead and needed to hold on to it. Mexico pushed to equalise but they couldn’t, leaving Colombia to lift their first ever Copa America title right where they would want to, in front of their own fans in their national stadium.
This was a huge moment for the Colombian national team, and also a big moment for them off the field. Many were concerned about taking the Copa America to Colombia but the tournament was a big success, with no reported trouble taking place as was predicted. The home team won the hearts of their nation with their first ever success in the tournament and the date 29th July 2001 will forever be in the football history books.
Had the hosts not won the tournament then there is no doubt that the big talking point from the 2001 tournament would have been the performance of Honduras. No one of betting sites or sports specialist could predict that they will finish third after winning a penalty shootout against Uruguay in the third/fourth place playoff game. This accomplishment under normal circumstances would have been a huge achievement for Honduras and wins against Uruguay twice and Brazil once will be remembered for a very long time by their fans.
However, what makes this effort extra special for them is the circumstances in which it was achieved, and how they battled despite everything being against them. Argentina pulled out of the 2001 event at the last minute due to security concerns and Honduras were the team to replace them. They didn’t have any pre-tournament build up at all going into the event, and only flew into Colombia on the day of their first game, just hours before kick-off. When you put all this together, it was a remarkable effort by the Honduras team and one that their fans should be extremely proud of.
Elsewhere, a team beaten by Honduras, Brazil, would have to go down as being the major disappointment of this tournament. With the withdrawal of Argentina, they were the biggest and most high-profile country in the 2001 tournament but failed to get past Honduras in the quarter final stages. With such a talented squad, much was expected from Brazil, and their fans were left bitterly disappointed in 2001.
The 1995 Copa America
In 1995 the Copa America went to Uruguay and in this golden era for South American football, fans from all over the world were excited to see what would happen. All football specialist was writing winning football predictions for Brazil and Argentina. Because they were dominating the world stage, and they were clear favourites to win this tournament, although things did not go to plan for them.
A 4-1 win for the hosts on an opening day against Venezuela got the tournament off to a fantastic start and gave Uruguay some real belief and momentum. Two wins and a draw gave Uruguay top spot in their group and a path to the quarter finals. Elsewhere in the group stages, Brazil won all three games to top their group, while Argentina won two, but were then shocked by the USA in their final game, losing 3-0. This was a huge shock and one that would have real consequences for Argentina. Instead of winning the group they came second, and that paired them with Brazil in the quarter finals, one of the big favourites to win this tournament was going out at an early stage.
A quarter-final clash between Brazil and Argentina grabbed the headlines, this is the game everyone wanted to see, but we didn’t expect to see it so early in the tournament. After two goals in the opening ten minutes, the game was 1-1 and was quickly turning into the classic everyone had hoped for. There was nothing to choose between the two giants of the game and after finishing 2-2, the only way to split these two was a penalty shootout. Two misses by Argentina gave Brazil the victory, and they progressed to the semi-finals, leaving Argentina to wonder what might have been had they managed to beat the USA in the group stages.
Uruguay had been handed a much easier path to the final thanks to being in the top half of the draw and they began their tilt at the trophy with a quarter-final against Bolivia. They won that game 2-1, after quickly going 2-0 ahead and protecting their lead. The home fans were starting to believe that winning the competition on home soil was a genuine possibility.
Uruguay moved to the semi-finals, where they would face Colombia for a place in the final of the Copa America. They controlled the game but were unable to break down the Colombians in the first half. However, that changed in the second half and a goal just after half-time changed the game. Uruguay took the lead and that forced Columbia to open up and look for an equaliser. That didn’t come and eventually, Uruguay found another goal to seal the tie. With a 2-0 victory, Uruguay were in the final of the Copa America where they would face the might of Brazil.
In the final, Brazil were the better team in the first half and scored after half an hour to take a one-goal lead. They deserved to lead, but in the second half, the game changed dramatically when Uruguay came out attacking and with a belief that they could pull themselves back into the game. Not too long into the second half, they did exactly that, equalising to send the 60,000 fans in attendance wild. Neither team could find a winner, so the final of the Copa America would be decided by a shootout between Uruguay and Brazil.
We saw nine penalties taken during the shootout and eight of those were successful, showing just what quality we had on show, despite the huge pressure on both teams. The only player to miss was Tulio, and his miss gave Uruguay a 5-3 shootout victory to lift their 14th Copa America title. After Argentinian dominance in the past two tournaments, Uruguay put their name on the title once again and best of all they got to celebrate it with their home fans at their national stadium.
The big story of this tournament was the performance of the USA, who reached the semi-final stage before being knocked out by Brazil. They stood up to much better teams and gave a great account of themselves, while they remained in the sporting spotlight in their country. Just a year before the USA had successfully hosted the 1994 World Cup and many people were beginning to love the game of football. Their success in the Copa America brought even more fans to the sport and it was a big time for the sport in America, leading to more coverage and more people getting involved.
The 1989 Copa America
The 1989 Copa America was hosted by Brazil and it was a tournament that they dominated. The hosts, along with Uruguay who had won the previous two tournaments, and Argentina who had many good youngsters coming through, were the three teams in with a chance of winning. The stage was set for a great tournament and the players on the field did not disappoint once they got going.
Brazil’s opening game saw them have a fantastic start in the tournament, beating Venezuela 3-1 to put two points on the board. However, after that, they stuttered and drew their next two games against Peru and Colombia. A final game victory against Paraguay saw them qualify for the final group, although they only qualified as runners-up behind Paraguay.
In Group B, Argentina topped the group with Uruguay in second to give the fans a final four they wanted, with three fantastic teams all going head to head, and Paraguay in there trying to spoil the party. Back in 1989, the final of the Copa America was a group of four, where every team played each other once. While this meant we didn’t have an official final as such, it did make for five great days of footballing action for the fans in attendance, and the attendances for this tournament were huge.
Onto the final and this is where the hosts really took off, dominating what looked on paper to be a very close group. A 2-0 victory over rivals Argentina got them off in the best possible style and they followed that up with a thrilling 3-0 victory over Paraguay. Elsewhere in the group, Uruguay were going well and looking for their third successive Copa America title, they recorded the same margins of victory in their games against Paraguay and Argentina. That set up a winner takes all game between Brazil and Uruguay, which would decide where the trophy ended up.
With Uruguay looking for their third title in a row, and Brazil having home-field advantage, this was a genuine 50/50 game, with little to choose between the teams. A goalless first half led to even more tension in the game and as the second half started both teams looked on edge. However, just into the second half, Brazil found a way to break the deadlock through Romario. They managed to hold onto their lead and win the game 1-0, a victory which secured top spot in the table to give them a fourth Copa America title.
The home nation brought to an end the dominance of Uruguay, although what was to follow was a successful period for Argentina, who had shown signs of promise in 1989, despite bringing a young squad to the tournament. While Uruguay were the talk of the tournament going into it, many people were talking about Argentina coming out of it. Their young team impressed many watchers and they would go on to have good success over the coming years. They won the next two Copa America titles, 1991 in Chile and 1993 in Mexico, as well as performing extremely well on the world stage.I don't know about you, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the computational power required to accurately and consistently upsample to DSDx16 (DSD1024). That, however, is what Ed Meitner automatically does to material played through his new EMM Labs DA2 Stereo D/A Converter ($25,000 base price). Able to receive via USB data up to DSDx2 and DXD (352.8 and 384kHz PCM), the DA2 does real-time transient detection, processing, and upconversion of all incoming audio before sending it to EMM's new DSDx16 DACs. Upconversion is done automatically in real time, and does not require users to fiddle with filters, settings, and all the rest.
Also available is the matching TX2 CD/SACD transport ($25,000), to be produced in a limited edition of 50. That's because Esoteric is no longer making its superior CD/SACD mechanisms available to other companies, and EMM's supply is running out.
Forthcoming from EMM Labs are the new MTRX2 monoblock amplifiers (approximately $80,000-85,000/pair), due in the fall. With technology based on the company's bigger amps, the MTRX2s stress speed and transparency. They also deliver an impressive 600W into 8 ohms, and function all the way down to less than 1 ohm. In the words of the company's Shahin Al Rashid, these completely balanced babies are capable of driving "the most bizarre speaker on the planet."
The sound, through Lansche Audio Cubus speakers and Graditech cabling, was midrange-heavy. My SACD of the Mahler Symphony 9 sounded exceptionally smooth, with beautiful highs, but the exaggerated midrange warmth may have been responsible for some of the smudging I heard.
At Auralic's Thursday morning press conference, company co-founder Xuanqian Wang explained that the Chinese company's target customers for the new Altair product series are those who want to spend $4000-5000 for a system. He then detailed the company's "road map" for 2016-2017, which includes, in no particular chronological order: the Altair amplifier (to come), which adds an amp to the Altair streamer-DAC, and which will output approximately 150Wpc; a new Lightning DS iPad control app for Auralic's Lightning series of products, as well as a new Lightning DS desktop version; and a proprietary music recognition and discovery service.
At another press event, Audionet presented a "meet and greet" with the company's Thomas Gessler and the legendary German-American industrial designer, Hartmut Esslinger (left and right, respectively, in the photo above). After founding a design agency in 1969 that was later known as Frogdesign, and designing Sony's Walkman, Esslinger's design strategy for Apple transformed it from yet another Silicon Valley start-up into the company it is now. Also among his most famous designs are the Apple IIc and Macintosh computer.
Esslinger repeatedly stressed that since there's a "wide bandwidth of taste," and you're always designing from yourself, you must create designs that are both timeless and considerate of what customers care for. "The biggest problem is working with cowards," he said of his various associations over the years.
"The ideas will come when they will come," Esslinger said at Munich High End. "Each product I create has its own life, and is designed for others. Every time is a new adventure. You initially agree to do things that you don't know how to do. Since you don't know what is coming next, it's important to enjoy the moment. My goal is so simple: To be the best in the world."
Forthcoming from Audionet and Esslinger in August or September are the Audionet Scientist Series über-performance Ultimate Heisenberg mono amplifier and Stern preamplifier. These are the largest boxes somewhat visible behind the men in the photo above.
At the BrinkmannMQA press conference on which I reported earlier (see here), Dr. Mattias Lück, developer of Brinkmann's digital components, explained that the company manufactured its first DAC 30 years ago, in 1986. "It has been a long journey to get DAC chips to stop doing all these things that they think they should do," he said.
Brinkmann then introduced the company's forthcoming MQA-enabled, streaming and playback Nyquist DAC, which uses a Roon endpoint for playback and music management. With balanced and unbalanced outputs and a headphone jack, it can process PCM up to DXD and DSDx2 via separate PCM and DSD DAC chips. It also has an exchangeable DAC module that will make upgrades possible. Circuitry topology is hybrid, with tubes used in the output stage.
Heard via Vandersteen 5A Carbon loudspeakers and M7-HPA power amplifiers, AudioQuest cabling, Shunyata power distribution, and HRS (Harmonic Resolution Systems) racks and bases, the Nyquist DAC helped convey remarkable clarity and liquidity on MQA-decoded tracks of Eric Clapton and B.B. King's "Three O'Clock Blues," Ray Charles & Milt Jackson's "How Long Blues," and Frank Sinatra's over-sentimentalized "With Every Breath I Take." The way in which instruments stood out, as they would in live performance, was exceptional. Sinatra's voice was just gorgeous, with every overly romantic sentiment as palpable as could be. The BrinkmannVandersteen combo sounded like an absolute winner.
The Bauta loudspeaker (125,000/pair), not currently available in the US, is the brainchild of Jacek Gawlowski. A Grammy Award-wining sound engineer and mixer with hundreds of Gold and Platinum records to his credit, Gawlowski designed his loudspeaker after finding all existing monitors inadequate.
The Bauta, however, is anything but a standard-sized studio monitor. It is a huge, 3-way, passive loudspeaker, whose active subwoofer supports the bottom frequencies. The MDF-enclosed, heavily braced speaker, which uses Scanspeak and Dayton drivers, has a 91dB sensitivity, a nominal impedance of 4 ohms, and a frequency response of 18Hz30kHz. It also claims perfect time alignment. Its enclosure is sealed, and recommended amplifier power is 300 to 1000Wpc. Bi-amping, in this case via Accuphase amplifiers, is essential. So is good cabling, in this case Siltech plus WireWorld.
The Bauta loudspeaker was demmed in a small, enclosed space that was lined with acoustic panels from Gawlowski's studio. At first I thought the sound superb. It was gorgeous, smooth, and warm, with lively colors. On the soundtrack from Gladiator, the deep percussion rumbles were thrilling, even if the music itself was bombastic schlock. But the sound on my SACD of Mahler's Symphony 9 was amorphous, with a curious midrange emphasis like no other. Lacking bite and impact, the symphony sounded like a leisurely stroll through the park, which is anything but what Mahler intended. Perhaps the Accuphase CD/SACD player was at fault. All I know for certain is that I really wish I could have heard these loudspeakers in a larger space.Chick-fil-A President Says 'God's Judgment' Coming Because of Same-Sex Marriage
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The president of one of the largest fast-food chains in America explained that he takes pride in being able to live out his Christian faith through his restaurants, but that we as a nation are challenging God's principals when it comes to the same sex-marriage debate.
Dan Cathy, the president and chief operating officer of Chick-fil-A, was invited to appear on the "The Ken Coleman Show," during when he revealed that those advocating for same-sex marriage will in turn bring "God's judgment" upon us.
"I think we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, 'We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage,'" Cathy said. "I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about."
Cathy explains that the company that his father created and the one that he now runs is possible because of family and the support that families offer.
"We are very much supportive of the family -- the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that … We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that," Cathy said.
The conservative stance taken by Chick-fil-A has not come without controversy and has led to some organizations to forego endorsing the fast-food restaurant. Earlier this year Northeastern University officials decided not to allow a store on the college's Boston campus.
"We need to be more faithful to depend on a God who does love us and wants to have a relationship with us, and wants to give us the desires of our hearts … We intend to stay the course," Cathy said.
"We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles," Cathy explained.FlipSid3 swaps Shara for electronic
FlipSid3 Tactics has decided to drop Aleksandr "Shara" Gordeev, bringing in Denis "electronic" Sharipov as a trial in his place.
The Ukrainian organization announced today that they have decided to make alterations to their long-standing CS:GO line-up, opting to cut Aleksandr "Shara" Gordeev from the team due to lacklustre performance from the Ukrainian in recent months. Shara had been with FlipSid3 since mid-December, when he officially signed with the team following a brief stint as a substitute. In his place the organization has decided to trial Denis "electronic" Sharipov, a relative unknown player from the CIS region who has slowly been gaining notoriety. FlipSid3 Tactics issued the following statement on the move:
“
As of today, Oleksandr “Shara” Hordieiev has been placed inactive and will no longer participate on the starting roster. We appreciate all that Oleksandr has done for the team since he joined the roster in early 2016.
We are commencing tryouts for the 5th active role with Denis “electronic” Sharipov. Denis has proven to be one of the more skilled young talents upcoming in the CIS region. We are very excited to see what he can bring to the team and see how he develops at the top level of competition. ”
FlipSid3 now consists of:
Georgi “WorldEdit” Yaskin
Yegor “markeloff” Markelov
Andrey “B1ad3” Gorodenskiy
Jan “wayLander” Rahkonen
Denis “electronic” Sharipov
Headline image: Game2DayOn Monday night, The New York Times revealed a follow-up story regarding a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and a Russian government-connected lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, regarding possible opposition research on Hillary Clinton. The new bombshell: Trump Jr. knew that the lawyer was apparently a front for the Russian government.
According to the Times:
Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.
The man who helped broker the meeting, publicist Rob Goldstone, reportedly wrote the email to Trump Jr.; the email allegedly explicitly talks about the material being funneled from the Russian government. As the Times acknowledges, “There is no evidence to suggest that the promised damaging information was related to Russian government computer hacking that led to the release of thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.”
This puts Donald Trump Jr. in a supremely awkward position. Originally, Trump Jr. didn’t report the meeting; then he said the meeting revolved around Russian adoption policy; then, yesterday, he admitted that he went to the meeting for the purpose of investigating possible anti-Hillary material, but gave no indicator that he knew that the information might come from Russia. Now, his lawyer has responded by calling the entire story “much ado about nothing.” The lawyer’s statement did not deny the allegation that Trump Jr. knew that the possible information would come via connection to the Russian government.
Statement from Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer to NBC News: “In my view, this is much ado about nothing.” (via @PeterAlexander) pic.twitter.com/oCWH0kS6xZ — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) July 11, 2017
At the White House, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated that “the president’s campaign did not collude in any way. Don Jr. did not collude with anybody to influence the election. No one within the Trump campaign colluded in order to influence the election.”
She may very well be right, given that apparently no information of importance was actually handed to the Trump campaign. That means no active collusion would have taken place, despite Don Jr.’s supposed willingness to hear out the Russian source. It’s also possible that the Russian government helped set up the meet, and then planned to use news of that meet in order to set fire to rumors surrounding possible collusion.
Goldstone denies some of the allegations in the Times story:
Mr. Goldstone, who wrote the email over a year ago, denied any knowledge of involvement by the Russian government in the matter, saying that never dawned on him. “Never, never ever,” he said. Later, after the email was described to The Times, efforts to reach him for further comment were unsuccessful.... Ms. Veselnitskaya, for her part, denied that the campaign or compromising material about Mrs. Clinton ever came up. She said she had never acted on behalf of the Russian government. A spokesperson for Mr. Putin said on Monday that he did not know Ms. Veselnitskaya, and that he had no knowledge |
](https://github.com/aol/cyclops-react) ). Our total productivity gains easily accommodated this additional development cost, but as time goes on we’re finding we have to spend less time building our own Microservices infrastructure as the approach has become more mainstream and much better supported.
For those that are interested, we first decided that a BASE model to state (Basically Available Soft State) suited our particular application. Which meant we designed services to cache as much locally as possible, and to make interservice calls for data asynchronous where appropriate also. This resulted in huge improvement in reliability and availability across the system, and mitigated the potential for cascading failures. We decided that all interface changes should be backwards compatible, and incompatible changes really should be a new service. The challenge of interface version proliferation effectively disappeared. To manage a large number of services we built infrastructure for service discovery, plugged into some neat modern monitoring systems and followed the crowd in adopting containerization and deploying to the cloud via CI/CD pipelines. That in itself was a lot of work, but the benefits are enormous.
Unexpected benefits
Almost as a side effect to adopting Microservices we’ve encountered a significant number of other benefits.
1. Simpler code — much less use of moderately complex patterns such as The Strategy Pattern, and generally less need for complex conditional logic
2. Better ability to choose the right tool for the task at hand — where our monolith was Java, our Microservices are JVM based (primarily still Java 8), but we make use of both Groovy and Scala based services when those languages and their libraries are a better fit
3. The ability to scale up development teams — we’re actively moving towards an ‘inner source’ model of development. It’s much easier for new external engineers to come into our codebase and create a nice new greenfield Microservice than understand a complex monolith. When needed we can facilitate much larger numbers of developers working productively on our project than we ever dreamed possible before.
4. Independent deployability of services — this isn’t something we set out to achieve deliberately. But the fact we can make changes to services quickly in an emergency and push a change out to production in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take has been a wonderful surprise of adopting this approach!
No silver bullet
Microservices aren’t a silver bullet, adopting them just because they are trendy is very high risk. But we believe that if you face real challenges around scaling development teams and improving productivity Microservices can help. Our experience is that pragmatically, conservatively and incrementally adopting Microservices, reap massive benefits for development teams.After a summer of studying, attending classes and learning from the experts, one Belton teen is now the youngest licensed auctioneer in the state.
In June, 13-year-old Thomas Gallaway graduated from the Texas Auction Academy in Dallas. It was a nine day session that taught him the ins and outs of auctioning.
After that, he signed two pieces of paperwork and waited for his license to come in the mail.
“It was really nerve-racking and exciting at the same time, sitting there, filling out Texas state paperwork,” Thomas said.
Thomas holds an associate license, which means he is allowed to call bids at auctions as long as his governing auctioneer and father, Trey Gallaway, is present.
Thomas will study under his father for four more years until he is old enough for a full auctioneer license.
Thomas’ father received his auctioneer license from the Texas Auction Academy nearly 18 years ago.
Now, he owns United Country Central Texas Auction and Realty, and the Central Texas Auction Services in Belton.
Trey was named the Texas State Champion Auctioneer in 2010 and the World Automobile Champion Auctioneer in 2013.
Now, Thomas is following in his father’s footsteps as he moves from behind-the-scenes work to the front of the stage.
"To see him grow up and follow what I'm doing is a really great feeling for a father," Trey said.
Even though Thomas has recently received recognition for becoming the youngest licensed auctioneer in Texas, he said it does not feel much different than when he wasn’t licensed.
"Well, it feels like my normal life, because I've been doing this for four years now," he said.
For the last four years, Thomas has been traveling to auctions with his father, helping to check people in and out, fill out paperwork, and even setting up technology equipment.
"I actually program and network and do everything, like all of the computers and stuff you see out there, I set that up,” Thomas said.
Thomas said even if this does not become his full-time job, he wants to continue auctioning.
It’s a family affair that even Thomas’ mother, who works as an occupational therapist, has joined. While taking Thomas to his auctioning classes this summer, she decided to get her license too.
"I decided to go ahead and do it, since I was there at the time, and would be there for the whole class with Thomas, I might as well go ahead and try it,” Thomas’ mother Julie Gallaway said.
Julie said even their nine-year-old son, Trent, is already interested in becoming an auctioneer.In a recent interview with Fox Sports Florida, Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper discusses the 2018 NHL All-Star Game coming to Tampa, his stint behind the bench for Team Canada at the IIHF World Championships, the Lightning’s performance last season, and the importance of learning from all of these experiences.
We have transcribed this interview for accessibility.
Quick Note: For the sake of clarity and fluency, I have omitted extraneous uses of the phrases, “and,” “but,” and “you know.”
All-Star Game
Rick Peckham: Coop, a huge day here talking about All-Star 2018. What do you remember from watching All-Star Games maybe growing up, maybe as a National Hockey League coach. How much are you looking forward to this happening in January?
Jon Cooper: Yeah, now it’s a little added incentive to make sure we’re in first place in the division when it’s time to be picked as a coach so I could be behind the bench. What an honor for the city. It all starts with [Lightning owner] Jeff Vinik and what he’s done. For the NHL to recognize what a big-time hockey city Tampa has become, I couldn’t be happier. The All-Star Game is an event. It’s just not something that is taken lightly. The best players in the world get to come here and show their skills. I’m so thankful our fans are going to get to be able to watch that.
World Championships
[For context: Jon Cooper was head coach for Team Canada at the IIHF World Championships. Canada earned a silver medal while Sweden won gold.]
Peckham: You’ve been a part here, in recent weeks, of a very important showcase of skills. Tell us about your experience there and how you felt maybe this could help you down the line.
Cooper: Well, the World Championships - it was such an honor to be chosen by Team Canada. It was crushing not to make the [NHL] playoffs, but to be afforded that opportunity kind of took a little bit of the sting away. To go over there on the international stage, to be with other players from the league that you battle against, be with other coaches that you work against - just to come together as a collective group was a great learning experience for myself. Then to watch our players out there, it made you proud as a coach to watch not only your players represent their countries, but to excel. I think Hedman was leading Sweden in ice time, Kuch [Nikita Kucherov] was leading them [Russia] in goals, you just go down the list - [Andrei] Vasilevskiy was the goaltender of the tournament. It kind of made you proud as a coach.
Cooper: Unfortunately it was a tough ending for us to go all the way to the Final and lose in a shootout. But when you’re shaking hands with Heddy [Victor Hedman] and Strals [Anton Stralman] at the end, I couldn’t have been more happy for the guys.
When you lose the gold but you're happy because the guy who won it is your #1 defenseman for the next 8 years... pic.twitter.com/IeLNOctHqm — Saima (@Saima_1226) May 21, 2017
Tampa Bay Lightning
Peckham: Well as you get ready to dig in for next year, what do you think this experience can do for your players - the Kucherovs, the Points [Brayden Point], the Vasilevskiys - towards the Lightning’s goal for next year?
Cooper: It’s been well-documented that we were one point from making the playoffs and seeing what we could do. You look at Nashville is in the Stanley Cup Final, we had the same amount of points [in the regular season]. It just shows how important those points in October are as opposed to those same points in March. I think we really grew as a group. It was a different year for us. I know we didn’t make the playoffs, but with a lot of the adver — I don’t want to throw that word “adversity” around -- but the injuries we had, the different lineup. There was a core group of guys there that grew. Brayden Point was one of them. Alex Killorn was another one. Jake Dotchin was another one. These guys that really helped elevate us to where we know we can be. You look back and say, “Okay, now we’re going to get a healthy Steven Stamkos back. We’ll hopefully get some of these restricted free agents signed [Jonathan Drouin, Tyler Johnson, Ondrej Palat]. You’ve got a goaltender that now has the net in Vasilevskiy.” We’re really excited for what’s coming up here. You’ve got to get through the [Vegas Golden Knights] expansion draft and the [NHL entry] draft, but I know that when we left the World Championships, guys were really excited for the season coming up. I can’t wait to get it started.
Learning experiences
Peckham: Jon Cooper, you had a taste at the World Cup of Hockey in terms of being a coach involved in international competition at the highest level, certainly at that time. Now the World Championships. Your thoughts as far as what Jon Cooper can do on the international stage. Obviously as the head coach here, you did a great job in getting your team to where you did.
Cooper: Well when you get to the NHL you just can’t stop and say, “Well, I got to the best league in the world and that’s it.” I’m a true believer that you can always grow. Once you’ve stopped growing, then you might as well get out of the game. At the World Cup, I was an assistant coach. It was a different situation for me to be put in, but it was one I cherished and loved. You learn from being in those situations about how assistant coaches feel when you have them. I thought I learned from that. You learn from not making the playoffs - the first time it had happened under my tenure. What could we do to help ourselves grow and get better and make the playoffs next year? And then finally, the World Championships. Now you’re the leader of the ship and you’re working with other NHL coaches around you and other players that are great players in the league. In one full swoop of one year, I had a lot of unreal experiences that helped me grow. Now it’s my job to collectively put it all together and make us a better team next year.
Peckham: Coop, thanks very much. Enjoy the off-season.Here in the States we talk about 0-60-mph runs when it comes to discussing the specs and performance of your average performance machine. Across the pond, our enthusiast friends who smartly embrace the metric system, measure a nearly similar jaunt as a car travels from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour. Translated to America-speak, that works out to a 0-62-mph blast.
Well, there's a brand new record in this space, and it's blisteringly quick.
Hailing from the University of Stuttgart, in Germany, the Green Team Formula students have created an electric vehicle that can run from 0 to 62 milers per hour in just 1.779 seconds. That's seemingly impossibly quick, especially when you compare that figure against all manner of hyperexotic street cars and even top-tier race cars. The Porsche 918 Spyder can make the trip in just 2.5 seconds, depending on who is doing the driving and the timing. An Ariel Atom 500—you know, the one with the 3.0-liter V-8—can apparently rip off a 2.3-second run. A modern F1 car can usually make the 0-60-mph run in just over two seconds.
How was the Green Team able to produce a vehicle that bests all of those other vehicles? By running a fully-electric vehicle equipped with all-wheel-drive. The torque from the four electric motors is sent instantly to all four wheels. Couple that with the extremely low curb weight of nearly 353 pounds, and you have a recipe for tremendous acceleration. The vehicle we're dealing with has a fantastic power-to-weight ratio, besting that of the aforementioned Porsche as well as the mighty Bugatti Veyron.
Really, there are few vehicles that accelerate more quickly than this. Top Fuel Dragsters will win the race to 60 miles per hour or 100 kilometers per hour, but those are the fastest accelerating things outside of vehicles capable of leaving this planet. They can make the 0-60-mph dash in around half a second but can't really be driven like a normal car.
For the German students and their amazing machine, we tip our caps and salute you. This is one heck of an achievement, and we hope others seek new ways to push the record even further. We do know of an electric Datsun nicknamed the White Zombie out there that could run to 60 in 1.8 seconds.
Is there more out there? We hope to find out.
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Follow Motor Authority on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.Yeah. I got the best gift ever in my opinion. Just yesterday, a large box came in the mail. Excited, I opened it to find...the entire Harry Potter book series. omfg. But, wait, what's that in place of the Prisoner of Azkaban? A box with Zoidberg on it? Fricken hilarious.
I'm glad I waited to post this though, as just today, I got another package in the mail. Curious and excited, I felt I already knew what it was. And I was right. My awesome gift-giver sent me the Prisoner of Azkaban.
I'm in heaven right now. Holy Fucking shit(excuse my vulgarity). I have the ENTIRE Harry Potter book set in hardcover. All. Seven. Books.
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Excuse me while I flail some more, then get down to reading.
Thank you Nathan. You have made my fucking YEAR.Smiling, laughing and occasionally thrusting his arms aloft, a man accused of trying to set off a bomb in the Loop in an alleged terrorist plot told a federal judge on Friday that he believes the government is going to behead him because he is Muslim, but he insisted he was not crazy or unfit to stand trial.
Adel Daoud, testifying against the advice of his lawyer at a hearing to decide his mental competency, also reiterated his contention that the judge and lawyers in the case are members of a secret society conspiring against him.
"Are you the defendant in this hearing?" asked Daoud's lawyer, Thomas Anthony Durkin.
"I am the hostage, yes," Daoud said on the second day of the hearing in the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman said she will rule next Thursday after considering the lawyers' arguments, case law and evidence, including the defendant's extensive writings and recorded phone calls.
Daoud, who is now 22, was a suburban Hillside teen when he was indicted in 2012 on charges he plotted to detonate a bomb outside a downtown Chicago bar. He has since been charged with allegedly soliciting the murder of the undercover agent in the terrorism case and attacking a jail inmate in 2015.
At Friday's hearing, Daoud said that he often holds conversations with himself "because I don't need a second person," but he denied hearing voices or seeing illusions.
"If I'm crazy now, and I feel this is the best state I've been in, I had to be crazy forever," he said.
Durkin argued that Daoud suffers from delusional disorder, a condition that has worsened in recent months, especially after one of his cellmates at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago committed suicide in January. In testimony Friday, a defense expert said he worried Daoud himself may be suicidal, but Daoud downplayed the impact of the cellmate's suicide, telling the judge that he reacted in the way anyone would after a loved one died.
Prosecutors argued that Daoud understands the charges against him, can assist in his own defense and that mental competency exams have determined that while he may hold extraordinary beliefs, he is not delusional or paranoid.
During about half an hour on the witness stand, Daoud said the government set him up because he wanted to travel to Saudi Arabia to become a Muslim scholar. He also testified he wrote a letter to President Barack Obama asking that he be released to fight in Syria after he rejected a plea offer from prosecutors.
"I guess if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, so that's when I thought about writing Obama," he said.
Durkin said that Daoud's mental condition makes it nearly impossible to craft a valid defense.
On the first day of the hearing, a government psychologist and a psychiatrist called by the defense offered differing opinions about Daoud's mental state, an issue that essentially came down to their assessment of whether or not he is delusional or merely extremist and idiosyncratic. The judge must determine whether Daoud's mental state meets the legal standard for being able to face trial.
Coleman, from the bench, asked whether the presence of a delusional disorder necessarily negates competency to stand trial.
While the defense expert reiterated his belief that Daoud "cannot assist in his defense" and expressed concern for his well being, he conceded that it was possible to be both delusional and legally competent.
"You can, in fact, have both," psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis answered. "... It's not an either-or."
[email protected]
Twitter @pmocwriterUpdate: Syracuse woman adopts all four cats.
East Syracuse, NY -- Atha Tehon Thiras had a successful career in Manhattan as an art director for a book company and had no children. When a massive heart attack struck the 86-year-old East Syracuse widow Feb. 15, her affairs were in order.
On the first page of her 20-page will, Thiras outlines a trust fund for her four cats: $50,000. The executors of her estate, an assistant and a niece, have been charged with finding a new home for Buff, Callie, Lady and Pepper — and their nest egg.
It’s been tougher than you’d think.
Thiras requested that the four cats stay together. An executor wants them to go to a house with no other animals. And, the survivors have found, they need to make sure any applicants aren’t just in it for the money.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The cats have to be moved by June 4, which is when prospective buyers can tour Thiras’ condominium in Erie Village.
The estate’s executors, Linda Vulcano and Susan Tehon, say they are willing to split the quartet but keeping the cats together would be ideal. After all, it’s what their friend wanted.
“These were her children and it’s her money,” Tehon said. “That was her wish and she enjoyed the cats.”
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The money is to be used for food, litter, medical expenses, boarding during the caregiver’s vacation, cremation fees and insurance, according to the will. The caregiver may also be paid up to $1,200 a year and should expect an annual visit from Vulcano to make sure the animals are well cared for.
Thiras’ seven nieces and nephews, including Tehon, will share the rest of her $1.2 million estate. Stephen Thiras, Atha’s husband of 44 years, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2005.
Vulcano, who spent three days a week at Thiras’ home as her personal assistant, has cared for the cats since February and is desperate to see them in a good home. She’s worried about someone stepping forward for the money and not the cats.
Tehon and Vulcano, of DeWitt, said they have been telling everyone they know about the animals. They have posted fliers online and in their neighborhoods. One early advertisement said the cats came with free vet, food and litter for life. “Do you have any idea how many crazy people called me and wanted to know what was in it for them and did not ask about the cats?” Vulcano said.
The fliers have been revised to say the four cats, one male and three females, are about 7 years old, have been fixed and come with “some financial assistance.” (Buff sometimes needs allergy shots and Pepper has an auto-immune disease requiring medicine three times a week.)
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Interested caregivers should expect an interview, will be observed interacting with the cats and must provide receipts for their care in order to be paid, Tehon and Vulcano said. “Nobody gets the money up front,” Vulcano said. “I couldn’t think of any other way to do it.”
Originally from Illinois, Thiras earned her master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949. She played piano and flute in college and painted. She worked as an artist in Europe, Greenwich Village and Cape Cod. She and her husband lived in Manhattan before moving to Syracuse about 12 years ago to be near her brother, who died in 2009.
For 32 years, Thiras worked as art director for Dial Books for Young Readers, a division of Penguin Group. It was in that role that she befriended some of the biggest names in children’s books — including Edward Gorey and Maurice Sendak, the author of “Where the Wild Things Are,” who died Tuesday.
Sendak and Thiras remained close friends, Vulcano said.
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Thousands of books fill the upstairs of Thiras’ condo. She was a lifelong student, her assistant and niece said, and subscribed to at least a dozen magazines including The New Yorker and ones about cats.
Her passions were varied and colorful. Above a pile of records of fado, a type of singing native to Portugal, sit three books: “Chinese Pottery and Porcelain,” “Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg” and “How to Render Roman Letter Forms.”
Among her books sit stuffed “Where the Wild Things Are” characters, a dozen Society of Illustrators medals, a group of miniature green and yellow John Deere tractors, and a manila folder stuffed with her favorite “Mutts” comic strips, torn from the newspaper.
Hundreds of children’s books, including a vast Sendak collection, line the walls of her studio. Those titles, along with her correspondence from Sendak and others, have been donated to the University of Pennsylvania archives, Tehon said.
Thiras discovered new things late in life. She got her driver’s license for the first time in her 70s; she bought a baby grand Steinway piano for the condo and played privately; and she began painting again, using the cats and her Native American pottery as subjects. She also liked to shop at Christmas Tree Shops in Mattydale, buying trinkets that brought her joy.
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Thiras and her husband struggled to have children. Their seven nieces and nephews visited them regularly in New York City.
When her husband moved to a nursing home a few years before his death, Thiras was lonely, Tehon said. Never having owned a pet, Thiras adopted two cats and fell in love. She soon adopted two more and the cats became the center of her life.
“She’d be sitting at the kitchen table having her breakfast and she’d have one cat on her lap and one on the table trying to get the milk out of her bowl,” Vulcano recalled.
Including the cats in her will was a priority, according to her lawyer, Scott Sherman, of Rye Brook. Sherman suggested a trust — something New York state began allowing in 1996 — so an executor could administer the money instead of an outright gift to a potential stranger.
Leaving money for the care of a pet is not unusual, Sherman said. “It happens more often than you would think, especially for people with no kids,” he said. Sherman recalls clients from New York City who set aside $500,000 for the future care of two large birds, he said.
Tehon even planned for her cats beyond this life. About two years before her death, Thiras selected a decorative urn that now holds her ashes.
As each cat dies, its ashes will be added to the urn. When they all are again reunited, the urn will be buried next to her husband in a Syracuse cemetery.
Tehon also designed her memorial. Family and friends will gather in her honor at an invitation-only dinner in late June at Wellington House in Fayetteville. Guests will enjoy wine and an exhibition of her art, Tehon said.
Tehon and Vulcano hope that by that time Buff, Callie, Lady and Pepper will be settled into a new home. “They’re starving for love, Vulcano said.
If you are interested in adopting Buff, Callie, Lady and Pepper, call Linda Vulcano at 446-8834. She will return messages.
Contact Emily Kulkus at [email protected] or 470-2184.When you think of a hard-core gamer, do you picture a teenage boy battling his friends in World of Warcraft?
Think again.
The average gamer, far from being a teen, is actually a 35-year-old man who is overweight, aggressive, introverted and... often depressed, according to a report (.pdf) out this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The study also showed when children and teenagers become game players, a trend toward physical inactivity and corresponding health problems extends and exacerbates into adulthood.
"Among researchers, there is growing concern and uncertainty about the health consequences of videogame playing," the CDC reported. "Given the ubiquity of video games — industry estimates suggest that they are played in 65 percent of American households — these concerns may be justified."
The study notes that half of gamers are between 18 and 49 years old, while 25 percent are 50 and older. The CDC also pointed out that of online gamers aged 8 to 34, nearly 12 percent showed multiple signs of addiction.
The study, based on a 2006 online survey of 552 people between the ages of 19 and 90 who were living in the Seattle/Tacoma area of Washington state, also shows differences between male and female gamers.
Men reported that gaming gives them a "reason to get together," while women are looking more for a diversion than social interaction. Despite their differing reasons for playing, many of the health effects remained the same.
Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat, noted that his concern isn't just with gaming but with social networks, as well.
"My issue is that it's not just gaming. It's social networking. It's the web in general," said McGregor. "We've gained so much, but still it puts people in front of a computer screen for hours on end. It gives Americans just another reason to be fat, dumb and lazy."
According to the CDC, both male and female gamers were more likely to report being overweight, having more poor-mental-health days and being less socially outgoing. Women, however, were more apt to deal with depression and report more health issues than women who aren't gamers. For men, they reported more obesity.
"One interpretation of these findings is that, among women, videogame playing may be a form of digital self-medication.... In short, they can literally take their minds off their worries while playing a videogame." noted the CDC. "Among men, the association among sedentary behaviors, physical inactivity and overweight status observed in children and young adults may extend into adulthood."
Related articles
Copyright © 2009 IDG News Service. All rights reserved. IDG News Service is a trademark of International Data Group, Inc.
Also on wired.com:Matt Damon and Ben Affleck reprised the roles that made them famous onstage in New York on Friday night, with a surprise appearance in a one-off live reading of the screenplay of Good Will Hunting.
The childhood friends were almost unknown when they wrote and insisted on starring in the tale of a young working-class polymath who is mopping floors at MIT when his life is turned around by a therapist, played by Robin Williams, and a Harvard student, played by Minnie Driver. It won the two an Oscar for best screenplay, was nominated for eight more (Williams also won), and provided them with a route to the big time. Today, they occupy numbers three (Damon) and six (Affleck) on the 2016 Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid male actors.
John Krasinski reunited the pair on Friday as part of a Film Independent and New York Times series of “live reads”, in which actors read the screenplay of a film to a live audience. The cast list was not released in advance, allowing Krasinski a moment of pure showmanship before the reading began.
Matt Damon: five best moments Read more
Introducing his cast one by one – including his wife, Emily Blunt, in the Driver role – Krasinski finally came to the leads, announcing that he himself would be playing Will … before Damon unexpectedly marched on to the stage, to a standing ovation from the crowd at New York University’s Skirball theatre.
“Thirty seconds before that, you were happy to see me do it!” Krasinski said. Preparing to sit down and take Affleck’s part instead, he said: “Chuckie’s a better role anyway …”
On cue, the Batman star followed Damon out from the wings, bringing the delighted audience leaping back to their feet.
The 1997 screenplay has held up well, and is often laugh-out-loud funny, much of its charm resting on the witty, wisecracking, believable banter between the dumb but protective Chuckie and his best friend, the brilliant, defensive and confrontational Will. Affleck and Damon slid easily back into characters based presumably on young men they had known or witnessed growing up in Boston, and Affleck in particular – now bearded, tanned and heavy-set – seemed to take great delight in revisiting the ribald put-downs and convoluted anecdotes which pepper the script.
Damon, whose DiCaprio-like quicksilver charisma has become something more stolid and workmanlike, was able to recapture that early magnetism. He was devastating in that indelible scene in which he tells Williams that when his father used to give him a choice of wrench, belt or stick for a beating, he would always choose the wrench – “because fuck him, that’s why”.
Blunt approached the part of Damon’s student girlfriend with something of the English naturalism that Driver brought to the film in 1997, and Krasinski, who read the stage directions, stumbled for comic effect over some of her love scenes with Damon, altering the ending of one to: “They do not kiss,” tripping over the word “postcoital” in another.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘As a kid from Boston, I think we all get tattoos of the poster of this movie.’ Photograph: Allstar/Miramax/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
“It was really good!” his wife blurted out, to which Krasinski asked rhetorically: “You’re really going to take Jason Bourne over Jim from The Office?” Less successful was his casting of The Americans’ Margo Martindale in the crucial Williams role. The gender switch might well have worked, but she was hesitant and seemed under-rehearsed.
Introducing the event, Krasinski made the case for Good Will Hunting as a modern American classic. “As a kid from Boston, I think we all get tattoos of the poster of this movie on your back,” he said, calling it “unbelievably well-written”. In truth, Affleck and Damon lay it on a bit thick in establishing Will’s genius – what is meant to come off as autodidactic brilliance occasionally teeters over into insufferability – and it’s a more sentimental film than it thinks it is, emotionally manipulative in a way that seems mercilessly machine-tooled for maximum effect, particularly towards the end.
But it works. And looking back, it laid the groundwork for Affleck’s career as a director producing compelling thrillers such as Argo and The Town that use tension as shamelessly as Good Will Hunting uses emotion, pleasingly calling to mind the crime dramas of the 1940s and 50s in which taciturn men find themselves forced into intractable situations, weighing up dilemmas about love and corruption and morality. Which, come to think of it, doesn’t sound a bad template for the Batman film Affleck is currently writing.The Royal Australian Navy is under pressure to explain why it has spent tens of thousands of pounds paying for female sailors to have breast enlargements.
The opposition Labour Party will this week grill the government over revelations that the operations were granted to women whose small breasts had caused them crises of self-confidence.
"On the face of it, taxpayer-funded breast enhancement is a questionable practice," said Labour's defence spokesman, Joel Fitzgibbon.
"I have to say it smacks of a government [that is] out of touch. The navy defended the practice, saying the procedure was only allowed for psychological rather than cosmetic reasons.
"Under defence policy, we do consider the broader needs of our people, both physical and psychological," said Brigadier Andrew Nikolic, a defence department spokesman.
"But that is a long way from saying that if someone doesn't like their appearance, defence will fund things like breast augmentation as a matter of routine - that is just not correct."
The navy has not disclosed how many women have undergone the taxpayer-funded operation.
But a Sydney plastic surgeon revealed that in the last two years he had carried out breast enlargements on two sailors, aged 25 and 32, at a cost of £4,200 each.
Other women had gone to a plastic surgeon retained by the navy, he said.
"I don't know why [the navy] pay for it,” said surgeon Kourosh Tavakoli.
"There's no breast augmentation, that I know of, for medical purposes."
Neil James, the head of military lobby group the Defence Association, defended the policy, saying female sailors were only given breast enhancements if there were compelling "psychiatric or psychological reasons".
"Just as there are in civilian life, there are some females who feel their breasts are too small and if their breasts were bigger, they might be more of a 'normal' woman," Mr James said.
"If they were lacking in self-confidence, this might provide the measure of self-confidence that would help them tackle their wider job."Let us recall the highlights of the incident: a series of screening agents at Edmonton airport failed to recognize a pipe bomb. One agent tried to return the bomb to its owner, who was allowed to board the plane despite refusing to take his own bomb back. The bomb was kept for several days in the security check area, in a bin with seized nail scissors and tubes of toothpaste. The bomb was initially tested for narcotics, but not explosives. The three metres of electrical wire emerging from the pipe bomb aroused no suspicion for days.
The recent pipe bomb incident at Edmonton airport has exposed our airport security for the piece of political theatre that it is. Airport security is only marginally about keeping us safe. It is mostly about maintaining the perception of manageability and control and reminding people of how the government protects us in a dangerous world. It is more important to be seen to be managing security than to do it well.
Another problematic policy is the random selection of passengers for special screening, a practice with almost zero chance of picking out a hijacker. Why? Hijackers are statistically rare events. Randomly selecting a small number of cases in the hope that one of them will be the rare event you are looking for is a fool’s game.
More importantly, the Edmonton airport security screening personnel were not government employees, but employees of a private company hired by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority. Since when did hiring the lowest bidder sound like a good way to ensure people’s security?
Such incompetence rightly attracted shock and outrage. But other aspects of the story deserve more attention than they got. Even if they had recognized the bomb, the screening agents could not have detained a passenger attempting to board an aircraft with a bomb. They would have had to call the RCMP to do that. And there was no RCMP officer at the screening area at the time of the incident.
Since random selection won’t find the hijackers, why do we do it? Deterrence is the usual answer; would-be hijackers know they may be caught and so they don’t try. While that logic worked in the era when all the hijackers wanted was to go to Cuba, it makes no sense in an era when the hijackers are willing to die in the hijacking.
We could use more intelligent sampling strategies. The man convicted of trying to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit in 2009 was not selected for special screening. Yet security screeners missed six markers — not alone but in combination — that should have triggered special screening. He was a young man, travelling alone with no checked baggage on a one-way ticket between two countries, and yet he was not a citizen or resident of either country. Each of those markers individually was innocuous. But the combination of all six factors (male, young, travelling alone, one-way ticket, no connection to the countries he was travelling between, no checked baggage) should have triggered special screening.
Worse still, security measures are frequently botched. I once witnessed a woman in her 60s being “specially selected.” Well before she reached the security screening, an airport employee told her that the letters SS, printed in bold on her boarding card, meant “special selection.” If the woman had been a hijacker, she would have had ample opportunity to change her plan.
So, what is all this airport security for? It is so badly done that it is hard to imagine passenger security is the main motivation. Israeli security officials (and they have not lost an aircraft to hijacking for more than 40 years) do not even attempt to hide their derision regarding airport security in North America and Europe |
essence”.
“I was 11 years old when the occupation started. I am now 61. There are people here now that have only known occupation.”
If apartheid as experienced in South Africa was to become a dirty word then so too must hafrada in the Israeli context. Anyone in any doubt about this need only visit the West Bank right now.
On a recent return trip, the first in a few years, I was unprepared for the changes I was to witness. Hafrada – segregation – in all its grotesqueness has turned the West Bank into a place of walls, barriers checkpoints and separate roads, along which Palestinians and those Israelis who have moved onto settlements illegal under international law now travel.
The pace of settlement construction has increased four-fold in the last few years alone. Yet despite its rapidity and illegality, such actions have barely registered on the international community’s radar let alone generated a significant level of worldwide protest.
Why does this international lethargy in drawing Israel to account prevail? Why do we seem so incapable of diplomatic solidarity when it comes to bringing punitive measures to bear on the Netanyahu government?
The geopolitical reasons are of course labyrinthine, but even allowing for this so much more could be done.
I am not alone in raising these questions. It is the clarion call of an increasing numbers of Israelis, some of whom I met during my recent visit.
Ilan Baruch and Dr Alon Liel are both former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa. They believe the time has come like never before to turn the screw on the Netanyahu government and the policy of occupation imposed on the Palestinians.
The views and influence of people like Baruch and Liel are important. Frankly, I often find myself frustrated by the political myopia and knee jerking of some European and international organisations claiming to be standard bearers for the Palestinian cause.
It is just not good enough for such movements, as they often do, to indignantly reject support from Israelis simply because they are that - Israelis. During my last visit I saw yet again the brave work being done by Israeli groups like Peace Now or Ir Amim who monitor or lobby against settlement expansion. Then there is the courageous stance taken by Breaking the Silence, an organisation of Israeli military veterans who have served since the start of the Second Palestinian Intifada – uprising – who have now taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.
The work of all these groups is vital not least in a time like this when the Netanyahu government shows such disregard for international law and an even greater willingness to ride roughshod over Palestinians rights.
In Jerusalem Ilan Baruch and Dr Alon Liel told me how they firmly believe Europe and the international community has a key role to play in the process of pressurising the Netanyahu government. They insist too that it has to happen fast, with signs of substantial progress needed within the next 18 months. Such is the pressing internal threat they see posed to their country’s future and that of the Palestinians.
Like many in Israel, both men fear that the marginal politics espoused by extremists in their society have now become mainstream. Baruch says that if the current trend continues: “Israel runs the risk of turning into a pariah state and faces growing delegitimisation.”
“Experience shows that this global trend won’t change until we normalise our relations with the Palestinians,” Baruch insists.
Last week in his piece written in the aftermath of Ali Dawabsheh’s murder, David Grossman pointed out that for decades Israel has turned its dark side toward the Palestinians, but now that darkness has infiltrated into its own internal organs.
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As ever, what lies at the root of all this of course is 48 years of occupation, segregation and subjugation of the Palestinian people. Until that issue is addressed justly, both communities are destined to continue their mutual and seemingly interminable dance of death.
David Pratt is Foreign Editor of the Sunday Herald and author of Intifada: The Long Day of Rage Click for Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, French, translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load. What's your response? - Scroll down to add / read comments Sign up for our FREE Daily Email Newsletter For Email Marketing you can trust Donate
Please read our Comment Policy before posting - It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH. Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.In particular, the so-called schools-to-prison pipeline is victimizing a significant portion of today’s black and Hispanic youth, a fact that has changed Pusha’s understanding of our country’s inherently unjust justice system. His home state is especially culpable. In 2015, the Center for Public Integrity analyzed data collected by the U.S. Department of Education measuring the rate at which schools referred their “disorderly” or “misbehaving students” to law enforcement agencies. Its analysis showed that Virginia led the country with a referral rate almost three times the national rate. And of the students referred, more than a third were either black or Hispanic.
“When you get the knowledge that I’ve come across recently, it’s like, oh my god…,” he says. “You want to tell kids the truth.”
It’s this kind of advocacy that was sorely missing in his own life. Luck, he admits, saved him from becoming another man with a number for a name. But instead of letting the next generation play with fate, he wants to help them stay off the streets before it’s too late.
“When you’re 18, 19, jumping off the porch, you don’t consider the deck being stacked,” he says. And the more he understands, the more he feels “duped.”
“I don’t like feeling like I’ve been taken advantage of, like you’re preying on my lack of knowledge. Had I been looking at it from that perspective, I might not have made some of the choices [I made]. We might not have made those choices.”
And it’s the “we” that haunts Pusha. Because, after all, his talent provided him with options that his friends didn’t have and, while he could bring them along, he could only take them so far.
“I feel like I thrust people into an industry without….” His voice trails off. “Me as an artist, I’m the focal point. I brought in people who were my focal point. In the midst of me weaving between music and the streets, I can go out of town, go away, have something to do. But the same way I don’t depend on [music], they don’t depend on….”
He’d rather not dwell on his past too much. Pusha is about action. His concern for how mass incarceration has decimated black communities is the major reason he signed on to help elect Clinton as the next president of the United States.
Which, to anyone who is versed in the history of the criminal justice system, might be as controversial as Pusha’s decision to sign Desiigner. Clinton infamously supported the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed into law by then President Bill Clinton, which is largely credited with helping to explode the prison population during the ’90s. Mandatory minimums and three-strike laws helped lock up more black people for longer. However, for Pusha, Clinton’s willingness to apologize for supporting that bill, advocate for justice reform, and embrace someone like himself, with his past, speaks to the possibilities of building new coalitions to fix the broken system. “I do think she cares about mass incarceration,” he told Complex ahead of the election. “Now, why she cares versus why I care, that could be different. I don’t really have time to deal in that. I like the fact that we both care about something and, together, if we can fix it, that would be amazing.”
Clinton, of course, won't be the 45th President of the United States. She lost to Donald Trump, and Pusha witnessed the devastating defeat live from Clinton headquarters in New York City. I spoke with Pusha again three weeks after the election; he was, like the rest of us, still grappling with the results. "As the evening went on, you could feel the energy shift—we were extremely disheartened," he recalls. "I just thought it said so much about America. I just didn’t understand how he could speak so ill to so many different groups of people and they still find a way to support him. The [support from] white women was a bit much for me. I thought that said a lot. The blatant disrespect to that group in particular, over and over again throughout the campaign—the people who voted for him did not care. Trump is trying to extend the lifeline of and expand upon white privilege. The racism in America—it’s no longer hidden. They don't feel the need to hide anymore, because your president didn’t hide it in any capacity."
Not all of Pusha's efforts were thwarted on Election Day, though. That night, voters in California passed Proposition 64, a referendum to decriminalize recreational marijuana for which Pusha made a PSA. The measure's impact on the criminal justice system has been immediate, forcing prosecutors in Califonia to reduce charges in and completely dismiss some cases currently in the courts.
And despite the daunting prospect of Trump's promised "law and order" presidency, Pusha says he's undeterred from his goal of ending mass incarceration. "I’m going to continue to fight up until Inauguration Day, then we have to strategize a bit better with regard to how and what we’re going to do going forward," he says. "It’s truly going to be tough and everyone knows that. There has to be a new strategy because we’re not dealing with people who actually care about our people."A Texas preschool teacher is out of a job after several anti-Semitic online posts, including a tweet encouraging a friend to “kill some Jews,” came to light.
Nancy Salem was fired from The Children’s Courtyard in Arlington after administrators were alerted to her anti-Semitic behavior online, the Dallas Morning News reported.
“Have a safe trip Lulu. I love you baby girl! See you in 3 weeks! Kiss the Palestine ground for me and kill some jews! <3 #IMissYouAlready,” she reportedly wrote in 2013.
In another tweet, she quoted a user named @DictatorHitler and wrote: “’@DictatorHitler: How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough’ @PrincessLulllu @thearabgirl HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHA.”
Ms. Salem was among 24 anti-Israel activists exposed by watchdog group Canary Mission for expressing anti-Semitism on social media, The Algemeiner reported.
The Children’s Courtyard released a statement Wednesday saying Ms. Salem was no longer employed at the school.
“Providing a safe, nurturing and inclusive learning environment is of the utmost importance to us,” the statement said. “The offensive comments certainly don’t reflect our views. Our employees are expected to uphold certain standards of personal and professional conduct. Our senior leadership thoroughly investigated this matter. This person no longer works for our company.”
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Correction: An earlier version of this article stated Ms. Salem was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Texas, Arlington. A university spokeswoman said Ms. Salem was never a student there, and SJP’s president said she was never a member.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.A new system for tracking pedestrian deaths was unveiled Tuesday, part of the "Dusk and Darkness" initiative.The effort, announced in October, is designed to make drivers more alert at rush hour in December, when pedestrian fatalities are triple those in August.On Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that Traffic Stat is the NYPD's new online collision and crash tracker, allowing residents to see the city's most dangerous intersections.With the holiday season, you can expect more people in the city. More pedestrians, more cars.But you'll also see some new Vision Zero measures.The expansion of Vision Zero since 2014, Mayor de Blasio claims, is starting to yield important results."That focus enforcement had a big and positive impact," said the mayor. "It helped us to reduce the number of fatalities in this sensitive time of year when people are driving more in darker hours."But accidents still occur, the latest victim a 66-year-old female pedestrian, who was critically injured when she was struck by an SUV while crossing the street on the Upper East Side Monday night.But in the past 28 days, the numbers are down."We have had a double digit decrease in fatal collisions," said NYPD Commissioner James O"Neill. "The raw number is 14 this year versus 30 last year."In high traffic areas, the NYPD will be using various driver checkpoints. There will be pedestrian and bicycle initiatives aimed at awareness too.And now for the first time, the NYPD is offering Traffic Stat, an online site where you can track accidents and trouble spots in all five boroughs."Essentially to give the public the tools that they need to view, map and analyze NYPD collision numbers," said Deputy Commissioner of Information Technology, Jessica Tisch.You can track those numbers in various ways and over various time periods."We see our highest volume, this is in Manhattan North last week, of 69 occurred on Wednesday," said Tisch. "If we look by collision type we see the majority were sideswipes."The stats are upgraded as reports come in to the NYPD.The DOT is also running an ad campaign in English and Spanish, especially during the dangerous drive times."And we've introduced some new compelling 15 second TV spots to amplify the enforcement message," said DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg. "And if you were watching political coverage or football on ESPN, you probably have seen some of these ads."The NYPD has issued more than 50,000 summonses for hazardous moving violations during the Dusk and Darkness initiative, said Commissioner O'Neill."The NYPD and its Vision Zero partners are reminding New Yorkers, especially motorists, to slow down, make safe turns and to never drink and drive," he said.New research published in the journal Sex Roles examined how women who choose to keep their own surname after marriage are perceived in the United States.
The study of 912 undergraduate women and 289 undergraduate men found women who retained their own surname were viewed as less committed to their marriage compared who women who adopted the surname of their husband.
PsyPost interviewed the study’s corresponding author, Rachael Robnett of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Read her responses below:
PsyPost: Why were you interested in this topic?
Robnett: As a developmental psychologist, I have always had an interest in people’s adherence to gender roles across the lifespan. For instance, why do little girls often play with dolls, whereas little boys often play with blocks? In high school, why do adolescent girls often wait for adolescent boys to ask them to Prom or Homecoming? Why do heterosexual men nearly always initiate marriage proposals?
Although gender roles have become more flexible in many facets of life, they have been somewhat slower to change in heterosexual romantic relationships. This is perhaps most evident when it comes to traditions related to heterosexual marriage. For instance, women are increasingly obtaining high-powered careers, and it’s becoming more and more common for them to outearn their boyfriends or husbands; yet, the vast majority of women still change their names after marriage. This is puzzling given that women in the U.S. have, from a legal standpoint, been able to retain their own surnames after marriage since the 1970s.
In carrying out this research, we wanted to shed light on why the marital surname tradition exerts such a strong conformity pressure. We know from prior research that stereotypes encourage adherence to gender roles. That is, people often stick to traditional gender roles because violating these roles can lead to scrutiny and criticism. Therefore, one of the major goals of the study was to examine whether women who retain their surnames after marriage encounter negative stereotypes. We were especially interested in the stereotype that a woman who retains her own surname is less committed to her marriage than a woman who adopts her husband’s surname. That is, if Sarah Smith stays Sarah Smith after getting married, instead of adopting her husband’s surname, do people perceive her as less committed to her marriage? Before conducting this research, my co-authors and I had come across anecdotal evidence of this stereotype, but it hadn’t yet received empirical attention.
What should the average person take away from your study?
We used an experimental design to examine whether people hold stereotypes about women who retain their surnames after marriage. Specifically, we presented two groups college students with a short story describing “Christina” and “David,” who were about to get married. The first group of students read that Christina was planning to adopt David’s last name. The second group of students read that Christina was planning to keep her own name. Otherwise, the stories the two groups read were identical. After reading the stories, we asked participants to rate the strength of Christina’s commitment to a successful marriage.
There were two major take-home findings. First, participants who were told that Christina retained her own last name rated her as lower in marriage commitment; participants who were told that Christina adopted David’s last name rated her as higher in marriage commitment. Put differently, perceptions of Christina’s commitment to a successful marriage were influenced by her marital surname choice. This suggests that some women who violate tradition by retaining their own surnames after marriage may encounter stereotypes about the strength of their marriage commitment.
Importantly, our second take-home message is that not everybody in our sample held these stereotypes to the same degree. To better understand this variation, we conducted two follow-up studies that focused on a personality trait called social dominance orientation. People high in social dominance orientation react negatively to violations of the existing social order that affords White, heterosexual men with status and power; they tend to be high in sexism, racism, and other forms of bias. Our findings showed that people high in social dominance orientation were especially likely to perceive Christina as low in marriage commitment when she retained her own surname after marriage. This effect held even after controlling for variables such as gender, ethnicity and religiosity, which underscores the strong explanatory power of social dominance orientation. These findings suggest that, for some individuals, gender, power, and the marital surname tradition are closely linked.
Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?
Yes, certainly–all research has caveats, and this study is no different. First, participants made their ratings after reading a brief story about a couple they didn’t know. This design has the benefit of experimental control, but it lacks some external validity. Specifically, people often, but not always, have a wealth of information at their disposal when they evaluate others. Thus, an important next-step is to examine whether our findings extend to evaluations of friends and family members that people encounter in their day-to-day life.
Second, our study focuses exclusively on heterosexual marriage norms. As the right to marry rapidly extends to people in same-sex relationships, the onus is on researchers to better understand the norms in these relationships. Carrie Underwood, one of the co-authors for the current study, just finished data collection for a study examining marital surname attitudes in same-sex couples. Her preliminary findings reveal both similarities and differences in how same-sex and heterosexual couples navigate the marital surname tradition.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
In conducting this research, my goal is to encourage people to actively consider gender-role traditions that receive relatively little attention due to being so commonplace. If this research can spark conversations between friends, family, or romantic partners, that goal has been accomplished.
The study, “‘She Might be Afraid of Commitment’: Perceptions of Women Who Retain Their Surname After Marriage“, was also co-authored by Carrie R. Underwood, Paul A. Nelson and Kristin J. Anderson.Video shot over the weekend on Staten Island shows a plainclothes police officer pointing a gun at someone recording him with a smartphone. The video, reportedly posted to Facebook by Maleek Simmons, shows the person filming asking, "Why you pointing your gun at me?" as the officer yells, "Get the fuck on the ground!"
"I didn't do nothing wrong!" the videographer tells the officer. The cop, wearing a collared shirt and tie and no obvious identifying markers, walks quickly after him, repeating his demand. "Don't touch me," the filmer says. "I ain't getting on the ground. I didn't do nothing wrong."
Another plainclothes officer in dress clothes can be seen grabbing a young man or boy. The officer is holding a bat. The video picks up the sound of something seemingly wooden being dropped as the person filming rushes away from the first officer. Once that cop gives up his pursuit, the videographer yells to his companion, "Just keep walking! They can't do that to you!"
Simmons told the Staten Island Advance that he was walking down the street with his cousin and a friend after playing baseball when the cops rolled up. He said that the officers accused them of having guns, and that he is the one in the video being detained. He insisted that he and his friends had done nothing wrong.
Police told the Advance that the incident took place at around 6:15 p.m. Saturday in Port Richmond. In a statement to Gothamist, an NYPD spokesperson wrote that the officers responded to "911 calls reporting a large fight involving several males armed with baseball bats." The statement continues, "The officers encountered males in possession of baseball bats. The group was dispersed." The police account makes no mention of the officer drawing his gun or of a report of men possessing guns, and the NYPD press office didn't respond to follow-up questions. No one, it seems, was arrested.
The department's patrol guide gives the following guidance to officers about when to draw their weapons:
Drawing a firearm prematurely or unnecessarily limits a uniformed member’s options in controlling a situation and may result in an unwarranted or accidental discharge of the firearm. The decision to display or draw a firearm should be based on an articulable belief that the potential for serious physical injury is present. When a uniformed member of the service determines that the potential for serious physical injury is no longer present, the uniformed member of the service will holster the firearm as soon as practicable.
No one answered at a number listed for Simmons's family.By the Power of Grayskull and the Great Eye of Thundera! The 1980s popular toy and cartoon franchises He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Thundercats are about to cross over in an epic comic book mini-series.
DC Comics is readying a He-Man/Thundercats six-issue limited series to launch in October. The story will be penned by Mattel head writer and Masters of the Universe lead creative Rob David and supervising producer Lloyd Goldfine. Freddie E. Williams II, who recently wrapped the Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover, will be on art duties.
This will mark the first time EVER that the worlds of He-Man and Thundercats will collide. I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t be more excited about this. #BestChildhoodMemoriesEver.
Rob David said: “For everyone out there who took different action figures and teamed them up to take on the world, this one’s for you,” with Goldfine adding “Writing this crossover event is the thrill of a lifetime, and Rob and I can’t wait to get started...You don’t wait 30 years and not go big!”
Here’s the official synopsis for the event mini-series:
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe team up with the ThunderCats—the epic crossover event you’ve waited thirty years to see! In his ever-living desire to destroy the mighty ThunderCats, Mumm-Ra quests for a weapon that can rival the legendary Sword of Omens: He-Man’s Sword of Power! But his dimension-spanning scheme kick starts a cataclysmic crisis that will embroil heroes and villains—Masters, Mutants and ThunderCats—in a mind-blowing six-part saga!
He-Man/Thundercats #1 will arrive in comic book stores on Oct. 5.
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(via Comic Book Resources)U.S. embassies around the world are warning allies that WikiLeaks might be poised to release classified cables that could negatively impact relations by revealing sensitive assessments and exposing U.S. sources, a State Department spokesman said Thursday.
The State Department has prepared for the possible release - which WikiLeaks has said would be seven times larger than the Iraq files released last month - by reviewing thousands of diplomatic cables and "assessing the potential consequences of the public release of these documents," spokesman P.J. Crowley said.
Crowley said State does not know "exactly what WikiLeaks has or what they plan to do," but the consequences to American interests could be severe. The cables, for instance, could reveal that senior government officials in other countries are the sources of embarrassing information about the inner workings of those governments, thus making it more difficult for the State Department to obtain such intelligence in the future.
"Without getting into specifics, typical cables describe summaries of meetings, analysis of events in other countries and records of confidential conversations with officials of other governments and with members of civil society," Crowley said. "They are classified for a very good reason. They contain sensitive information and reveal sources of information that impact our national interests and those of other countries."
Crowley added that "the lives of people who provide us valuable information and perspective are being put at risk. They help us understand what is happening around the world and inform our policies and actions."
WikiLeaks has bedeviled the Obama administration with a series of damaging revelations about U.S. policy overseas. In July, it released more than 70,000 military reports on the war in Afghanistan and in October nearly 400,000 reports on the Iraq war. "Next release is 7 [times] the size of the Iraq War Logs," WikiLeaks stated in a posting on its Twitter page Nov. 21.
WikiLeaks has not disclosed the source of the materials. But suspicion has centered on Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, an Army intelligence analyst whom the military arrested this year, charging him with the downloading and transfer of classified material.
In the past, WikiLeaks has provided a small group of news organizations with an advance peek at the information, with an understanding that their reports would be released simultaneously at a pre-agreed time. The Washington Post has never been part of such an arrangement with WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by a former computer hacker, Julian Assange. The organization has been under stress in recent months, with several members quitting, citing differences with Assange and the direction of the group. Assange is facing allegations in Sweden of rape and sexual harassment, which he has denied, saying the charges are part of a U.S.-orchestrated smear campaign.
The cables could also show that allies sometimes take private actions that directly contradict publicly declared policies. The London-based daily al-Hayat reported that WikiLeaks is planning to release files that show Turkey has helped al-Qaeda in Iraq - and that the United States has helped the PKK, a Kurdish rebel organization. The documents reportedly suggest that the U.S. has supported the PKK, which has been waging a separatist war against Turkey since 1984 and has been classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization since 1979.
News reports from around the globe indicate that foreign governments are bracing for the impact of the revelations.
U.S. ambassador to Canada David Jacobson has already phoned Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon to inform him of the matter, the Foreign Affairs department told the Canadian Press. Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Melissa Lantsman said the Canadian Embassy in Washington is "currently engaging" with the U.S. State Department on the matter.
In Australia, the Department of Foreign Affairs and other agencies in Canberra, including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, met to discuss the leaks, which a senior Australian government official said had prompted a "strong measure of concern," according to the Australian newspaper. "The whole thing is pretty big," the official said.
"We condemn what WikiLeaks is doing," Crowley said. "Its actions are gratuitous, harm relations among countries and erode the trust that enables governments to cooperate and collaborate and work together to resolve regional and global challenges. Little good will come from what WikiLeaks has indicated it plans to do."About half of the 219 terrorists who committed the 228 attacks over the past five months were under 20 years of age, while 11 percent were women, an internal IDF and Shin Bet document obtained by Yedioth Ahronoth shows.
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The first part of the document breaks down the data about the attacks, showing that 80 percent (174) of terrorists were from the West Bank, 16 percent (36) came from Jerusalem, and the others came from within the Green Line.
An analysis of the data indicates several reasons for the recent outbreak of terrorism, including the lack of a political horizon, the feeling that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' era has come to an end, and a sense of alienation of the Palestinian public from the Palestinian Authority.
But the most interesting finding from the report is the rise of the younger generation, the one that did not experience the first intifada and barely remembers the second one. It is a generation that got tired of family hierarchy, the occupation, and its leaders. It is a generation that is defiant toward parents and adheres to human rights. The new Palestinian, officials say, is not worried about the IDF's punitive measures or its nightly arrest raids.
When considering the characteristics of lone terrorists in the current terror wave, women appear to play an ever-increasing role in the escalation. Female terrorists like Hadeel al-Hashlamoun, Ashraqat Qatanani and Sarwa al-Sharawi, who became icons on the Palestinian street. All of them are seen as martyrs who decided to carry out attacks against the authorities. While the psychological aspects behind these women's actions are complicated, they are not from the margins of society - most of them come from stable and educated families.
A look at the individual incidents shows that these women's distress and personal motives were the catalysts for carrying out the attacks. Their feelings of stress and personal frustration with their parents, combined with the basic hostility they feel toward Israel, have created fertile ground for terrorist attacks.
In addition to the emotional and personal processes that the Palestinian women and the rest of the terrorists went through, Hamas' television stations and social media activity also helped inspire them to carry out attacks. The popularity of Hamas’ Al-Aqsa Brigades and the incitement that permeates the internet encouraged the women to emulate the acts glorified there.Posted 29 July 2014 - 04:34 AM
So let's look at my Beast Machines garden, now!!
The Beast Machines garden room has one of my favourite doors, because it took a tonne of work to really get it working properly. It's such a simple thing, but I had to build and rebuild it over and over to get it to work right.
First of all is the little gun emplacement. This was a really late, spur-of-the-moment addition which required a TONNE of work to get right. I'm happy with it. It's two sided. So there's guns on the outside if you don't want to open the door -- but also a separate, differently designed set of guns on the inside!
The door bulges out a lot because it was built around the fact that there's absolutely no room for anything to bulge INTO the room -- the garden room is far too full for that. But hey! Look! It hides Lockdown inside. You might notice there's also a little spot on the wall for Lockdown's gun to hang on! Neat! Lockdown can control the guns (I used blue bricks to make a link between the control panel and the guns to imply it's being controlled).
But the main show is that classic playset feature -- a ladder.
The ladder took freaking AGES AND AGES to build right.
The ladder uses Kre-O and LEGO parts. There's also the problems with making it sit in properly, and having the build the entire door around it. But I love the final effect -- I love the way it makes the whole playset feel more alive and connected. There will be more ladders and things.
But let's look at the inside of the room... it's the garden from Beast Machines as seen from the oracle bridge:
Neat, right?
I also build a break into the wall where a drill drone is breaking throguh!
The drill drone is designed to be able to spin his drill, no idea if it actually comes through in the photo, though, sorry if it doesn't:
The drill spinning gimmick was made using the drill spinning mechanism from the Devastator KRe-O set. I love this part and it's unfrotunate that KRe-O has become so downsized so I'll only ever own one of them. Need to see more of them used in later sets. (One of my other goals with this set is using as many of the large Kre-O feature pieces as possible. I love these parts and think they really need to be shown for what they can do.
Here's the button, on the exterior of the set:
And what the hell, here's the locking mechanism -- fitting it on was quite a challenge!
--Andrew S.Amid heavy criticism from Red Bull over its performance, Renault has been revealed to have saved a significant portion of its engine development tokens for a mid-year upgrade.
The FIA has confirmed that Renault retains 12 of its 32 tokens, with Ferrari holding 10 and Mercedes seven.
The teams have been allowed to spend their tokens during the season this year under a revised interpretation of the existing regulations.
Each token represents a different area of the engines in which development can take place.
As previously reported, new manufacturer Honda has been given nine tokens following the pre-season homologation of its power unit.
Renault’s season got off to a disastrous start on Friday when Daniel Ricciardo’s Red Bull required a replacement engine after just one practice session.
The Australian, who has been complaining of driveability issues throughout the weekend, confirmed this morning that he believes the first engine is not salvageable.
Red Bull’s motorsport advisor Dr Helmut Marko has been highly critical of Renault, which also struggled to match Mercedes last season.
“The engine is broken after 50 kilometres… it cannot be like this,” Marko told Austrian broadcaster ORF on Friday.
“We are promised again and again ‘next time it will be better, the test results are encouraging’.
“But if you have an engine failure after 50 kilometres, that is incomprehensible.
“We wanted an improvement and we have taken a step back. The gap to the top now is frightening.”
The French firm is understood to be targeting a major upgrade in June; roughly a third of the way through the season.
Red Bull and its junior team Toro Rosso are currently Renault’s only Formula 1 engine customers following Lotus’ off-season switch to Mercedes and the demise of Caterham.Barcelona have struck a deal with Fluminense attacking midfielder Gerson, according to the Blaugrana's representative in Brazil.
The Brazil youth international has agreed on a five-year accord with the current Champions League holders, with no stipulated time for the 18-year-old to swap teams as the player has not yet been sold by the Rio side.
"We have agreed to a five-year contract with Gerson, without a fixed date for him to arrive in Europe," Andre Cury told Globo on Wednesday. "We'll depend on [Fluminense president Peter Siemsen] to sell him."
"When he wants to sell, he'll say: 'I want to sell for X.'"
Barcelona, who are serving a transfer ban that prevents new signings from representing the club until January, had purchased rights of first refusal on Gerson and fellow Flu youth products Kenedy and Marlon earlier in the year.
Gerson, 18, has been a regular starter with Fluminense since February.
Speaking in an interview earlier in the month, the player's father, Marcos Antonio da Silva, stated the highly-regarded left-footer would be heading to the Camp Nou in January -- an assertion Cury seemed to back on Wednesday.
"The president [Siemsen] hasn't given us a price. He said he wasn't interested in selling the player this year." Cury said.
Gerson, who has been a regular starter with Fluminense since February, is considered one of the most promising young players currently in Brazil. However he was left out of Brazil's Under-20 World Cup runners-up campaign this summer.
ESPN Brasil was informed earlier this month that Barca had offered €20 million for Gerson and, while Juventus had made a superior offer, the player always preferred a move to the Camp Nou.Last June, an incident on Greek television revealed a disturbingly prescient commentary on Golden Dawn, the far-right political party whose rise over the past two years has shocked Europe. Ilias Kasidiaris, a young party member and parliamentarian, was sitting alongside two female politicians on a political chat show. When Rena Dorou, a member of the upstart radical Syriza party, challenged him over his alleged role in an assault on a university professor, Kasidiaris dumped his glass of water over her head. Outraged, Communist Party member Liana Kanelli stood up in protest to reprimand him, leading Kasidiaris—chivalrous young fascist that he is—to slap the 58-year-old woman hard across the head three times.
The assault by Kasidiaris—whose other great claim to fame was his denial of the Holocaust during a June parliamentary debate—comes immediately to mind in light of the news that Greek authorities have belatedly decided to crack down on Golden Dawn, a neo-fascist movement that has existed, in one form or another, for over thirty years and whose political platform can roughly be ascertained by a mere glance at its logo (One of the party’s foundational texts claims that Adolf Hitler, who invaded and occupied Greece, was a “visionary of new Europe,” a description that, though factually true, Golden Dawn meant as an accolade). Last Saturday, Greek police arrested 35 people affiliated with Golden Dawn, including Kasidiaris and founder and leader Nikos Michaloliakos, following the high-profile murder of an anti-fascist rapper by a party member in September. “This government is determined not to allow the heirs of the Nazis to poison our social life, to commit crimes, to terrorize and to undermine the foundations of the country that gave birth to democracy,” Prime Minister Antonis Samaras proclaimed following the murder. He has since promised to “eradicate” the group. Because banning political movements is illegal in Greece, the government has opted to pursue a series of 31 charges against the party that collectively cast it as a criminal organization, thereby depriving it of financing and imprisoning its leaders.
Last week’s arrests are apparently the result of a long, yet fitful, government investigation. For years, Golden Dawn has been known for its noisy protests against immigrants, rhetoric that has often incited its black uniform-clad, torch light-parading hooligans to commit violence against refugees. Last year, the Greek Ombudsman’s office recorded 253 racial attacks, many perpetrated |
diplomacy. Powerful nations in the foregoing decades had begun an arms race to develop their industrial capacities to unprecedented levels. Modern machinery – machine guns and heavy artillery – were used, transforming the killing potential of weapons. The war has been described as a ‘hurricane of steel’. The ‘Great War’ was profoundly different because it represented warfare between competing global empires and industrial mass production. As the longest living survivor from WWI, Harry Patch, has noted, the war was “legalised mass murder”. It plunged the world into a chasm of barbarism, industrialised killing and ruin beyond imagination.
The poet Siegfried Sasson wrote poignantly on the destruction the war caused:
Lines of grey muttering faces, masked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
The war wasn’t an act of liberation, or self defence from despotism, as our leaders today preach. The British Empire feared the growing industrial and military power of imperial Germany. The war that exploded in 1914 was a war to re-divide the world. It was a scramble for colonial possessions, markets and resources amongst the major nations. Young men and women were told that they would be back within 6 weeks of the start of war; their rulers envisaged a quick campaign. But this wasn’t the case – 16 million people lost their lives.
The primary claim by governments at the time, and today, is that the war would be laying claim to our freedoms, and preserving our democratic traditions. But at the same time as the war, most in the UK were not politically enfranchised or even held basic democratic rights, particularly women and working class people. Internationally the British government played a barbaric role.
The survivors who returned from war faced a desolate world. The economy was depressed, and the recompense for many returning was the poverty of joblessness. Popular loathing against the war came together with class anger against exploitation and hardship. A wave of revolutions followed across Europe, some were limited, and others developed into full blown changes in the status quo, for example in Russia the working class took power.
This legacy is not documented. The Prime Minister David Cameron wants the lessons of the war to remain with us but the dominant narrative on show is one-sided and distorted. It mourns the dead and regrets their loss. But at the same time it exalts their “necessary sacrifice”. The war was terrible, the argument goes, but the price was worth paying.
Cameron deems Friday’s remembrance should be a “to capture our national spirit” and display “national pride”, this is the same sentiment as the purported challenge to accepted national values trumpeted by war politicians in the lead up to 1914. Today the military and monarchy stand tall at the front of the day of remembrance. Mourning the butchery of thousands of ordinary people through an act of remembrance side by side with the inheritors of an economic system which created the war is not something I wish to take part in. It is an insult to those sent to die, victims of the self interested advancement of the British Empire.
Karl Liebknecht, a German parliamentarian who voted against war credits, was one of thousands from many countries who spoke out against war. There were mass demonstrations in opposition in many countries. Liberknecht was later imprisoned for arguing that the main enemy is at home, not against our brothers and sisters abroad. He is absolutely right!
We should instead remember the internationalists and socialists. We should remember the figures like Karl Kraus, one of many poets and satirists, who denounced the war. We should remember the soldiers that downed tools to build relationships with each other.
I mourn and remember the dead. But my mourning is mixed with bitter anger against the rulers and the system that create such bloodshed.
Best,
Daniel
AdvertisementsHouse Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, center, arrives for a meeting with House Republicans, Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on Congress and DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (all times local):
4:50 p.m.
Democratic lawmakers are slowing House debate on a spending bill by pressing for a vote on legislation to protect certain young immigrants from deportation and give them an opportunity to obtain legal status.
One by one, Democratic members of the House are lining up to display pictures of young people living in their congressional districts and offering brief descriptions of them.
For example, Rep. Alan Lowenthal, D-Calif., has shown a picture of a young man he identified as Eduardo. Lowenthal says Eduardo attends UCLA and is an anti-bullying activist.
Lowenthal and the other Democratic lawmakers are trying to bring up legislation called the DREAM Act. It’s in response to President Donald Trump’s decision to formally rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
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2:30 p.m.
President Donald Trump says he believes Congress will come up with a legislative fix for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who were brought here as children.
Trump on Tuesday suspended a program for these immigrants and gave lawmakers six months to resolve their status.
Trump told reporters traveling with him that he’d like to see a permanent deal and that he thinks it will happen. He predicted having great support from both sides of Congress.
Trump said in a tweet late Tuesday that he would “revisit” the issue if Congress blew its six-month deadline. He said Wednesday that revisiting the issue may be unnecessary because “Congress really wants to do this.”
He says the issue was discussed during an Oval Office meeting with top Republican and Democratic congressional leaders.
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11:50 a.m.
President Donald Trump says he has “no second thoughts” on his decision to end protections against deportations for young immigrants brought to the country illegal as children.
Trump says during a meeting in the Oval Office with congressional leaders that he doesn’t have any second thoughts on the move and he’s hopeful Congress will act.
He says, “I certainly hope they do.”
Trump gave lawmakers a six-month delay to push immigration legislation to address the issue. He tweeted on Tuesday night that if Congress doesn’t “legalize DACA,” he will “revisit this issue!”
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11:45 a.m.
Ohio’s outspoken Republican governor is blasting President Donald Trump’s decision to begin dismantling the Obama-era program protecting young immigrants brought into the country illegally.
On Wednesday’s “CBS This Morning,” Gov. John Kasich (KAY’-sik) said “putting kids, young people who are contributors in jeopardy” isn’t the American way.
He invited immigrants to “come to Ohio,” where he said they’ll be appreciated for their contributions.
Kasich, a 2016 presidential rival, was reacting to Trump’s plan to reject all new applications to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, and formally rescind the program.
The president gave Congress six months to legalize it or he’ll revisit whether to continue renewing existing work permits for participants, called “Dreamers.”
Ohio’s estimated 4,400 Dreamers contribute about $250 million to the state’s gross domestic product.
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10:45 a.m.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says that if Congress doesn’t pass protections for immigrants brought to this country illegally as children, Democrats will move to attach it to other items this fall “until it passes.”
The New York Democrat said in a Senate floor speech that aid for those immigrants “would likely pass without much fuss.”
Schumer said “we could solve this problem tomorrow rather than letting the fear of deportation hang over the heads of 800,000” young immigrants, many of whom only know the U.S. as their home.
The announcement came a day after President Donald Trump announced he would end protections against deportation for such immigrants, which Former President Barack Obama issued by executive order in 2012. Trump gave lawmakers a six-month delay in an attempt to craft immigration legislation.
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10:05 a.m.
House Speaker Paul Ryan is telling Republicans that they will address the issue of immigration through the regular legislative process.
That’s the word from Rep. Dennis Ross on Wednesday after the weekly closed-door meeting. Ross said Ryan told the GOP caucus that the leaders “were not going to jam anybody, we’re going to go through the process.” That means the chamber will not put the legislation on a fast track, but go through a more deliberative process.
President Donald Trump is dismantling the program protecting hundreds of thousands of young immigrants who were brought into the country illegally as children. He gave Congress six months to come up with a legislative solution.
Congress has repeatedly struggled to come up with a legislation solution to deal with immigration.
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7:20 a.m.
Sen. Lindsey Graham says he believes “there’s a congressional deal to be made” that could resolve the question of a legal shield for young immigrants living in the U.S. illegally while improving border security without building a wall.
Graham says in a nationally broadcast interview that lawmakers could restore a “Dream Act” for the young while also enhancing border security — without constructing the 2,200-mile wall (3540.39-kilometers) that President Donald Trump has advocated since his campaign for the White House.
But Graham also tells MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show Congress needs “to define what an acceptable ‘Dream Act’ would look like.”
The South Carolina Republican, who is working on a bill with Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., says he thinks Trump should turn to White House chief of staff John Kelly, who previously headed the Department of Homeland Security, for advice on border issues.
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3:50 a.m.
President Donald Trump’s announcement on immigration has Congress staring down an election-year deadline on an issue that bitterly divides the president’s own party, and that has painfully eluded lawmakers time and again.
Four years after comprehensive immigration legislation passed the Senate only to die in the House, Trump tossed to Congress the question of what to do with almost 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced that the administration will begin dismantling protections these immigrants were granted by former President Barack Obama, and the program will end unless Congress acts first.
What will actually happen in six months absent congressional action remained unclear. Trump himself took some of the sting from his threats with a tweet issued late Tuesday, after a day of turmoil and debate, declaring that if Congress can’t act to “legalize” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, “I will revisit this issue!”10! 9! 8! Come experience the excitement of a rocket launch, live in AltspaceVR! And this is not just any rocket launch, this is the world's first orbital-class rocket to fly a second time! On April 8, 2016, this rocket successfully delivered supplies to the ISS, and in March it will go even farther, delivering a communications satellite to a geosynchronous transfer orbit. If rockets can be flown more than once, it will dramatically drive down the cost of getting to orbit and beyond, opening up space science and travel to a whole new market. Imagine how expensive plane tickets would be if they could only fly the plane once! The importance of this historic milestone cannot be overstated, you don't want to miss it.
The launch is scheduled for Thursday March 30th, 2017, between 18:27 - 20:57 EDT, but that may change. Stay tuned!
Recording Disclaimer: By entering this event, you hereby irrevocably grant AltspaceVR and Microsoft and its affiliates, agents, and licensees, the right, but not the obligation, to photograph and record your avatar, likeness, voice, and/or username and to own, license, assign, and use the same (or any portion) in the production, exhibition, and promotion of the event, AltspaceVR or other Microsoft products and services without compensation, in any media and on any platform now known or hereafter devised (including the Internet) throughout the universe in perpetuity. You waive the right to bring action of any kind in law or equity against Microsoft.
If you wish to not be recorded, simply leave the event. (But we hope you’ll stay!)Trump signed two executive orders Wednesday aimed at cracking down on immigration, including a directive to build the wall. A barrier along the southern U.S. border was a key promise made by Trump during his campaign, and Mexican officials have repeatedly said they will not pay for it.
After Pena Nieto's tweet, the dollar moved higher against the Mexican currency. Dollar/peso rose to 21.30, after hitting 20.86 earlier in the day. The peso was down 1.1 percent against the dollar at midday but it recovered about a half percent in afternoon trading. The low for the peso was when it reached 22.0385 to the dollar on Jan. 11.
"Yesterday's conciliatory tone has been shattered by those tweets," said Andres Jaime, global foreign exchange and rates strategist at Barclays. "It's a reversal from yesterday's optimism that this was going to go smoother than initially thought.... In the meantime, [the peso is] going to remain under pressure."
The talk of border tariffs reinforces the negative outlook for the peso, for now, said Win Thin, senior currency analyst at Brown Brothers Harriman.
"The market has gotten a little more balance, but I think it's (dollar) loaded for another move higher," said Thin. "I'm kind of confident that the dollar is going to head higher and I'm very confident we're going to have gyrations both ways...I still think things are negative for Mexico and nothing's changed. Tariffs are never good."
The peso recovered a bit after Spicer discussed a tax on Mexican imports but was still lower on the day. Jaime said he estimates the market is already pricing in a border tax, at about 16 percent, at current levels. "In our assumption expectations about Trump policy would imply a border tax of about 16 percent," Jaime said.
Jaime said he doesn't see the peso going much lower than it went in January, but he does expect it to be more volatile. He projects it to trade flat this year, but the risk would be more to the upside, because of the deep slide in the peso already.
"The U.S. has a huge trade deficit of $60 billion with Mexico, but it's very different, the relationship the U.S. has with Mexico than it has with China.
to tell the people, 'look, I'm doing what I promised,'" Jamie said. "We need to get used to this very high intraday volatility."
Markets had been looking forward to the meeting as the next event that could affect the peso, but now there's no event — other than tweets, which aren't predictable. "What we've seen, in terms of policy announcements, is many times you can see a tweet changes the perception of the market," he said.
The U.S. trade deficit with Mexico was about $58 billion in the first 11 months of 2016. It was $58 billion for all of 2015, according to Commerce Department data. The deficit was the largest in 2007, at $74.8 billion.
According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Mexico was the third-largest supplier of goods imported into the U.S. in 2015. The top category was vehicles, including parts at $74 billion. The U.S. also imports electrical machinery, mineral fuels, and optical and medical equipment. The U.S. imported $21 billion in agricultural products in 2015.Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has said progress still needs to be made on clearing obstacles encountered by federal inspectors general. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
It’s hard for inspectors general to be watchdogs when chained by their agencies.
IG employees investigate waste, fraud and other things that go wrong in federal places. They often work in the same buildings and eat in the same cafeterias as those they investigate, yet they stand apart. While legally under the supervision of an agency’s top boss, the IG is not supervised by that boss.
IGs are designed by law to be independent and agencies are not permitted to interfere with their investigations.
So it was extraordinary when 47 inspectors general, about two-thirds of the lot, wrote to Capitol Hill in August to complain that interference does happen. Unsatisfied since Congress looked into the allegations last year, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will again examine obstacles to 13,000 IG employees at a hearing Tuesday.
Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) acknowledges some progress, but adds: “A lot of daylight has passed since August and it’s still a problem.”
In a related development, the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, wrote to Chaffetz on Friday about “a longstanding disagreement” among the Environmental Protection Agency’s office of homeland security, the agency’s IG and the FBI concerning the exchange of information in national security-related investigations.
In this case, “a final resolution appears to be within reach,” Cummings said.
Although the August letter from the inspectors general focused on problems IGs had with three agencies, — the Justice Department, the Peace Corps and the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board — they said that “others faced similar obstacles to their work, whether on a claim that some other law or principle trumped the clear mandate of the IG Act or by the agency’s imposition of unnecessarily burdensome administrative conditions on access.”
The Peace Corps is a case in point.
In testimony submitted for Tuesday’s hearing, Kathy A. Buller, the Peace Corps IG, says the agency continues to hamper her duties by invoking another law to inappropriately overrule her legal mandate. After her testimony in September, the Peace Corps did grant her office greater access to information, but she said that was only after “two years of discussions with the agency and members of Congress, two congressional hearings, negative press coverage, a hold being placed on the nomination of the Director, and, ultimately, the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the agency and OIG [Office of Inspector General].”
“Much work remains to be done to undo the damage caused by these access-denying policies,” she added.
This situation is a particularly sensitive one because it involves the agency’s handling of sexual assault allegations from Peace Corps volunteers stationed abroad. The horrific stories related by my colleague Lisa Rein in 2011 include one in which a 27-year-old volunteer was raped after being told she was going to be kidnapped into marriage. The woman said a Peace Corps security officer told her “not to worry.”
There is no indication that this 2004 case is among those Buller’s office reviewed. Yet it does show that this dispute over information is more than an intramural contest between bureaucrats protecting territory.
Buller said her push for access “goes beyond our zeal” for agency transparency and is meant “to ensure our volunteers, who sacrifice so much when serving in remote corners of the world, receive the services they need when they are victims of a sexual assault.”
Her sense of urgency is backed by the IG act, which says IGs are entitled “to have access to all records, reports, audits, reviews, documents, papers, recommendations, or other material.”
An opinion by the agency’s former general counsel, however, said that another law, the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act, rules.
Agency officials argue that “the Peace Corps has an overriding obligation not to disclose volunteers’ personally identifying information or the graphic details of the assault to anyone other than those directly involved in providing statutorily specified support services.”
But the Puzey law provides exceptions, including when the release of the information is “required by Federal or State statute,” which seems to include the statute authorizing IGs to get all the information they need.
Furthermore, Buller said, she doesn’t like having to make an agreement with the agency to get information her office is entitled to in the first place.
“As long as that [general counsel’s] opinion remains in place,” she said, “the Peace Corps is free to rescind our agreement and withhold or delay OIG access to sexual assault reports.”
That is not a situation Chaffetz finds acceptable.
“We’ve got to be able to get the inspectors general to do their jobs,” he said. “If they can’t do their jobs, we can’t do our jobs.”
Twitter: @JoeDavidsonWP
Previous columns by Joe Davidson are available at wapo.st/JoeDavidson.If you love cooking with garlic, you know it does a lot of good in recipes by helping build flavor -- but its strong odor can linger for hours, especially on our hands. We've all been in the situation where after preparing a wonderful meal, we're left with the stench of garlic on our fingers -- yuck! There are a few tricks people often recommend to eliminate the smell: lemon juice or vinegar, rubbing your hands with salt, or even using toothpaste! But those don't work -- all they do is mask the garlic smell. So what does really work? Stainless steel.
Stainless steel, of all things, has been shown to remove the odor of garlic. Kitchen gadget companies have even created stainless steel bars shaped like soap for removing kitchen smells from your hands. But using any stainless steel surface works, too. Try your stainless steel kitchen sink or faucet -- just hold your hands under cold running water while rubbing the stainless steel for 10 seconds. Voila, the smell will be gone.
Let's explain why stainless steel works.
Not surprisingly, it all has to do with the chemistry of garlic and stainless steel. Garlic contains molecules with sulfur. When cutting garlic, the molecules are transferred to your skin. Washing your hands with water heightens the smell because the water causes the sulfur to turn into sulfuric acid. When you touch stainless steel, the molecules in the steel bind with the sulfur molecules on your hands, thus transferring the molecules (along with the smell) to the metal and off from your hands. Presto! No more garlicky fingers.
Stainless steel can also help remove onion or fish odors from your hands. So the next time you're handling garlic, onions or fish as part of your kitchen prep, try stainless steel for yourself. You'll be surprised at how well it works.
What do you do to get rid of the garlic smell from your hands? Leave us a comment below.A new interim leader has been appointed to the Saskatchewan Liberal Party.
Tara Jijian will take over the position from Darrin Lamoureux, who resigned from the role earlier this month.
READ MORE: Darrin Lamoureux steps down as Saskatchewan Liberals leader
Jijian ran as the Liberal candidate in the Regina Coronation Park riding during the 2016 provincial election. She placed a distant third in that race, losing to the Saskatchewan Party’s Mark Docherty.
Jijian is an avid community volunteer, and an advocate for education and mental health services.
“I think the Liberal Party is in a renewal phase, and given my personality, my engagement with the public and all of my advocacy work I have done thus far, I was best suited to take over that role, and to engage people and invite them to our table,” Jijian said.
“The most important personal values for me are hard work, respect and trust. Those principles will guide our leadership team as we engage with all stakeholders in developing sound policies to take to Saskatchewan voters in the next election.”
The party has begun preparations for a leadership convention to select a permanent leader in 2018.The World Anti-Doping Agency's executive board wants the International Olympic Committee to ban all Russian teams from the Rio de Janeiro Olympics following a report showing the scope and length of state-directed doping in the country.
WADA issued a seven-point list of requests after it published a report from Canadian law professor Richard McLaren that confirmed claims of state-backed Russian cheating at the Sochi Olympics and beyond.
WADA also wants Russian government officials to be denied access to international competitions, including the upcoming Olympics.
The anti-doping watchdog also called on the world governing bodies of sports implicated in the report to consider action against Russian national bodies.
McLaren's investigation found that Russia falsified at least 312 results from 2011 through at least last year's world swimming championships.
Calling the report a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games, IOC president Thomas Bach said the committee will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against those implicated. The IOC executive board will meet via conference call Tuesday to make initial decisions on possible sanctions for the Rio Games.
McLaren dubbed Russia's program the "disappearing positive methodology" in the report, which was released Monday by WADA.
The investigator said allegations made by Grigory Rodchenkov, Moscow's former anti-doping lab director, about sample switching at the Sochi Olympics went much as described in a New York Times story published in May. That program involved dark-of-night swaps of dirty samples with clean ones, which prevented Russian athletes from testing positive.
In short, Russia's deputy minister of sports, who was also part of Russia's Olympic Committee, would direct workers at Moscow's anti-doping laboratory of which positive samples to send through and which to hold back. Assisting the plan was Russia's national security service -- the FSB, the current version of the Soviet Union's KGB.
In his report released Monday, Richard McLaren outlined steps Russian authorities took to falsify positive doping tests among the country's athletes. AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson
McLaren said out of 577 positive sample screenings, 312 positive results were held back -- or labeled "Save" by the lab workers -- but that was only a "small slice" of the data that could have been examined. More than 240 of the 312 "Saves" came from track and field and wrestling, and other sports involved included swimming, rowing, snowboarding and table tennis.
Minister of Sport Vitaly Mutko personally intervened to cover up a doping case of "at least 1 foreign [soccer player] in the Russian League," according to McLaren. The report says 11 positive tests by Russian soccer players were made to disappear in the state-sponsored doping program.
It was "inconceivable that Minister Mutko was not aware of the doping cover-up scheme," according to evidence from Rodchenkov.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says the officials named in the report as directly responsible for the widespread doping will be suspended pending a thorough investigation in Russia.
Putin gave no names, but his statement appears to apply to Mutko and his deputy, Yuri Nagornykh, who are both discussed in the report. The report by the WADA investigator says Nagornykh directed workers at Moscow's anti-doping laboratory on which positive samples to send through and which to hold back.
In the statement released by the Kremlin, Putin asks the WADA commission to provide "more complete, objective, evidence-based information'' about its findings to Russian investigators.
McLaren said Russia's cheating also included the 2013 track world championships in Moscow and the 2015 swimming world championships in Kazan.
The 97-page McLaren report is the result of a two-month investigation. McLaren said he is confident the document was not leaked and stands by its credibility.
Several athlete and anti-doping groups, including the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, were gearing up over the weekend to send letters to the IOC urging that Russia's entire delegation be banned from next month's Rio Games.
Olympic leaders had said those moves undermined the report and called it "disappointing" that the groups would try to have Russia banned in such an "underhanded" way.
McLaren said the moves to send the letters were based on nothing more than speculation. He did not include a recommendation for punishment in the report and urged the IOC and others to absorb the information and act upon it as they wish.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of USADA, called the report proof of a "mind-blowing level of corruption" and urged the international community to come together to ensure that what he called an unprecedented level of criminality never threatens sports again.
Tygart's statement did not include a call for a full ban of the Russian team from the Rio Games. Last week, he said if the report was as damning as expected that he would push for such a ban.
U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Scott Blackmun said in a statement that the report "confirms what we have stated previously: the current anti-doping system is broken and urgently requires the attention of everyone interested in protecting clean athletes."
"In the meantime, we are focused on preparing Team USA to compete at the upcoming Rio Games and will rely on the IOC, WADA and the international federations to impose sanctions that are appropriate in relation to the magnitude of these offenses, and that give clean athletes some measure of comfort that they will be competing on a level playing field in Rio," Blackmun said.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.Matt Cornell grew up with gynecomastia, a harmless condition that made his school days a misery. From the bullying to the surgery that followed, he looks back on what'moobs' meant to him
Tits. The name was given to me by a bully shortly after I started Year 6. I had been a fat kid since the age of nine, but as puberty began to kick in, parts of me started growing differently than expected. The doctors said I had gynecomastia. "Man boobs" or "moobs" in the jeering parlance of our popular culture.
But my bully simply called them "tits". And so this became my name in the school hallways.
I was Tits.
He would pass me in the corridor and catcall, "Hey, Tits!" and his friends would laugh. Sometimes, if he was feeling bold, he might actually grab one of my breasts and squeeze it in front of the other kids. Not everyone laughed. But many did.
As direct as this bullying was, growing up with gynecomastia was characterised by other, smaller insults, too. Most kids would just say, "Why don't you wear a bra?" Even adults could be cruel. "Are you a boy or a girl?" I was often asked.
When wearing shirts, it was crucial that they be loose fitting. If a T-shirt had shrunk in the dryer, I would spend hours stretching it out, so it didn't cling to my body. You can see fat boys do this every day. Pulling at their shirts to hide the shape of their bodies, and particularly their breasts.
Hello, Dolly: Cornell as a 12-year-old boy (left), dressed as Dolly Parton for Halloween. Looking back, he now realises he was using his body as a statement long before he ever thought to do so on stage. Photograph: Courtesy Matt Cornell
As a fat kid, and one who hated competition, I learned to loathe sports and, especially, physical education. The one form of exercise I enjoyed was swimming. Unfortunately, as my breasts grew, so did my shame about removing my shirt. I knew that taking it off would bring ridicule. So I pretended that I was above swimming – that I was too cool for the pool.
By my teenage years, I had developed remarkable powers of verbal self-defence. I absorbed cruelty and learned how to mete it back out in sharp doses. There's no doubt that this shaped the person I became, for better and for worse. At school, I managed to carve out a social niche for myself. The bullying stopped. But the shirts stayed loose fitting. I rarely went swimming.
The doctors thought that perhaps I suffered from low testosterone. I found this funny, since my sex drive had been in high gear since the age of 14. I assured them that this was not the case. Finally, they suggested that my excess breast tissue was probably just a result of being fat. Lose the weight and the breasts will go away.
So I lost weight. By 17, I was slender. Girls were starting to talk to me. I was more confident. And I still had breasts. In some ways, my slimmer body only accentuated the contours of my chest. So I continued to wear baggy shirts and the idea of being topless in front of a woman or acting on that newfound female attention seemed remote. The doctors noticed, too. After graduation, they congratulated me on my thin body. Now it was time, they said, to get rid of my breasts.
Though I had always been squeamish around doctors, there was little question about whether to have the surgery. They said it would take only a few months to heal and that the only side-effect would be a permanent loss in nipple sensitivity. Could a decade of bullying end with a simple outpatient procedure? We quietly scheduled a date, sharing the decision only with close members of the family.
In the first surgery, I was placed under general anaesthesia. The doctor made a half-moon incision under each nipple and cut out the excess breast tissue, finishing the job with some liposuction. Unfortunately, the surgery wasn't a complete success. My breasts were smaller, but lumpy, and my nipples were puckered. This was disappointing. My chest looked worse than it had before I'd gone under the knife. It took a second surgery to make everything look "normal".
I was 19. On New Year's Eve, I went to a party and got drunk for the first time in my life. There, I met a girl who took my virginity. She didn't insist on taking my shirt off. This was a relief, because under my shirt was a sports bra, and under that layers of gauze. My chest was still healing from the second surgery. In many senses of the word, I was still becoming a man.
I'm reminded of my experiences whenever one of those "humorous" stories pops up on websites such as the Huffington Post and Mail Online. Perhaps you saw the photo making the rounds late last year, of New York Democrat Barney Frank's "moobs". The photo spread throughout the web and inspired mocking headlines, even on politically liberal websites.
This fixation on "man boobs" reveals our culture's obsession with binary gender, but we have all the evidence we need that biological sex and gender are not as rigid or fixed as we imagine. There are intersexed people. There are transgender people and genderqueer people. There are millions of men and boys like me with gynecomastia, a medically harmless (though socially lethal) condition. The prevalence of gynecomastia in adolescent boys is estimated to be as low as 4% and as high as 69%. As one article notes, "These differences probably result from variations in what is perceived to be normal." You think?
We're so entrenched, we can't accept bodies that don't fall on either extreme of the gender continuum. Transgender men and women encounter these attitudes in direct and sometimes life-threatening ways. And, given the misogyny that pervades society, these pressures are even harder for women and girls, whether they're cisgender or transgender. Their bodies are hated and desired in equal measure. When my bully grabbed my breasts and called me "Tits", he was taking what he wanted. He was also reminding me that I was no better than a girl. I was beneath him.
'As a fat man, I still have breasts. The ones I have now are smaller, but still capable of riling the body police.' Photograph: John Loomis for the Guardian
With the explosion of social media and the surveillance society, body policing has become far more intense. We live in an age of crowdsourced bullying. I cannot imagine what it would be like to grow up as a boy with breasts in 2012. I suppose I'd spend hours in Photoshop, digitally sculpting my body to remove fat from my face, belly and chest before uploading my profile photos. I would probably become vigilant about removing tags from unflattering photos and obsess over remarks people made about me on comment threads.
Perhaps because of my early struggles to accept my body, I've found a measure of freedom in appearing naked on stage as a performance artist. And now, 20 years after my surgeries, I find I miss my breasts. Looking through childhood photos, I was astonished to find a picture of myself at 12, dressed for Halloween in full drag as Dolly Parton. In the photo (left), I have a big smile and my boobs have been pushed up and exaggerated. The photo touches me, because it suggests that even while I was facing intense bullying and social stigma, I was already using my body to comment on gender with humour and strength.
As a fat man, I still have breasts. The ones I have now are smaller, but still capable of riling the body police. I once scandalised a fancy pool party simply by taking off my shirt. I realise that, as a man, it is my privilege to do so. In most parts of our society, it is either illegal or strongly frowned upon for a woman to go topless. (Female breasts are either for maternity or for male sexual pleasure, not for baring at polite parties.) Perhaps my breasts, which remind people of this prohibition, invite a similar kind of censure.
Now, I don't just use my sharp tongue for self-defence. I also use my body itself, as an argument and as a provocation.
I am Tits. Got a problem with that?Roster weaknesses: Every team has them, and the draft is often the best way to address them. With the 2014 NFL Draft fast approaching, NFL Media's Daniel Jeremiah will be taking an up-close look at the main areas of weakness -- and the prospects who could fix them -- for all 32 squads in the league. Be sure to catch "Path to the Draft" on NFL Network at 7 p.m. ET Monday through Friday for more in-depth analysis.
The Arizona Cardinals won 10 games last year, and they were the third best team in their division. If they want to get over the hump in 2014 -- and unseat the reigning Super Bowl champs -- they'll need to add a few key pieces on both sides of the ball.
Their defense is loaded with difference-makers, with Patrick Peterson, Calais Campbell and Daryl Washington still leading the unit. But with all of the young, talented quarterbacks in the NFC West, Arizona needs to be able to rush the passer and fortify the backend of its secondary.
Speaking of young, talented quarterbacks, I believe the Cardinals have to find one of their own. With so much depth at the position in this year's group, I think general manager Steve Keim will be able to draft a suitable signal-caller for Bruce Arians' system.
Here are four positions of need for Arizona -- and four prospects who could fill them.
1) Safety
Pairing Antonio Cromartie with All-Pro cornerback Patrick Peterson will keep offensive coordinators up at night -- that is, if Cromartie returns to his 2012 form. Even if the duo is operating at a high level, the safety spots have some real question marks. Tyrann Mathieu had a solid rookie season, but he's coming off ACL and LCL tears in his left knee. Even when he does return, the defensive play |
Jerusalem's thriving Arab-Jewish school burned books, destroyed most of the school, and left walls defaced with graffiti reading “End Assimilation” and “There Is No Coexistence With a Cancer”;
* Racist thugs regularly protest progressive or Arab-Jewish events by targeting human-rights advocates they liken to anti-Semites and Nazis, even threatening, “We will make soap out of you”;
* Officials are investigating a recent Facebook post that depicted top politicians as Nazis ― there is a recurring theme here ― for questioning the highly questionable Israel-Is-Only-For-Jews bill;
* Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, Likud member, longtime conservative, critic of racist rhetoric and “Israel’s most unlikely moralist”, has been excoriated for declaring that Israel is “sick”, having forgotten not just how to be Jews, but how to be human.
Meanwhile, the US just announced it will be sending Israel 3000 more smart bombs like those used in the Gaza assault, at a cost of US$82 million. Because this ― offering succor and guns to those standing on the wrong side of history ― is what the US does. None of it will end well.
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One thing is for sure. All of baseball will likely be buzzing tomorrow about what we just saw from Erasmo Ramirez, Danny Hultzen, Taijuan Walker and James Paxton. They pretty much blew away an Arizona Diamondbacks lineup with plenty of good major leaguers on it.
The dangerous Justin Upton hit into a first-inning double play against Ramirez and the tone for the night was set. Seattle's quartet allowed just one run on four hits while striking out eight batters over eight innings of an eventual 7-1 win by the Mariners.
Arizona's only run came against Paxton after he'd walked his first two batters. But it took a wild-pitch with two out to get the run home and Paxton finished with four strikeouts in his two innings.
Walker was the only one to go just one inning, but what a frame that was. The stadium was positively buzzing after he struck out veterans Willie Bloomquist and John McDonald to start his outing off.
All of the young arms did something special tonight, each in their own way. Ramirez threw just 28 pitches, 23 of them for strikes.
"You tell yourself to try to forget about whether you're facing big league or minor league hitters,'' Ramirez said. "But when you see the hitter and that it's (Justin) Upton and he's hitttng, you remember everything. It's like 'Oh my God, it's a big leaguer!' ''
Ramirez looked s strong, the team had him throw another 15 pitches in the bullpen. He told me they wanted him to simulate an actual inning against three different hitters, which is what he tried to do.
His game plan last night? Just keep hitting the mitt of catcher Jesus Montero -- who, by the way, had three RBI as did Munenori Kawasaki.
Hultzen said he'd pitched in front of bigger crowds in college than the 12,510 people here.
"I think the difference here is that there were 12,000 for the Diamondbacks,'' he said. "In Omaha, it was kind of split. There were just baseball fans out there.''
But he just did what all of the youngsters keep doing.
"You have to always remind yourself that it's just baseball out there,'' Hultzen said. "You don't have to do anything special.''
This is going to get noticed around the game. I was sitting next to SBN's Rob Neyer during the game and he was continuously amazed by what he was seeing from the young hurlers with their relative inexperience. Only Ramirez has pitched in Class AAA.
As I was leaving the clubhouse, Ken Rosenthal of FOX walked in right after me to chat with the young pitchers.
So, yeah, expect some buzz about this game. There should be. This was not the type of debut you see from this many young guys in a row all that often.
Will any of them head north to start the year? No way. Sure it's tempting, but won't happen. The Mariners don't want to start anyone's arbitration or free agency clock just yet and that relative inexperience level I just mentioned has the club not wanting to rush anyone no matter how good the spring stats.
The team has capable major leaguers and Hisashi Iwakuma's four innings today alleviated concerns about him. Enough that the M's won't have to panic and look beyond Kevin Millwood, Blake Beavan and Hector Noesi to fill the rest of the rotation.
But make no mistake: what we saw tonight put the rest of MLB on notice. Some of these young arms will be in The Show sooner rather than later. Bank on it.MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos rallied on Wednesday in response to the prime minister’s state-of-the-nation address, delivered a day earlier to a parliament in which the new leftist movement still has no seats.
Pablo Iglesias, secretary-general of Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos (We Can), speaks during a meeting in Madrid February 25, 2015. REUTERS/Sergio Perez
Pablo Iglesias, leader of the one-year-old “We Can” party, said it was the real opposition to Spain’s centre-right government, as he addressed hundreds of supporters crammed into a theatre a few metres from the congress building in Madrid.
“There was a need for the opposition to respond to the government, that’s why we are here,” said 36-year-old Iglesias, a pony-tailed former political scientist whose political stance and surging popularity have drawn comparisons with Greece’s new Syriza rulers.
Among the measures Iglesias said he would implement if he became prime minister in the general election due by the end of the year are a restructuring of the country’s debt and a new tax on wealth.
Without once referring directly to Podemos in his speech on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy nonetheless took swipes at rivals promising “magic remedies” and sought to portray himself as a safe pair of hands steering Spain to economic recovery.
The growth of parties like Podemos is a sign of the creeping fragmentation of Spain’s decades-old two-party system, analysts say.
Upstart parties without so much as a seat in parliament increasingly push policy debates outside its walls.
The new centre-right Ciudadanos (“Citizens”), led by 35-year-old lawyer Albert Rivera, is also gaining in polls and could chip away at support for Rajoy’s People’s Party as it touts its credentials as a party untainted by corruption scandals.
“It’s good for Spain that the parties that have not yet entered (parliament) are already making a mark on the country’s political and economic agenda,” Rivera said on Wednesday.
“We see a government that is nervous and thinking more about attacking others than explaining what it has done.”
Helping the cause of Podemos and Ciudadanos is a growing desire among Spaniards for an overhaul of the country’s political structures.
“The economy, which triggered people’s disaffection, has become a secondary issue behind that of the very political system,” said Fernando Vallespin, political scientist at the Autonomous University of Madrid.Facebook user Chow Mun Fai has been sentenced to a year’s jail for using his ‘Chow Jack’ Facebook account on June 12 to post a Hari Raya Aidilfitri greeting that included the words ‘devil’ and ‘bak kut teh’, a dish containing pork that is forbidden to Muslims. ― Picture by Choo Choy May
KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 9 ― A 27-year-old Facebook user was sentenced to one year's jail after he pleaded guilty to making remarks disparaging Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
Chow Mun Fai was earlier charged with using his “Chow Jack” Facebook account on June 12 to post a Hari Raya Aidilfitri greeting that included the words “devil” and “bak kut teh”, a dish containing pork that is forbidden to Muslims.
The charge was proffered under Section 233 (1)(a) of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998, for posting an offensive comment with intention to hurt the feelings of others.
After hearing arguments from both sides, Sessions Court judge Azman Mustapha ordered Chow to be jailed for one year ― the maximum imprisonment term allowed under Section 233 (3) of the same law.
The penalty under Section 233 (3) is a fine of up to RM50,000 or one year jail or both.
According to Azman, the sentence should serve as both a lesson for Chow and also a reminder to the public to not hide behind the Internet to write comments that could cause anger and disrupt harmony.
Chow's lawyer Ahmad Ridza Mohd Noh had earlier asked for a lighter sentence, pointing out that his client was providing for his parents, both aged 60, with his RM2,000 monthly wage as a site supervisor.
Ahmad Ridza also said that his client suffered from severe gastric problems and tuberculosis.
Chow also regretted his error and his act would “haunt” him for life, the lawyer said.
DPP Suhaimi Ibrahim had argued that “public policy demands a severe sentence to be imposed” in Chow's case.
Suhaimi cited the Federal Constitution’s Article 3, which states that Islam is the religion of the federation while other religions may be practiced in peace and harmony.
“The accused’s action in disputing or raising sensitive issues about Islam would surely invite response from others,” he said, adding that this would destroy the foundation of a peaceful and respectful society based on Article 3.
Suhaimi also said there is a limit to the constitutional right to freedom of expression, and that the court must give a clear message to all social media users that they must be responsible for the consequences of their remarks.
Earlier today, Chow pleaded not guilty to the principal charge under Section 4(1)(c) of the Sedition Act, which prescribes a maximum penalty of RM5,000 fine or three years’ jail or both.
Since Chow pleaded guilty to the alternative charge under the CMA, the sedition charge against him no longer applies.
The charges against him were brought following a June 12 police report by Mohamed Fairuz Mohamed Ariff, a supervisor at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPAC) — where Chow was said to have posted the offensive remark.In most capitalist societies, the balancing act between the forces of supply and demand determines the prices of most goods, unless a government decides to intervene to influence the economy’s direction. Unfortunately, not all economies are endowed with equal natural and human resources. Regional differences in available inputs lead countries to produce different products depending on what is most efficient or necessitates the lowest opportunity costs. That is why prices vary between economies. However, there are instances internal or external factors may cause prices to vary between economies with similar access to resources.
Highest Gasoline Prices in the World
Hong Kong has the world's highest gasoline prices. There are many factors affecting this, including lack of land area, import fees, taxes, etc. As Hong Kong exists on a very small land area that could be easily clogged with automobile traffic, the government encourages its citizens to use public transit as their primary form of transportation. The restrictive government policies towards automobiles lead to very high gas prices. Luckily, Hong Kong has one of the world's best public transportation systems.
Norway is a developed country and a leader in advocating for green energy. Because of this, the country imposes hefty fines on non-renewable energy sources such as oil, making gasoline prices high.
Gas prices are high in the Netherlands, at $7.04 a gallon. Like many other places in Europe, gasoline in the Netherlands is subject to high taxation which results in a higher price.
Lowest Gasoline Prices in the World
Gasoline prices are lowest in Libya, at $0.42 a gallon. Although the country has suffered from unrest over the better part of a decade, Libya is working on restoring their ability to export oil around the world. In the meantime, the country's oil fields are conveniently nearby, meaning that oil prices in the country are the lowest in the world.
In Turkmenistan, a gallon of gasoline only costs $1.14. While this does have to do with the country's PPP, the government of Turkmenistan also heavily subsidizes the cost of fuel.
Gas prices in the North African country of Algeria are also very low, at $1.17. This is due to the overall lowering in value of gallons of gas, which has also had drastic negative impacts on the economy of Algeria as a whole.The new Solar Means Business report out today (Oct. 15) from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and the Vote Solar Initiative found that among the top 25 corporate users of distributed solar energy use increased by 33 percent in just one year, with the top 25 users of local solar having more than 445 megawatts of solar in action, up from 300 megawatts in 2012.
“The top 25 corporate users named in the Solar Means Business report reads like a Who’s Who of the most successful corporations in America,” said SEIA Executive Director Rhone Resch. “These brands are leading the way in reducing our nation’s dependence on foreign energy sources.”
The overall leader in terms of both overall capacity and systems deployed might surprise—it’s Walmart, which has 215 systems installed totaling 89.43 megawatts of solar installed across 215 locations. That’s up from 144 installations and 65 megawatts last year. In terms of capacity Sam’s Club competitor Costco came in second with 47.06 megawatts of solar installed, it was second last year, too. At that point it had 38.9 megawatts of solar installed.
Second in terms of number of systems installed is Walgreens, which now has 156 solar arrays, the report found. However, Walgreens stores are usually much smaller than Walmart or Costco stores are. As such the company is fifteenth in terms of capacity with 8.86 megawatts of solar installed.
Overall the capacity and number of installations lists looked relatively similar to last year’s results with one notable exception, Apple. The company didn’t even place on last year’s list and this year, thanks to the 40.73 megawatts—most of which (if not all) is at its North Carolina datacenter—the company jumped to fourth on the list.
Resch observed that retailers installed the most solar capacity, but added that auto manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and the food services industries are all looking to lower operating costs through solar power. “As of this past August, the total commercial solar deployment was 3,380 MWs at almost 33,000 facilities. This represents a 40 percent increase over last year alone.”
The businesses are going solar in an effort to reduce their energy costs. For instance Walmart’s Vice President of Energy Kim Saylors-Laster, said that the company’s solar arrays have already saved the company roughly $3 million in utility costs in the U.S.
The effects can also be larger than just at the businesses, however. “We think the consumer facing brands in the report can help to lead more consumers towards solar adoption as well,” said Jim Walker, co-founder of The Climate Group and Director of International Programs & Strategy. “This is part a wider trend we’re seeing, we’re seeing more companies like Ikea and Apple and others now setting pretty big, ambitious renewable energy targets.
“We’re working to build this group. This is a great resource, a great indicator [that] highlights the leadership of companies that are doing the work,” Walker said. His organization also is working with companies and looking at how to harness their work and social media to encourage more people to install residential solar, he said.It’s an unlikely best seller, catapulting a soft-spoken French economist into rock star status and possible Nobel Prize contention.
Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty examines the history of income inequality in the U.S. and Europe since the 18th century.
The book is number one in the non-fiction book category of The New York Times and sold out in its first week on Amazon. It presents a compelling case for something many have long suspected - that the rich are getting richer.
“You know, if two-thirds of this growth goes to the top 1 percent, it’s not clear that this is a good deal for the rest of the population, Piketty said.
Using charts and tax data going back to the start of the industrial age, Piketty’s grand theory is that, over time, capital or wealth grows faster than economic output; but, the controversy centers on the author's policy solutions, among them a global tax on wealth.
Critics say such punitive measures would hurt everyone.
“I disagree with pretty much all of his policy recommendations, but, even beyond that, in the sort of purely analytical part, I think he exaggerates how much capital has grown over the last 100 years,” said Stan Veuger, a political economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Veuger argues much of the wealth accumulation in the U.S. has been due to the rise in home ownership; but, others say that does not account for the growing concentration of wealth among a privileged few.
“Perhaps there’s something more general about a problem where inequality in a democracy is going to lead to the rich prevailing despite the rules that we have on the books that should normally prevent that from being the case,” said New York University's David Stasavage.
And emerging economies are not immune. In China, Piketty says negative population growth will drive a wedge between rich and poor.
“Already, you know, inheritance of assets is becoming a big issue and access to real estate property in larger Chinese cities where you have some people inherit from the property of their parents. And, you know, some migrants will be completely unable to access property."
Piketty hopes the book sparks more discussion. That's a view shared by Yale professor Robert Shiller, who, after winning the Nobel prize for economics, told VOA that rising income inequality is the biggest problem facing the world.
“We should think now about a contingency plan for the possibility of much worse inequality and how do we stop that? Well, it has to be some form of taxation of the rich.”
At nearly 700 pages, Piketty's book is not an easy read, but both fans and critics say it's bound to generate heated discussion in a U.S. election year likely to be dominated by economic issues.My son and I went to see the Cubs last week as we do every Spring.
The Cubs won 8-0 and Matt Garza was one out away from throwing a complete game shutout, a rarity for a Cub. The crowd was on its feet with full count to the would-be final batter who rolled the ball back to the mound for Garza to scoop up and throw him out. We were all ready to give a big congratulatory cheer and then this happened. This is a guy who was throwing flawless pitches to the plate for nine innings and here with all the pressure gone and an easy lob to first he made what could be the worst throw in the history of baseball and then headed for the showers. Cubs win!
But this Spring we weren’t so interested in the baseball out on the field as we were in the strategery down in the toilet. Remember a while back when I wrote about the urinal game? It seems like it was just last week (fuzzy vertical lines pixellating then unpixellating the screen to reveal the flashback:)
Consider a wall lined with 5 urinals. The subgame perfect equilibrium has the first gentleman take urinal 2 and the second caballero take urinal 5. These strategies are pre-emptive moves that induce subsequent monsieurs to opt for a stall instead out of privacy concerns. Thus urinals 1, 3, and 4 go unused.
So naturally we turn our attention to The Trough.
A continuous action space. Will the trough induce a more efficient outcome in equilibrium than the fixed array of separate urinals? This is what you come Cheap Talk to find out.
Let’s maintain the same basic parameters. Assume that the distance between the center of two adjacent urinals is d and let’s consider a trough of length 5d, i.e. the same length as a 5 side-by-side urinals (now with invincible pink mystery ice located invitingly at positions d/2 + kd for k = 1, 2, 3, 4.) The assumption in the original problem was that a gentleman pees if and only if there is nobody in a urinal adjacent to him. We need to parametrize that assumption for the continuos trough. It means that there is a constant r such that he refuses to pee in a spot in which someone is currently peeing less than a distance r from him. The assumption from before implies that d < r < 2d. Moreover the greater the distance to the nearest reliever the better.
The first thing to notice is that the equilibrium spacing from the original urinal game is no longer a subgame-perfect equilibrium. In our continuous trough model that spacing corresponds to gentlemen 1 and 2 locating themselves at positions d/2 and 7d/2 measured from the left boundary of the trough. Suppose r <= 3d/2. Then the third man can now utilize the convex action space and locate himself at position 2d where he will be a comfortable distance 3d/2>= r away from the other two. If instead r > 3d/2, then the third man is strictly deterred from intervening but this means that gentleman number 2 would increase his personal space by locating slightly farther to the right whilst still maintaining that deterrence.
So what does happen in equilibrium? I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news first. Suppose that r < 5d/4. Then in equilibrium 3 guys use the trough whereas only 2 of the arrayed urinals were used in the original equilibrium. In equilibrium the first guy parks at d/2 (to be consistent with the original setup we assume that he cannot squeeze himself any closer than that to the left edge of the trough without risking a splash on the shoes) the second guy at 9d/2 and the third guy right in the middle at 5d/2. They are a distance of 2d> r from one another, and there is no room for anybody else because anybody who came next would have to be standing at most a distance d< r from two of the incumbents. This is a subgame perfect equilibrium because the second guy knows that the third guy will pick the midpoint and so to keep a maximal distance he should move to the right edge. And foreseeing all of this the first guy moves to the left edge.
Note well that this is not a Pareto improvement. The increased usage is offset by reduced privacy.They are only 2d away from each other whereas the two urinal users were 3d away from each other.
Now the bad news when r >5d/4. In this case it is possible for the first two to keep the third out. For example suppose that 1 is at 5d/4 and 2 is at 15d/4. Then there is no place the third guy can stand and be more than 5d/4 away hence more than r from the others. In this case the equilibrium has the first two guys positioning themselves with a distance between them equal to exactly 2r, thus maximizing their privacy subject to the constraint that the third guy is deterred. (One such equilibrium is for the first two to be an equal distance from their respective edges, but there are other equilibria.)
The really bad news is that when r is not too large, the two guys even have less privacy than with the urinals. For example if r is just above 5d/4 then they are only 10d/4 away from each other which is less than the 3d distance from before. What’s happening is that the continuous trough gives more flexibility for the third guy to squeeze between so the first two must stand closer to one another to keep him away.
Instant honors thesis for any NU undergrad who can generalize the analysis to a trough of arbitrary length.
AdvertisementsEver since I can remember, I’ve had a fascination with the night sky. As a young kid I’d stare up at the stars. Later, I’d take my daughter out during meteor showers to see how many shooting stars we could count. And throughout, I’ve experienced an uncanny need to keep staring at the full moon for about an hour after it rises. Yet my fascination with the night sky grew exponentially about six years ago when I learned that my digital SLR had the capabilities to capture the brilliance of the night sky, including details that my own eyes weren’t able to resolve. After capturing a sequence of photos, it’s a simple matter to turn them into breathtaking time-lapse videos.
If you’re an avid photographer it’s likely you already have the tools you need to start capturing the night sky. Beyond the right tools, all you really need is the right camera settings. In the chart below I have listed the basics you’ll need, as well as a list of the key settings.
Tools Camera Setup
Digital SLR or mirrorless system camera Aperture value Wide-angle lens with f/2.8 or faster aperture Shutter speed Sturdy tripod ISO sensitivity Timer remote (intervalometer) Finding sharp focus Large memory card (16GB, 32GB Preferred) White balance Fully charged camera battery Sky conditions
Why Time-lapse Photography?
Time-lapse photography is an art form that allows us to see the world in a different way. Most of us have witnessed a star-filled sky, but the sky in motion is not something that happens fast enough for the naked eye to perceive. Up until the introduction of high-ISO capable DSLRs, there wasn’t an easy or affordable way to capture the beauty of the night sky in motion.
To capture the night sky as a single photograph involves taking just one picture, but to capture the night sky in motion will require a series of pictures that, when assembled using software, will turn into a motion video; it’s the digital equivalent of a flip-book. This tutorial will help you get started.
CAMERA SETTINGS
Let me first give a simple overview of the key settings that go into capturing the night sky.
RAW versus JPEG
All of today’s digital SLRs have the ability to capture images in either JPEG or RAW format.
JPEG format applies in-camera effects, filters, and sharpening to an image before compressing and saving the image to a memory card. JPEG photos often look ‘finished’ right out of the camera but have much less flexibility when it comes to tweaking things later or bringing back blown-out highlights. Since JPEG is a compressed (lossy) image format, you’ll also notice banding in areas of solid color, like blue skies. You can fit more images on a card using the JPEG format, but it comes with quite a few trade-offs.
RAW format actually saves the exact image — what the sensor sees through the lens — onto a memory card. By preserving the original scene and not altering or compressing it in-camera, the image becomes a true digital “negative.” Since you’ll need to post-process your still images in order to turn them into a time-lapse, capturing in RAW format doesn’t really add complexity to the workflow. Of course, RAW images take up more space on a memory card, but this can easily be countered by shooting with larger cards. SD/SDXC memory cards are relatively inexpensive, so jumping from an 8GB to 16GB or 32GB card might only add $10–$20 to the overall cost of the card.
The real advantage to shooting RAW is an extra one to two stops of exposure latitude. Skies that are just a tad too bright can be “dialed down” in post, and shadow areas can be brightened up a bit without adding a ton of extra noise. Also, solid colors won’t have the appearance of “banding” that’s often visible in JPEG images, especially as you edit and re-save the images.
Aperture
The aperture value (Av) refers to the size of the lens opening, which determines how much light makes it through the lens. Since aperture values (or f-stops) are represented as fractions, the smaller values actually provide a larger lens opening – and a larger lens opening means more light will pass through the lens. This is a very simple definition of course, but what’s important to know is that a lens with a larger aperture will let a lot more light through to the camera sensor. To shoot the night sky it is highly recommended that you use a lens with a maximum aperture value of at least f/2.8.
Shutter Speed
Digital SLR cameras feature a mechanical shutter or “curtain” that sits between the camera’s image sensor and the rear opening of the lens. This shutter opens and closes based on the settings you choose and ultimately determines how long the image sensor will be exposed to the light coming in through the lens. Faster shutter speeds (1/250th, 1/500th, etc.) are used in sports because their speed helps to freeze the action, while slower shutter speeds (1 second,.5 second) are often used to create silky images of flowing rivers, since a slower shutter allows the image sensor to be exposed to light for a longer period of time, blurring and softening any motion in a scene.
A slower shutter speed allows more light to reach the image sensor (great for night photography), while a faster shutter speed allows less light to reach the image sensor (great for controlling too much light on a bright sunny afternoon).
When shooting the night sky we’ll be setting a very slow shutter duration of between 20 and 30 seconds. Because the sensor will be exposed for a long time, it is important to make sure that when framing the night sky you don’t have any bright lights around the area you’ll be shooting. Street lights, car headlights, and even a full moon may prove too bright for a slow exposure, and may ruin your attempt at capturing the night sky.
ISO Sensitivity
The ISO value is the digital equivalent of film speed. The higher you set it, the more light-sensitive the sensor becomes, with the trade-off being increased noise or “grain.” Despite some noise at a higher ISO setting, today’s cameras are still quite amazing. In fact, setting a newer model DSLR to ISO 1600 will produce less noise than a 4-year-old camera shooting at ISO 400. Not only have cameras become cleaner at higher ISO settings, software tools such as Adobe Lightroom allow you to clean up images even further.
Keep in mind that all cameras have a sweet spot and just because the camera claims its ISO can reach 52,000 or 102,400 doesn’t mean the image will look good at those settings. The Canon 5D Mark III, a camera I’ve been shooting with for a couple of years, has a maximum ISO rating of 102,400 – yet the highest setting I’ll shoot at is ISO 6,400. Any higher and noise really becomes a problem. Test your camera’s limits before deciding how high is too high.
When shooting the night sky, you’re asking your camera to record an image that even your eyes can’t see all that well. To do that will require using a “fast” lens (large aperture), a very slow shutter speed (25 seconds), and a high ISO setting (1,600–6,400). When these three items (aperture, shutter, and ISO) are combined, your camera will be able to record images that you won’t believe.
Focus
When shooting still frames for time-lapse, you don’t want your camera to change focus every time it takes another picture, so it is important to shut off autofocus when shooting time-lapses. Many photographers have never used manual focus before, but don’t let that scare you away. It’s as easy as turning on your camera’s Live View mode, switching your lens to manual focus, and turning the focus ring until the subject looks sharp on the monitor.
When shooting the night sky, focusing becomes a greater challenge. Since the camera is aimed into darkness, it’s difficult to know when the scene is in focus. A trick to focusing on the night sky is to aim the camera at whatever the brightest star is at that time, use the Live View zoom and magnify feature to make this object larger, and then turn the focus ring until the star looks sharp. Now you can re-compose your shot, being careful not to touch the focus ring.
NOTE: You may also have to turn on your camera’s Exposure Simulation mode, which makes it easier to view low-light scenarios on the camera’s LCD display.
White Balance
When shooting in RAW mode, the white balance setting isn’t really important; you can change it later. But you don’t want your white balance to shift from frame to frame, so it’s important that you do not set it to Auto. I usually set the camera’s white balance manually to between 3,800 and 4,200 degrees Kelvin when shooting the night sky, as this gives the sky a bit more of a blue hue. But ultimately I make my final decisions about white balance during post-production.
SETTING UP YOUR NIGHT SKY SHOOT
Sky Conditions
Sky Guide for iPad
When I refer to sky conditions, I’m not talking about the weather. It’s obvious that clouds will prevent a view of a star-filled sky, but less obvious is that there are better and worse times to shoot the night sky — and these change throughout the year. For example, as I write this article it’s 12:19 a.m. on Saturday, March 29, 2014. If my goal was to capture the Milky Way, I wouldn’t have much luck until after 2:00 a.m., since that’s when the brightest part of the Milky Way starts to rise in the east. As spring and summer progress, that time will get earlier and earlier.
You’ll also want to make sure that the moon has either already set or won’t be rising until you’re done capturing the sky. Most avid night sky photographers will wait for the days just before, during, and after a new moon.
How do you learn about sky conditions? Simple! Download one of many free or inexpensive apps. The ones I use are Sky Guide (iOS), Photo Pills (iOS), and Star Walk (iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Windows Phone), but there are plenty of great apps for both Android and iOS platforms. These mobile apps will use the device’s built-in GPS and compass to know exactly where you are and will show you the sky as it appears above you at any given day and time.
A popular app for the desktop is the free Stellarium app for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Good Composition
This is a very subjective aspect of photography, so I won’t go into what makes a good or bad composition. I will say that shooting the sky without anything else in the frame tends to be boring, so try to include something in the foreground. Photographs with layers tend to be more interesting than an image without.
Finding a Dark Sky Location
If you live near a major city (L.A., Boston, Houston, Chicago, Miami, Orlando, Salt Lake, Denver, etc.) you’re not going to have any success capturing the night sky; the light pollution will wash out any attempt. Remember the high ISO and long shutter speeds you’ll be using? These settings are designed to flood the camera sensor with as much light as possible — from the sky itself. Any ambient light from the ground will throw way too much light onto the sensor, thus washing out your attempts.
I teach night-sky workshops in Moab, Utah, because the sky there is so incredibly dark that you can see the Milky Way with just your eyes (after they adjust). However, you don’t need to travel to southern Utah to capture spectacular night sky photographs. Just drive 60–90 minutes away from the brightest, largest towns in your area. The darker the sky, the more stars you’ll see, but you don’t need total darkness to still have a decent viewing and time-lapse experience.
In the Boston area, for example, this means driving west towards the Berkshires, northwest towards Groton, Mass., or north into New Hampshire towards the Lake Region or White Mountains (beyond Manchester and Concord).
In Salt Lake City you could drive up into the mountains near Solitude, Alta, or Snowbird, which puts you above much of the light pollution from the city. You can also drive south to places around Spanish Fork or further south to the national parks.
A free iPhone app called DSM Lite (Dark Sky Meter Lite) will give you a light measurement of the night sky above you. There’s also a great tool online called the Clear-Sky Chart that will help identify the best time(s) in the next 24 to 48 hours to capture the night sky.
PHOTOGRAPHING THE NIGHT SKY
Okay, so now that you know where to shoot, it’s time to jump in and set up your camera to capture your first images of the night sky. Here are some settings that will get you started. Once you’ve seen the results from your camera, feel free to tweak these settings to achieve the best results from your setup.
Install a freshly charged battery Nothing will ruin a time-lapse quicker than a dead battery or full memory card.
Insert an empty 16GB or 32GB memory card A smaller 8GB card may work as well, depending on how many images your camera can capture in RAW mode.
Manual mode Place your camera into “M” or “MANUAL” mode.
f/2.8 aperture Set the lens aperture to its maximum setting. A lens with an aperture of at least f/2.8 works best, remembering that faster is better for night photography.
Wide-angle lens A lens with a focal length of 24mm or wider works best when capturing the night sky. But keep in mind your camera’s “crop” factor; if you’re shooting with a cropped-sensor camera then a 24mm lens actually performs more like a 36mm or 38mm lens, which isn’t ideal for night sky capture. Instead, you’ll want to shoot with a 14mm–16mm lens (or wider), which is equivalent to a 24mm lens on a full-frame camera. A lens in the 8mm–16mm f/2.8 range is a good choice for cropped-sensor cameras, while a 14mm–20mm f/2.8 (or faster) lens is a good choice for full-frame cameras.
Shutter speed of 25 seconds Set your camera’s shutter speed to 25 seconds. This should show up on your camera’s LCD display as 25”. Don’t confuse this with 1/25th of a second.
ISO 1,600 Set your cameras ISO to 1,600.
Set white balance to “Incandescent” or 3,800°–4,200° Kelvin Feel free to experiment with |
Russia despite recent concern over the U.S. commitment to European security.
Raimundas Karoblis told The Associated Press that he had no doubts about "the solidarity from any NATO country, including the United States."
U.S. President Donald Trump sparked anxiety at NATO with his election campaign suggestion that he might not help defend countries that don't pay their fair share.
A Nato soldier takes part in an exercise in eastern Europe More
Karoblis said the deployment of NATO troops to Lithuania, which borders Russia's Kaliningrad territory, is "a really powerful measure of the deterrence" the allies are providing.
He said that any "potential invader" of Lithuania and its Baltic neighbors Estonia and Latvia is now "calculating the consequences."
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis warned NATO allies this week to boost defense spending to 2 percent of economic output or Washington could "moderate its commitment" to the alliance.
Mattis declined on Thursday to say exactly what that meant. Only five countries - the United States, Britain, Estonia, Poland and Greece - are meeting the target, according to NATO figures.
1:44PM
Did Russia interfere in the election?
US intelligence agencies have already accused Vladimir Putin of launching an "influence campaign" to damage Hillary Clinton in a new report, writes David Lawler in Washington.
Some sources said British intelligence provided the tip about Russia's hacking of the Democratic Party.
his combination of pictures created on December 30, 2016 shows a file photo taken on December 28, 2016 of US President-elect Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin More
Russia showed a "clear preference" for Donald Trump, the president-elect, according to sources, and carried out cyber attacks and issued propaganda both to boost his chances and to undermine confidence in American democracy.
Mr Trump later insisted that foreign meddling had "absolutely no effect" on the outcome of the election, and declined to say whether he believed Russia was behind the hacks.
1:27PM
Trump lashes out at 'low life leakers'
Mr Trump was up early this morning and fired off a tweet aimed at those leaking sensitive information to the media.
The spotlight has finally been put on the low-life leakers! They will be caught! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 16, 2017
The president is waging war on his own intelligence agencies over “un-American” leaks that revealed that his campaign aides had been in regular contact with Russian intelligence officials and led to the resignation of his national security adviser.
Mr Trump has claimed intelligence agents with a political vendetta against him are responsible for “criminal leaks” aimed at undermining his presidency.The German appeal court has overturned a decision by the German Federal Patent Tribunal to declare Microsoft's patent for the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system invalid. In judgement number X ZR 27/07, handed down on Tuesday, the tenth civil division of the Karlsruhe-based court confirmed the enforceability of the company's commercial rights in Germany. It has not yet published its reasoning, but has confirmed the decision in a short press release (German language link).
The case revolves around patent rights for a "common namespace for long and short file names" conferred by European Patent Office patent number EP 0618540, which is based on US patent number 5,758,352. The common namespace solved the problem of short file names made up of a maximum of 8 characters encountered in older operating systems such as MS_DOS. The company applied for patent protection for the process of linking a second directory entry to the short file name allowing two-way access to the corresponding information.
In 2007, the German Federal Patent Tribunal declared that the invention had no right to protection under European law, as it was not the result of an inventive step. The court found that the patented method had in particular already been suggested by specifications for the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol (RRIP) for reading files on CD-ROMs, the first version of which dates from 24th July 1991. The group behind the protocol took it upon themselves to extend the ISO 9660 standard for directory entries so that it would also be possible to access CD-ROM content using POSIX file system semantics. This, according to the court, involved determining the location in which a file is stored using the process described in the Microsoft patent.
The German appeal court has now stated that it is unable to understand the lower court's interpretation. It takes a different view of the patent's meaning. It notes that the method of the patent enabled Microsoft to introduce the VFAT file system (in Windows 95), which allows long file names, but remains compatible with the original FAT file system. This solution is, according to the court, made possible by using the file attribute field when storing a long file name, causing the name entry to be ignored when processing data using this system.
According to the court, the method of the patent is to store two independent directory entries, one with a short name and one with a long name. By contrast, in RRIP "both names are contained in the same directory entry". The patent's inventor would have faced "other problems in overcoming" the eight character file name limit. The appeal court's decision brings it into line with the US patent office's assessment of the FAT patent. In early 2006, after lengthy deliberations, the latter confirmed the rights to protection conferred by patent number 5,579,517, claiming that the development was new and inventive.
Appeal court judgement X ZB 22/07 (german language link) of 20th January 2009 had previously reaffirmed the impression gained by critics of software patents that young judges at the Karlsruhe-based appeals court considered it a progressive move to fit in with European Patent Office case law and to interpret the non-patentability of computer programs "as such" accordingly. In a practice which has proved highly controversial, the EPO has long granted patents for "computer-implemented inventions". Last year a German appeal court judgement concerned patent rights for a "control system for investigative modalities"; The judges found that the key issue for whether a patent should be granted was "whether the method seen as a whole serves to solve a specific technical problem which goes beyond data processing."
(Stefan Krempl)
(Stefan Krempl / djwm)Hostess Brands Inc., Irving, Texas, will terminate its defined benefit plan, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. will assume its liabilities, said Lance Ignon, Hostess spokesman.
The news follows Hostess' announcement on Friday that it will close its business and sell off all its assets.
Hostess suspended payments to the 42 multiemployer pension plans to which it contributes in August 2011. “For active employees, the circumstances differ for each MEPP, so (participants) should contact the administrator of the MEPP” in which they participate, Mr. Ignon said in an email, citing an employee Q&A document. He could not provide further information by press time.
The company's IBC Defined Benefit Plan had about $56 million in assets and $111 million in liabilities as of April 30, according to the PBGC.
“PBGC exists to safeguard retirement security in uncertain times, and that's what we'll do for the 2,300 men and women in Hostess' single-employer plan if the company liquidates. The plan is underfunded by about $55 million,” said J. Jioni Palmer, PBGC spokesman, in an emailed statement.
“Hostess belongs to 42 multiemployer plans, but its liquidation wouldn't cause those plans to immediately become insolvent. PBGC doesn't take responsibility for multiemployer plans, but instead gives financial assistance to the plans that can't pay benefits,” Mr. Palmer said.
Kevin Olsen is a reporter for Pensions & Investments, a sister publication of Business Insurance.BEIJING—Flashing police cars guarded Beijing schools Tuesday and officers in another city were told they could shoot to kill to stop assaults on students, as Chinese authorities tried to assert control after three attacks last week left dozens of children injured. The government also banned further media coverage of the attacks, a watchdog group said.
Tuesday was the first day of classes in China since a farmer hit five elementary students with a hammer on Friday in the eastern city of Weifang before burning himself to death in the latest of the back-to-back attacks on children that shook the country.
"I was a little worried after seeing those reports on TV about the attacks," said Liu Xingwu, who took his 7-year-old granddaughter by bicycle to Shijia Elementary School in central Beijing. "The security measures are good. But we've also told her to be careful."
The government has sought to appear on top of the situation, with senior leaders urging improved school safety. But experts say the violence indicates a lack of support for the mentally ill in rapidly changing Chinese society and that official efforts so far have failed to address the social inequalities believed to have driven the violence.
Child safety touches a nerve particularly among people in the urban middle class, who invest huge amounts of money and effort in the education and care of their children. Most Chinese have only one child under the country's population control laws.
Recent scandals in which children have been the main victims have sparked public anger and occasional protests, such as when at least 3,000 children around the country were found to have lead poisoning from polluting factories built too close to villages, and in 2008 when tainted baby milk powder sickened more than 300,000 infants.
China's recent string of school attacks started when a man stabbed eight elementary schoolchildren to death in March in Fujian province. He was executed on April 28, the same day a 33-year-old former teacher broke into a primary school in the southern city of Leizhou in Guangdong province and wounded 15 students and a teacher with a knife.
The next day in Taixing city in Jiangsu province, a 47-year-old unemployed man armed with an 8-inch (20-centimeter) knife wounded 29 kindergarten students -- five seriously -- plus two teachers and a security guard.
China's education ministry on Tuesday again urged improved school safety, including guards with protective gear and patrols at the beginning and end of the school day.________________________________________
The Lives of Ordinary Tudor Women
by Elizabeth Norton
The Tudor age is often seen as an age of queens, with the six wives of Henry VIII and reigns of Mary and Elizabeth coming to characterise their respective periods. However, the vast majority of women ranked far below royalty. They were far below the nobility even, with their links to court and claims of kinship with the ruling dynasty. Seldom told, their stories can be just as dynamic as those of their social betters.
The early lives of most Tudor women were roughly similar, regardless of rank. All babies were swaddled at birth and all were baptised. They were weaned in the same way, with their mother or nurse carefully chewing food for their toothless mouths. There were toys, too, to suit all parental purses. Even the most destitute children could fashion a plaything from animal bones, scraps of cloth or wood, while children of all social levels played games and mimicked their elders in their play.
With female education becoming fashionable, a surprisingly high number of Tudor girls were able to attend school. It was not, of course, thought necessary to teach them Latin and Greek, or other subjects taught to boys at the new Grammar schools since (as one contemporary educationalist put it) ‘naturally the male is more worthy’. Nonetheless, a little reading, writing and accountancy could not hurt a girl and a great many were sent to local free schools to learn alongside their male peers. Even the very poorest families in Norwich in the 1560s sent their daughters to school, although older girls – from about the age of nine – were pulled out of their lessons to help support the family with spinning and other work.
Childhood for Tudor children ended in the early teens when almost everyone, from the highest and lowest, left home for the first time. While aristocratic and gentle girls could expect to be sent to serve a social superior, for poorer girls this usually meant a term of domestic service. Contracts were verbal and of one year’s duration, with neither the employer nor the employee permitted to end them early. The master would undertake to pay a wage, as well as provide board and lodging, while the servant performed domestic, farm or business tasks.
Occasionally girls were actually formally apprenticed, although in much smaller numbers than boys. In Tudor Bristol, many girls were apprenticed to learn housewifery, although there are examples of girls being apprenticed to male pinmakers or mercers. Women, too, could take over a family business when their husband died, or in some places start up their own business as a ‘femme sole’. Then, they could take their own apprentices, securing their admission to the prestigious livery companies which would not admit even the most successful women traders.
For most girls, service was brought to an end by marriage. At all social levels it was expected that there should be some love or, at least, a liking between the young couple, with poorer women usually more free to choose than their social superiors. Men were also advised to choose carefully, with contemporaries advising them to meet with their prospective mother-in-law to observe her behaviour, in the expectation that her daughter would follow her conduct. Men were cautioned to seek out meek and demure wives, skilled in sewing, spinning, knitting and keeping bashfully out of the way when strangers came to call. There was less guidance for women, although they were advised to avoid the ‘crocodile tears’ of young men. A woman’s reputation, once lost, could never be repaired and they must ensure that they were safely promised before they consented to consummate their relationships.
In the absence of reliable contraception, most wives soon became mothers, with women expected to do the bulk of the child rearing. At the same time wives were expected to have a good knowledge of cookery and household medicine making, as well as the skills to assist their husband in his business. Given the fact that women lived longer than men on average (in the Tudor period and now), most women could expect to be widowed at least once. Subsequent marriages were not uncommon, although sexual intercourse after the menopause was frowned on by the church – there was, after all, no prospect of a child.
Much is made of Elizabeth I’s concerns over her ageing and fading appearance, with sources claiming that mirrors were removed at court to stop the queen seeing herself as she truly was. However, old age was immeasurably harder for the queen’s poorer subjects. With no prospect of retirement, the elderly were usually forced to work until they were physically incapable. At the same time, aged women were viewed with suspicion. The author of the wildly popular Women’s Secrets, for one, believed that all women were toxic and that they could poison babies with one glance.
It was only a small step from this position to view the elderly as potential witches, with such unfortunate women always vulnerable to allegations of witchcraft. Poor Alice Samuel had only to visit her neighbour in Warboys in Huntingdonshire in 1589 to find herself accused of bewitching the household’s daughters. When one girl pointed to her and said ‘Grandmother, look where the old witch sits’, the die was cast. Poor Alice Samuel was later hanged for this supposed crime. Wealthier women were less vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft, but they did occur. Old age must have seemed a poor reward for surviving all the dangers of Tudor life.
Tudor women lived lives as varied as those of Tudor men, with social status and wealth particularly important in defining their daily activities. The idea that life could be divided into seven ages was a popular one in Tudor England, but very few women made it to their seventh age. Infancy, childbirth, accident and disease carried off most women long before they reached old age. It is perhaps no surprise therefore that, when questioned, many of the poor women of Norwich in the 1560s exaggerated their age, claiming to have reached the age of 100. They probably hoped for a place in one of the town’s charitable institutions – comfortable places to see out their final years.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Norton is a British historian that researches and writes primarily of the women contributing to English medieval history. With MA degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge and a MA degree in European Archaeology from Oxford, Elizabeth certainly is multi-talented and highly gifted. Elizabeth completed her doctoral research at King’s College, London where she researched the Blount family of Shropshire. Elizabeth also researched and released a non-fiction book focusing on the remarkable life of Elfrida, England’s first crowned queen, further broadening her expertise of England’s most remarkable female historical figures. For more information, visit Elizabeth’s website at ELIZABETH NORTON.
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To Purchase an Outstanding History Book by Elizabeth Norton,
CLICK THE LINK BELOW!!
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A noticeable trend is spreading in the far right, with attempts to rebrand and draw more mainstream elements into their movement. Electioneering for the Trump campaign, Blue Lives Matter, White Lives Matter and defense of Confederate symbol under the guise of southern heritage are a few examples. A branch of the WLM movement has been active in Houston, holding an armed protest in front of the NAACP office in August coupled with online organizing efforts. The bought-off press would like to portray this as an issue of Black Lives Matter vs White Lives Matter in a move to add legitimacy to an organizing push by the fash. They’ve glossed over the fact that all of organizers of the event come from various neo-fascist groups, The Aryan Renaissance Society, Traditionalist Workers Party, and the National Socialist Movement, to name a few.
The occupied indigenous land so-called Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas is no less than 200 miles from the other major cities in the region. This vast distance alienates us from the struggles of other urban centers, but we feel that the proliferation of the right must be confronted even outside of one’s locale. In this spirit, a contingent was mobilized to lend support to comrades in Houston.
The scene was confrontational, lacking the typical “liberal anti-fascism” and “peace policing.” Chants of “Follow your leader! Kill yourself!” and “Nazi Scum has got to go!” excited the crowd. An American Flag was destroyed which enraged the fash and brought raucous cheering from everyone. The crowd was diverse with a large section of people of color. Local militants set up a PA system and drowned out every attempt by the Nazis to speak. Despite a united distaste for fascists, some contradictions were visible amongst the people. While a large portion had a basic understanding of the role the pigs play in upholding white supremacy, some still spoke positively of the armed wing of the State.
White Lives Matter protest outside Antidefamation League Houston Tx pic.twitter.com/CkHo8FwuTA — Raven Carrington (@Ravenwolfmoon60) October 2, 2016
The State worked in conjunction with the Nazis and were obviously hostile to all counter demonstrators. At one point the crowd was notified that vehicles parked in private parking lots were to be towed, effectively thinning out the crowd. While this was not a surprise to us or those around us, it further reinforced the fact that white supremacy and the state are inextricably linked. Although the Nazis paraded around armed with long guns and knifes, the pigs always faced the counter demo with their backs to the white supremacist scum in an equally satisfying and disgusting reminder of who the pigs consider friend and enemy.
To limit our exposure to repression and ensure our protection we arrived masked up, tightly grouped, carrying our banners and flags. We were immediately surrounded by the state who confiscated our flags which they deemed to be “dangerous weapons” Obviously an attempt at political repression and limiting our tactical flexibility. A local involved in Cop Watch arrived and immediately began filming and the pigs switched to a tone more aligned with soft policing tactics.
The flip side of this was the large staging of the event with the entire block cordoned off; metal barricades, an estimated 50+ pigs on hoof, dozens on bikes, patrol cars constantly circling the block and horse mounted pork as well. We also noticed a large HPD box truck and a few personnel among the pigs dressed in military style digicam with no identifying insignia. A man without press credentials but with professional equipment mingled around the counter demo snapping pictures of people’s faces. The importance of masking up cannot be over emphasized. He was confronted by part of our group when he continued to take pictures after being asked not to. He denied his actions and became aggressive but left quickly.
We were enthusiastically greeted by other masked comrades but also immediately recognized the limitations of our tactical possibilities due to our lack of preparation for the state’s staging efforts. In the future more planning and familiarizing ourselves with the area beforehand is paramount. For instance, taking to the street that was only partially blocked instead of traveling through back alleys and parking lots might have gained us more flexibility in this context. Through conversations and what we experienced we see the possibilities of a broader anti-fascist network.
For more info read:
Crackers in the Concrete by Unity and Struggle
Houston: Whites Lives Matter Exposed as Neo-Nazi Front from It’s Going Down
Neo-Nazi members of ‘White Lives Matter,’ a front for the Aryan Renaissance Society (ARS).
AYN/WLM members.
Traditionalist Worker Party members (TWP) were also in attendance.
Support our work! Please donate:The Cherokee was an experimental rocket built by the Cook Electric Co. for use by the United States Air Force during the 1950s for the testing of ejection seats.
Made from aluminum,[1] Cherokee was a blocky, simple design that was designed for air-launch from a B-29 bomber.[2] It was operated as part of Project Whoosh, an effort to determine if the use of ejection seats at supersonic speeds was feasible.[3]
Launched from the B-29 mothership at an altitude of 6 miles (9.7 km),[4] it would fire a solid-fueled rocket to accelerate to supersonic speed, at which point the ejection seat, containing an anesthetized chimpanzee as a test subject, would be fired.[3] The first test took place on January 26, 1954, at Edwards Air Force Base; another test in June was held before the project moved to Holloman Air Force Base, with two further tests being carried out in July 1955 and April 1956.[5] None of the four chimpanzees used in the tests survived due to difficulties with the ejection system, however the project was considered a partial success.[5]Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
June 11, 2016, 5:41 PM GMT / Updated June 12, 2016, 12:18 AM GMT By Elisha Fieldstadt
ISIS claimed responsibility Saturday for suicide blasts that a monitoring group said left at least 20 people dead and more wounded in a predominantly Shiite suburb of Syria's capital.
The terror network released a statement claiming responsibility for killing and wounding more than 80 people in the Sayyida Zeinab area south of Damascus after three suicide bombers detonated two explosive belts and one car bomb, according to global security firm and NBC News analyst Flashpoint Intelligence.
People and Syrian Army members inspect a damaged site after a suicide and car bomb attack in south Damascus Shi'ite suburb of Sayeda Zeinab, Syria on June 11, 2016. OMAR SANADIKI / Reuters
State media said eight people perished in the blast. But the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 20 were killed and the death toll was expected to rise because more were in critical condition. Thirteen of the dead were civilians, while seven were pro-government fighters.
Sayyida Zeinab is home to a shrine of the same name that thousands of Iraqi and Afghan Shi'ite militia recruits visit before being assigned to the front lines to fight ISIS and other Sunni rebel groups.
Sayyida Zeinab has been a frequent target of bombings in Syria's civil war, now in its sixth year. On April 25, a suicide car bomb struck a military checkpoint, killing eight people, and in February, a series of blasts killed at least 83 people and wounded more than 170.
People and Syrian Army members inspect a damaged site after a suicide and car bomb attack in south Damascus Shi'ite suburb of Sayeda Zeinab, Syria on June 11, 2016. OMAR SANADIKI / Reuters
Syrian state TV aired footage from the blast site, showing several vehicles and shops on fire and at least two buildings whose balconies, doors and windows had been destroyed. Blood stains could be seen on the debris-covered road. Fire engines rushed to the scene to extinguish fires caused by the explosions.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a statement called the attack "appalling" and said "those responsible for attacks on civilians must be held accountable."
Washington condemned the attack in the strongest terms, said State Department spokesman John Kirby.
"This terrorist act demonstrates once again the inhumanity and brutality of all that (ISIS) does and all it stands for," he said.Americans are into whiskey. It makes sense: That wonderful whiskey variety known as bourbon is our country’s best known native spirit. But according to recent data, not everyone in the States likes to drink their whiskey the way their forefathers did. In a state by state breakdown, Jack Daniels is battling for the crown of most discussed brand with, of all liquors, Fireball.
The social drinking app BARTRENDr—which appears to have been named by a wordplay-loving tech guru who couldn’t figure out how to use his caps-lock button—recently analyzed posts and photos from its 700,000 users to determine the most popular liquor brand in every state.
In 42 states, whiskey took at least a share of the top spot (five states had multiple brands tied for the lead). Only Colorado (Bacardi), Connecticut (Patron), Massachusetts (Hennessy), New York (Hennessy), Oregon (Jose Cuervo), Virginia (Grey Goose), Washington (Patron) and Wisconsin (Captain Morgan) went completely against the whiskey grain (pun!).
Among the whiskeys, Jack Daniel's and Fireball found themselves on equal footing, with each being listed as most popular in 15 different states. Most of the other names on the list were some of your usual suspects: Crown Royal, Evan Williams and Jim Beam, though South Carolina stood out for their love of George Dickel.
Of course, the Achilles’ heel of these findings is that they rely solely on the data from an app that may skew toward younger partiers and people who, unlike your author, don’t consider “social drinking” sipping amaro with his cat.
Regardless, the data does speak to the exploding popularity of Fireball over the past few years. I’m sure Jack Daniel would have a thing or two to say about that.Most Popular Liquor in Every State | Create infographicsImages and info courtesy of Business Insider.
[h/t Business Insider]
Related: These Are the Beers Most Likely to Be on Menus in Every State
The United States of Beer: Who Owns Your Favorite Brewery
5 Classic Craft Beers that Shouldn't Be ForgottenAn 83-year-old retired Marine kept a promise he made to a fellow officer while they were hunkered down in a bunker during the Vietnam War.
Retired Marine Master Sgt. William H. Cox and Retired Marine First Sgt. James 'Hollie' Hollingsworth were shielding themselves from rockets and mortars in 1968 as they were fighting in the Marble Mountains during the war on New Year's Eve.
The two men, who were strangers to each other, had decided if they made it out of the bunker and survived the war, they would contact each other every New Year's Eve.
For the next five decades they kept that promise - every New Year's Eve they would catch up.
Earlier this year, Cox traveled from Piedmont, South Carolina, to see Hollingsworth, 80, in Hephzibah, Georgia.
The 83-year-old made the trip so that he could say goodbye to his dear friend who was dying.
Honor: Retired Marine Master Sgt. William H. Cox (left) kept his promise to stand guard at his friend's funeral, Retired Marine First Sgt. James 'Hollie' Hollingsworth on October 24
For decades, Cox (left) spoke to Hollingsworth (right) on New Year's Eve after they became close friends when they survived a 1968 NYE attack during the war. In July (above), Hollingsworth asked Cox to give the eulogy and stand guard at his funeral
The two men flew over 200 combat missions together, which resulted in Cox (left) to consider Hollingsworth (right) to be a 'brother'. The two men served in the Marine helicopter squadron VMO-2. Obviously, Cox agreed to honor his dear friend
While visiting, Hollingsworth asked his buddy to make him one last promise.
He asked him to stand guard over his casket and deliver the eulogy at his funeral, to which Cox accepted.
'I said, "Boy, that's a rough mission you're assigning me to there,"' Cox told Greenvilleonline.com.
A photo shared to Facebook by Hollingsworth's son shows the two men catching up like old times in deep conversation back in July.
'Two great Marines were reunited once again. These two flew over 200 missions on the same Huey in Vietnam,' his son wrote alongside the image.
'I have always been proud of my father and his service to our Country. Love hearing the stories from his closest friend.'
His son said the last thing Cox told Hollingsworth was a phrase they often exchanged when they closed their conversations - 'Hollie, you keep 'em flying, and I'll keep 'em firing.'
Cox, who served in the Marine helicopter squadron VMO-2 with Hollingsworth, made sure to keep his final promise when the time came months later.
The 83-year-old put on his dress blues and stood guard over his friend's casket during his funeral service on October 20.
He also delivered a heartfelt eulogy for Hollingsworth - whom he flew over 200 combat missions with during their time in the Marines.
When he closed the eulogy at his funeral last month, Cox (above in 2011) repeated a phrase he would tell his friend during their missions and when he would say goodbye to him on the phone: 'Hollie, you keep 'em flying, and I'll keep 'em firing.'
Closing the emotional eulogy, Cox repeated: 'Hollie, you keep 'em flying, and I'll keep 'em firing.'
A photo taken of Cox standing next to Hollingsworth casket was shared to Facebook by his son, Bill Cox.
'My 83 year old father, Master Sergeant William H.Cox, USMC, Retired, honoring one of his Vietnam brothers, First Sergeant James J. Hollingsworth (Hollie),' he captioned it.
'They made a pact to stay in touch, if they survived their tour, and they did. Both were door gunners, and dad was the only enlisted man in VMO-2 to be awarded the DFC in Vietnam.
'He has to use a cane most of the time now, but he insisted on not using it during his vigil at the casket and at the funeral.'
Since sharing the photo on November 5, the emotional photo has been shared thousands of times with many fellow Marines saluting the pair for their service.
Cox said that his bond with Hollingsworth as a Marine was 'different from any other branch of service' and that he considered him to be 'a brother.'Over the past few decades, the Earth's rising temperatures have slowly shifted the climate in many areas. That would be expected to cause species to shift in response, and a variety of studies have suggested they are. (You can see this clearly at the US Arbor Day Foundation, which has an animated map showing changes in plant habitats.) But most of these studies have looked at a limited number of species or a narrow geographic region, making it hard to put together a clear picture of global trends. Now, a study has combined a lot of the individual ones into a meta-analysis, and finds that species are shifting habitat faster than we had assumed, but aren't all moving towards cooler climes.
The authors looked at two classes of studies, ones that focused on changes in altitude (plants and animals moving uphill) and others that focused on changes in latitude, as species respond to a warming world by moving towards the poles. Although the result is a bit more global, it's still heavily biased towards Europe and North America (with Chile and Malaysia also making appearances). Still, the studies are enough to include over 1,300 species, which the authors consider in 23 distinct groups, divided by taxonomy and geography (in the authors' example, plants in Switzerland).
The mean travel poleward of all the species included in these studies was 17km a decade; vertically, the mean had a species moving 11m uphill. That's not especially speedy, but it's still two to three times faster than previous estimates had placed on these values. And over several decades, those kilometers can add up. Perhaps more significantly, two different tests indicated that species were moving the fastest in areas that are experiencing greater temperature changes.
The type of species involved doesn't seem to matter at all. "Much greater variation is associated with differences among species within a taxonomic group than between taxonomic groups," according to the authors, who note that bird species, which are relatively mobile horizontally, haven't tended to shift their habitats as much vertically. And over 20 percent of the species actually moved in a direction opposite from the one that would be predicted to be due to a warming climate. So, things are changing on average, but the details may vary considerably.
The authors point out that there are a lot of reasons some species may respond in a manner different from the average—everything from physiological differences to habitat fragmentation may play a role. Still, the study provides another indication that we don't have to look to any temperature gauges to see signs of a warming world.
Science, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1206432 (About DOIs).Turley'skeptical' of Pelosi support for truth commission David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Published: Friday February 20, 2009
Print This Email This Does the Bush administration get a pass for alleged abuses of power? Or will a Congress that's been reticent to investigate finally reverse course?
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Pelosi said she's supportive of contempt citations against several Bush administration officials, indicating that Karl Rove, President Bush's former political adviser, will likely be prosecuted.
However, on Thursday night, Constitutional attorney Jonathan Turley took exception to Pelosi, saying he is "skeptical" of her sincerity.
Asked by Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson if she supports Sen. Leahy's plan for a "truth and reconciliation commission" to investigate alleged Bush era crimes, she seemed to dodge the question.
"I support what Mr. Conyers is doing," said the speaker. "I look at it from the standpoint of a separation of powers. We believe there was a politicizing of the Justice Department under President Bush, that conversations took place at the White House that supported that activity. We asked for |
environment the hippocampus is thought to create a cognitive map of that environment, which can be reactivated to recall this map []. However, in 2011 a break with this standard view occurred []. The sequential pattern of hippocampal place cells during a sleep session was recapitulated while the animal was subsequently running on a linear track (after waking up), despite no prior experience of the track []. This phenomenon of de novo ‘pre-play’ argues for the existence of pre-configured sequential patterns in the hippocampus that the hippocampus ‘maps’ onto a new environment.
7 Silva D.
et al. Trajectory events across hippocampal place cells require previous experience. In a challenge to these findings, a recent study by Silva, Feng, and Foster [] reports that, although it is possible to observe de novo pre-play events, the occurrence of these events does not happen at a frequency above what would be expected by chance. Second, while a significant increase in the number of trajectory events can be observed after the animal's spatial exploration, these effects are mitigated with pharmacological blockade of NMDA receptors (disrupting synaptic plasticity) when administered before exploration. Together, these two observations suggest that trajectory events are experience-dependent.
How can we resolve the conflicting results surrounding the existence of de novo pre-play? To answer this, we raise three main issues, which we will refer to as the good news, the bad news, and the ugly truth.
The Good News: Internal Sequences Exist in the Hippocampus 8 MacDonald C.J.
et al. Hippocampal ‘time cells’ bridge the gap in memory for discontiguous events. 9 Villette V.
et al. Internally recurring hippocampal sequences as a population template of spatiotemporal information. For de novo pre-play to exist, the hippocampus must be able to generate an internal sequence, in other words a sequential pattern of place cell activity in the absence of a spatial trajectory. Substantial evidence now supports this. Time cells in the hippocampus exhibit responses tuned to time instead of, or in addition to, space []. If time cells do not require travel, then theoretically trajectory sequences can be generated without locomotion, and may not be fully determined by the spatial tuning of cells. Recently, hippocampal cells have been observed to exhibit repeated sequences of activation linked to the distance run on a wheel in the dark, providing further support for internal representations [].
The Bad News: We Can’t Predict the Future 2 Roumis D.K.
Frank L.M. Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples in waking and sleeping states. 3 Pfeiffer B.E.
Foster D.J. Hippocampal place-cell sequences depict future paths to remembered goals. 4 Ólafsdóttir H.F.
et al. Hippocampal place cells construct reward related sequences through unexplored space. 10 Wu X.
Foster D.J. Hippocampal replay captures the unique topological structure of a novel environment. Evidence suggests trajectory events can pre-play through previously explored space [], and even through unexplored space, when the path leads to a visible reward []. However, can trajectory events occur without any experience or knowledge of the environment? To explore this we can perform the following thought experiment. Imagine we observe two different trajectory events (A and B) repeating during sleep. If trajectories A and B do not share any place cells, we can assume that they represent different trajectories, while if instead the middle of both trajectories share the same sequence of place cells, then this would imply that the trajectories intersect. This means that we can infer information about the topology of the environment. This principle has already been demonstrated for replay events [], and thus might apply to de novo pre-play trajectory events. Except that, in a pure de novo state, one cannot predict the future. Thus either de novo pre-play only works on specific topologies, limiting its overall utility, or we have identified the neural correlate of pre-cognition.
The Ugly Truth: Statistics 2 Roumis D.K.
Frank L.M. Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples in waking and sleeping states. 7 Silva D.
et al. Trajectory events across hippocampal place cells require previous experience. How do we even know that a pattern of neural activity is replaying or pre-playing a trajectory? Since the discovery of hippocampal replay we have observed a rapid evolution of statistical analyses to measure: (i) the similarity between patterns of activity, and (ii) whether a pattern occurs above chance levels. These statistical methods have moved from pairwise correlation, combinatorics of short sequences, rank-order correlation, to Bayesian inference [], and most recently to using a multidimensional analysis of sequence correlation and jump distance []. Unfortunately, with the improved use of statistics has also come their misuse. For instance, it is important to compare like with like. Firing rates in place cells, as well as the behavioural and sensory experience of the animal, vary dramatically between sleep and awake states. Comparing trajectory events between these two states can be problematic, especially given that many of the methods employed depend on neuronal firing rates. Similarly, it is incorrect to compare the best correlation scores from multiple sequence templates with a single shuffled template. Another concern is the issue of event independence. Statistical methods generally assume that each event being compared is independent. We assume that each neuron generates its activity independently of the other neurons. However, some studies have treated all spikes generated by a neuron (rather than only the first spike) as independent events. This is problematic because place cells typically fire in bursts, generating non-independent events. 6 Dragoi G.
Tonegawa S. Preplay of future place cell sequences by hippocampal cellular assemblies. Finally, it is important to note that the strongest evidence supporting de novo pre-play has only found approximately 7% of trajectory events pre-playing a single trajectory []. Thus the number of pre-play events observed in these studies is more frequent than chance levels, but not by much. Therefore ‘statistical clarity’ is more important than ever to either properly dismiss or support the view that the hippocampus maps out the future de novo.
Acknowledgments D.B. received support from an ERC starter grant and H.J.S. received support from a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award.
Article Info Publication History Identification DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.01.003 Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc. ScienceDirect Access this article on ScienceDirectFilter your water today – Click HERE
PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — New research shows that fluoride chemicals added to U.S. public water supplies are not reducing tooth decay as promoted and promised by government agencies, reports the New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation, Inc. (NYSCOF).
sing federal statistics, the West Virginia University Rural Health Research Center reports that urban U.S. children, with more exposure to fluoridated water and dental care, have just as many cavities as less fluoridation-exposed rural children. (1)
The researchers write: “For children’s dental health measures, it was found that fluoridation rates were not significantly related to the measures of either caries or overall condition of the teeth for urban or rural areas.”
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says fluoridation reduces tooth decay. But, this study and others shows it hasn’t. Tooth decay crises are occurring in all fluoridated cities, states and countries. And, the CDC reports the incidence and severity of children’s primary tooth decay recently increased.
“Fortunes are wasted on fluoridation schemes that fail to prevent cavities while unnecessarily exposing children to fluoride’s adverse drug effects,” says attorney Paul Beeber, NYSCOF President.
New York City spends millions of dollars annually on fluoridation. Yet another study proves fluoridation fails in NYC also.
NYC’s Chinese-American 2-to-11-year-olds, living in the low-income area of Manhattan’s Chinatown have much more primary tooth decay when compared to white and other minority groups nationally (NYS Dental Journal June/July 2011).
Most of NYC’s Chinese-American children are U.S. born – 63% have primary tooth decay compared to only 38% of children in a national study.
The authors write, “This high prevalence of caries in the primary dentition is also similar to a national survey of children in mainland China, where three out of four children were found to be affected by caries in primary teeth,” averaging about 5 decayed teeth.
More evidence that fluoridation fails New York is here.
Legislation ( Int 0463-2011 ) is pending to stop fluoridation in New York City. Council Member Peter F. Vallone, Jr, the chief sponsor, says “There is a growing body of evidence that fluoride does more harm than good.”
“Fluoride is neither a nutrient nor required for healthy teeth. Fluoridation must end,” says Beeber.
Contact: Paul Beeber, JD, [email protected]
http://www.fluoridation.webs.com
http://www.FluorideAction.Net
SOURCE NYS Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation, Inc.The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies concludes the epic journey of Bilbo Baggins of the Shire and his legion of Dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield, under the guidance of Gandalf the Wizard, with a powerful, emotional finish. It begins right where part II left off, and wastes little time building towards the incredible war that is about to take place for the treasures of the Lonely Mountain. Thorin must decide if he should live in his Grandfather's footsteps and horde all of the gold that is rightfully his, or listen to his solemn friends at the end of their dangerous journey to reclaim their home. The Bard and his townsfolk want only enough of the treasure to rebuild their fire scorned town, while the Elves want their cut of the diamonds, and yet the Orcs and Goblins, led by Azog the Defiler, wish to claim this Mountain fortress for its strategic position in the land, under their master Sauron, who is confronted by Galadriel, Gandalf, Elrond and Saruman. When the Dwarf army enters the fray, war becomes inevitable despite the pleas of the burglar Hobbit, Bilbo and his golden ring of invisibility. Tamriel (smoothly weaved into the story and an original character not in the J.R.R. Tolkien Book) lends her support along with the expert marksman Legolas, as she must decide if Kili, the Dwarf she is taken with, will be worth pursuing during this great war. The expertly filmed battle endures through most of the film, yet keeps the audience compelled as we fight alongside our heroes and villains, while their stories unfold one last time.
Read moreTrio will be sentenced in October for what police call 'disgraceful attack'
A boy has been found guilty of raping a teenager in punishment for'spreading rumours' about his sister, who told the victim'snitches get stitches'.
Lacquan Weekes, 17, carried out the attack in an alleyway after being egged on by his sister Aliyah Weekes, 19, and a 16-year-old girl.
He was found guilty of rape, while his sister and the 16-year-old, who stood trial alongside him at the Old Bailey, were found guilty of aiding and abetting the attack.
Lacquan Weekes (left) raped the 15-year-old after his sister Aliyah Weekes (right) threatened her with violence
The 15-year-old victim, who cannot be identified, was made to perform a sex act on Lacquan Weekes, who is 10 days away from his 18th birthday.
She had left home on an evening in April to buy a drink and was confronted by the two teenage girls in a park in Willesden, north-west London.
Aliyah Weekes had told her'snitches get stitches' when she accused the victim of telling secrets about her and the 16-year-old.
Prosecutor James Dawes had previously told the court: 'It was Aliyah's idea. She was the one who said, 'Snitches get stitches'.
'She was the one who physically threatened (the victim) and said it was her who would punch her if she did not comply.'
Nine days earlier, Aliyah Weekes, the 16-year-old girl charged alongside her and the victim had been involved in an attack on a different girl in a park. The 15-year-old who was later raped had told police what had happened in that incident.
There were tears and wailing from the defendants in the dock as the jury came back after eight hours of deliberations to find the brother and sister and their friend guilty.
After the jury returned its verdicts, Judge Jeremy Donne, sitting at the Old Bailey, said: 'It seems to me there was degradation and humiliation which went beyond the commission of the acts.'
He described it as a'sustained incident' involving prolonged violence. He said: 'There is no doubt that the defendants acted together to commit the offence.'
The confrontation is said to have happen on a patch of grass outside the College of North West London campus in Willesden, north-west London (pictured) before the girl was led to an alley
The 19-year-old and the 16-year-old then forced her into an alleyway where she was forced to perform a sex act on the boy while they stood nearby, the court heard.
Afterwards, he grabbed her and tried to pull her back, but she managed to get away saying she wanted to go home, the court heard.
The victim's mother had become concerned when she did not come home by 10.30pm and had called police. All the defendants had denied the charges.
Aliyah and Lacquan Weekes were remanded in custody and the other defendant was bailed until their sentencing on on Friday, 17 October.
Investigating officer Detective Constable, Daniel Pegg, said outside court: 'This was a disgraceful attack during which the victim was surrounded, accused of betraying confidence, assaulted and then threatened with further violence if she did not comply with their demands.JYJ's Junsu has confirmed a total of five cities for his world tour in North and South America!
Starting August 30th, the tour will open up at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, a venue previously visited by popular artists like Puff Daddy, Nicki Minaj, and Nas. JYJ also held their showcase here in 2010.
On September 2nd, he'll be at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles where the likes of Jay-Z and Justin Bieber performed at in the past.
The tour will continue down to South America at the Blackberry Auditorium in Mexico City on September 6th, followed by Espa�o�Victory in Sao Paulo, Brazil on the 8th, and finally Teatro�Caupolican�in Santiago, Chile on the 10th.
Representatives of his concert hosts stated, "South American fans are ecstatic over news of Junsu's South American tour. Junsu's concerts have become a back to back hit. Realistically, we know that South American tours aren't affective income-wise, but we feel that this tour will have a positive effect through C-JeS Entertainment's promotional tactics."
Junsu expressed, "I recently stayed in the States where I worked on my single album and music video. I'm really satisfied with the results of it, and am filled with excitement and anticipation over meeting my fans all over the world once again."
His Asia tour will finish up in Hong Kong on August 7th.
Source + Photos: Kuki News via NaverNick Jonas, the cast of Happy Endings, Jodie Foster, James Corden, Ryan Murphy, and an anniversary celebration of Scream are among the big highlights at EW PopFest, presented by Entertainment Weekly in Los Angeles this coming October.
The event, held at The Reef in downtown Los Angeles, will include a performance by Jonas, special appearances from Corden, Foster, and Murphy (who will bring along cast members from his various television projects), and a live-reading of a never-before-seen Happy Endings episode from the cast of the beloved cult series.
Other highlights: first-look footage and special guests from Sony’s Dark Tower, the cast of The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend performing their musical mashups live, and a conversation between husband-and-wife YA superstars Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me) and Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children).
The weekend will conclude with a 20th anniversary Scream celebration, including a Wes Craven tribute, followed by an outdoor screening of the film. Additional programming will be announced in the coming weeks.
“EW PopFest is the latest example of the exciting brand extensions taking place at Entertainment Weekly,” said Rich Battista, President of the Time Inc. Entertainment & Sports Group and Video, in a statement. “These live events build and expand on the brand’s pillars of TV, movies, music and books, offering consumers and marketing partners dynamic interactive experiences from the most trusted source in entertainment and further accelerates Time Inc.’s goal of becoming a globally recognized force in live media.”
EW PopFest will take place from Oct. 29-30. A detailed schedule of events along with additional confirmed talent will follow. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to: http://ewpopfest.com/China says all VPN providers must get permission from government to operate.
China announces mass shutdown of VPNs that bypass Great Firewall
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology yesterday announced a major crackdown on VPN (virtual private network) services that encrypt Internet traffic and let residents access websites blocked by the country's so-called Great Firewall. The ministry "said that all special cable and VPN services on the mainland needed to obtain prior government approval—a move making most VPN service providers in the country of 730 million Internet users illegal," reported the South China Morning Post, a major newspaper in Hong Kong.
China's announcement said the country's Internet service market "has signs of disordered development that requires urgent regulation and governance" and that the crackdown is needed to “strengthen cyberspace information security management," according to the Post. The government said its crackdown would begin immediately and run until March 31, 2018.
Numerous Internet users in China rely on VPNs to access sites blocked or censored by the government's Great Firewall, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, The Pirate Bay, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many others. Apple recently pulled New York Times apps from its Chinese App Store to comply with Chinese regulations.
JOBTUBE: #1 FOR TECH JOBS IN CHINA
China's tightening of its already strict Internet censorship may be preparation for this autumn's 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, at which new party leadership will be elected. Besides the VPN crackdown, China on Saturday shut down "two websites run by a liberal Chinese think tank" and 15 other websites, the Post reported.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/china-announces-mass-shutdown-of-vpns-that-bypass-great-firewall/
GlobalNews: does this mean that they will start pulling VPNs from the app store? They've already got Apple to remove some "illegal" apps!!!
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TRUMP TO 'STOP CHINA' IN SOUTH CHINA SEA
READ MORE↙️↙️Square Enix Want To Bring Dragon Quest VII For 3DS To The West, But Aren’t Sure If It’ll Sell Enough
By Robert Ward. August 31, 2014. 9:28am
At PAX Prime, Siliconera caught up with Dragon Quest mobile producer Noriyoshi Fujimoto, and asked whether Square Enix were interested in publishing the Dragon Quest VII remake for the Nintendo 3DS in North America.
Dragon Quest VII is famously known for having perhaps the largest script of any game in the series, and this aspect of the RPG has often been presumed to be one of the reasons that Square Enix haven’t committed to localizing it yet. Fujimoto confirmed this when he spoke with us.
“In terms of DQVII, it has a lot of text to go through and translate,” Fujimoto said, “and we’ve received so many requests and so much positive feedback about the game, but unfortunately, we have to consider the cost and the manpower needed to handle the sheer load of text. In terms of scenario and script, the game is probably one of the largest in the DQ franchise. If a lot of people can buy it and support it… well, we can’t promise anything.”
“From Dragon Quest VIII and beyond, we’ve revamped the translation,” Fujimoto explained. “For example, we’ve added regional twangs like those from Baltic regions sounding Russian and things like that. We’ve also updated the spells and monster names, so any classic titles we revisit, we want to say consistent. That being said, when we go back and update the classic titles, we make these changes. That’s another step in the process.”
“Going back to people who want DQVII to come out… we’ve gotten a lot of requests, we really want to do it, but right now, we need to hammer out what kind of resources we’d need to do it. We say this a lot, but, we can’t seem to get to the point where it’s justifiable.”
So, here’s the deal. This is one of those cases where making noise is actually a productive thing to do. Square Enix want to bring Dragon Quest VII for 3DS over. They just need convincing that it’s worth their time and money to do so. So if you care about the game and want to see it published in the West, get out there and let them know. Do it via their official Twitter feeds, their Facebook pages. Send e-mails if you can. Get in touch with their community managers. (And do it politely.)
If you have trouble finding any of these things, Google is your friend. Let’s make this happen. The 3DS has proven to be a fantastic platform for JRPGs in the West already, not just in terms of quality but also in terms of sales. Square Enix have seen this firsthand in the case of Bravely Default. If they need to see fan support for Dragon Quest, showing it to them is a good first step.K is for Kettle Corn
Popcorn is a fairly common snack. It’s so easy to put those little packets in the microwave, press start, and come back in 3 minutes to perfectly popped kernels. Plus most companies have expanded their flavors choices to include more than just buttery popcorn, such as cinnamon, salty lime, cheddar cheese, and even spicy nacho, so there’s something for practically everyone. But despite all of those varieties, nothing beats simple stove-popped popcorn.
A number of years ago, I decided to always make my popcorn on the stove the old-fashioned way. I enjoy mine salted and lightly toasted, not quite burnt, and it’s much easier to achieve those flavors when I do it myself. Today, I refrained from either, choosing to make kettle corn for K. I thought it’d be pretty difficult to pull off that distinct flavor, mainly because vendors only sell buttered popcorn at movies, carnivals, and amusement parks, and I assumed that they don’t sell kettle corn because it’s harder to make. I couldn’t have been more wrong! This kettle corn only requires three ingredients and is ready to eat in a matter of minutes.
Kettle Corn
serves 4-6
When adding the sugar and kernels to the pot, be sure to stir the sugar throughout the kernels really well, leaving no clumps. Otherwise, some of the popcorn will be plain, while others will be dripping and over-coated.
3-4 tbsp vegetable oil
¼ c. white sugar
½ c. popcorn kernels
Heat oil in a large pot over medium heat. After a few minutes, add 3 kernels of popcorn and put the lid on. Once the kernels pop, add the remaining kernels and sugar. Stir well and coat all kernels evenly. Replace lid. Let pot sit for 3 seconds, then lift and shake, holding the lid in place. Return to heat. Repeat the sit-and-shake until the popping sounds slow down. It may take a few minutes for the kernels to pop after adding the sugar, so be patient! Remove the pot from heat, but continue the sit-and-shake for another minute. Pour kettle corn into a large bowl and let cool, stirring occasionally to prevent any large clumps. Serve warm or at room temperature.
My favorite part about making popcorn is watching the little kernels burst, and my secret dream is to someday leave the lid off and let them fly all over the kitchen. I kept the lid on it this time, but no guarantees about the next…
Advertisements(Adds comments from legal experts and trading firm executive)
By Karen Freifeld
NEW YORK, March 19 (Reuters) - Marketwired, a company that publishes and distributes corporate earnings and other market-moving news releases, said on Wednesday it would no longer sell directly to high-frequency trading companies.
The change came as New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman investigates early access to information by technologically sophisticated traders. It followed a similar decision last month by Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s Business Wire.
Marketwired said in a statement it would no longer provide its distribution service to high-frequency trading firms to “eliminate any perceived advantages gained through technology by certain customers.”
“This is another important step forward in bringing an end to Insider Trading 2.0,” Schneiderman said in a statement Wednesday, referring to his wide-ranging crackdown on traders who exploit technology to obtain information fractions of a second earlier than others.
“High-frequency traders who drain the value out of market-moving information in the milliseconds before it becomes widely available... skim from the rest of the investing public, which hurts the entire market,” Schneiderman said.
Marketwired, whose majority owner is the Toronto-based private equity firm Omers, distributes corporate press releases and financial disclosures to the media. Some are inconsequential while others are regulatory filings that push stocks higher or lower.
By subscribing to Marketwired’s direct-data feeds, high-frequency trading firms could take advantage of the split second difference between the time a company releases information to subscribers and when news wires send that information to the broader market, Schneiderman said.
The time lag allows high-frequency trading firms to trade on the information ahead of other investors, Schneiderman said.
Marketwired said in its statement it would “continue to provide full and fair, simultaneous disclosure of information.”
The company said it made its decision before consulting with Schneiderman and later notified him.
Last month, Business Wire agreed to stop the sale of its releases to high-frequency trading companies after discussions with the attorney general’s office, a source said at the time.
After consulting with Warren Buffett, Berkshire’s chairman, Business Wire decided the practice could hurt the company’s reputation, not because traders received a time advantage, Business Wire’s chairwoman, Cathy Baron Tamraz, said in a statement.
James Cox, a professor at Duke University School of Law, said Marketwired’s decision was a reflection of the legal, social and political reality “that everyone should have access at the same moment, whether or not it makes a big difference.”
Columbia Law School professor John Coffee said getting Marketwired to stop selling to traders was much easier than effecting change to more critical practices such as stock exchanges allowing firms to use direct feeds that give them price data milliseconds earlier than others.
Schneiderman said on Tuesday he was expanding his investigation to include high-tech services provided by U.S. stock exchanges and alternative trading venues that may give advantages to high-frequency traders.
“The issues involving the release of price data are far more important and give a more material advantage to the favored recipient,” Coffee said.
He added: “I don’t think it will motivate the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq to change their behavior because the stakes are higher for them.”
Mark Gorton, chief executive officer of Tower Research Capital LLC, a high-frequency trading firm, said it was a “noble goal” to make sure no one got a jump on data, but the markets were working “quite well now.”
“There is a level playing field in a way that never existed before,” Gorton said. “The competition is driving the markets to incredible levels of efficiency. The high-frequency trading firms are bashing each others’ brains over fractions of a penny.”
Earlier in his probe, Schneiderman sought to end early access to analyst and consumer sentiment. BlackRock Inc, the world’s largest asset manager, in January agreed to end its analyst survey program, which he said could be used to get information about upcoming revisions to published views on companies.
Eighteen other financial companies, including UBS AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co, also agreed to temporarily stop responding to such surveys in relation to companies listed on U.S. exchanges.
Last year, Thomson Reuters Corp suspended its early data release to a small group of clients of the widely watched Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment data. (Editing by Stephen Powell, Steve Orlofsky and Amanda Kwan)Mark Mardell, the BBC’s North American editor, issued a mea culpa of sorts today after Jonathan Karl at ABC News dropped his bombshell that proves beyond any doubt that the Obama Administration lied about its involvement in editing the CIA’s talking points surrounding the September 11 attack on our consulate in Libya.
In a piece titled, “After Benghazi revelations, heads will roll,” Mardell writes, “In the interests of full disclosure I have to say I have not in the past been persuaded that allegations of a cover-up were a big deal.” He adds, “It seemed to me a partisan attack based on very little.”
That all changed with today’s revelations. Mardell now believes:
This is the first hard evidence that the state department did ask for changes to the CIA’s original assessment.
Specifically, they wanted references to previous warnings deleted and this sentence removed: “We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qa’ida participated in the attack.”
There’s little doubt in my mind that this will haunt Hillary Clinton if she decides to run for president, unless she executes some pretty fancy footwork.
State department spokesperson Victoria Nuland is directly implicated, and the fingerprints of senior White House aides Ben Rhodes and Jay Carney are there as well.
If the rest of the mainstream media shows the integrity Mr. Mardell just did, the Obama Administration is about to finally be held accountable for an unforgivable coverup that started back in September and has lasted straight through to today.
Big hat tip to @RaganEwing.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
Obama never mentioned Trump’s name during a speech in Montreal, but he obliterated Trump’s vision of an America that withdraws from the world and lives in a society of bigotry and division.
Video:
Obama took on Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the rest of the world by saying, “In an age of instant information where TV and Twitter can feed us a steady stream of bad news, and sometimes fake news, it can seem like the international order that we created is being constantly tested and that the center may not hold, and in some cases that leads people to search for certainty and control, and call for isolationism or nationalism, or they can suggest rolling back the rights of others, or simply they can try to retreat and suggest that we have no obligations beyond our borders or beyond our communities, beyond our tribe.”
Obama stressed that we need to replace fear with hope, and later he added. “When we lead with our hopes and not our fears, we are capable of doing things that other nations can not do.”
Near the close of his speech, the former president said, “I am convinced that the future does not belong to strongmen. I believe equally that the liberal international order based not juat on military power or national affilitations, but on principles, on rule of law, on human rights, on individual freedoms, on empathy, on understanding across cultures, that’s our only choice.”
For those in US and around the world who are worried about American leadership, Obama’s speech was reminder that Trump is a speed bump in the road of progress. The former President explained why the backward ideology of Trump is doomed to fail. Trump’s America First slogan is an excuse for isolation, withdrawal, and US abdication of global leadership.
Obama obliterated the ideology behind Trump and in the orocess does what he does best. Barack Obama stepped onto the world stage and provided a forward thinking vision that eloquated his faith in hope and believe that progress always wins.
The former president demonstrated that he is everything that Donald Trump never will be.
Barack Obama is a real president.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:Caucuses are only the first stage in key voting states’ selection process and provide a litmus test for which party candidates could fare well in the primaries
Countdown to Iowa: a caucus guide for what to know about America's first vote
The Iowa caucuses are a unique political institution that play a crucial role in the American primary process. However, they aren’t particularly intuitive to understand or follow. (Even though we’ll be live-blogging them all day and night at the Guardian from here across the first-in-the-nation voting state.)
What time do the caucuses start?
The caucuses start at 7pm local time on Monday, but campaigns encourage their supporters to show up half an hour early.
How do the caucuses unfold?
Very different rules govern the Democratic and Republican caucuses:
Republicans have a relatively straightforward process, in which they cast secret ballots in their precinct caucuses – church halls, school buildings.
By contrast, Democrats vote publicly in a two-stage election where candidates must get support of 15% of caucus-goers in each individual precinct to be viable. If they fall below that threshold, their voters need to choose another candidate or go home. After that redistribution, votes are counted and from those totals, delegates are assigned.
Lessons from Iowa: real caucus victory comes from beating expectations Read more
Can unregistered voters take part?
Any Iowan who will be over the age of 18 at the time of the presidential election (on 8 November) can participate. Attendees can register on the night at the caucuses and can switch their party affiliation there as well. This means a Democrat can go to the Republican caucuses and vice versa. Four years ago, 121,503 people showed up to the 2012 Republican caucuses. Democrats have traditionally had higher turnout and, in their last competitive caucus in 2008, 239,872 people attended.
What happens then?
The caucuses are political party-run processes with no state involvement, so the reporting of results doesn’t happen through state election officials. Instead, local volunteers at each caucus location across Iowa’s 99 counties report them. This means there can potentially be many hiccups:
For Republicans, the ballots are tallied and counted at each caucus site and reported to the state party.
Under the Democratic system, only the actual number of delegates pledged to each candidate is reported and not any actual vote counts.
Barring reporting issues, a clear idea of the results should emerge by around 9.30pm local time.
How are delegates decided?
American presidential primaries are all about electing delegates to the party conventions which are staged over the summer and where nominees to run for president will formally be chosen. The caucuses don’t formally select those delegates. Instead, they represent the first stage in Iowa’s multi-part selection process, but campaigns and the media will be able to extrapolate how many delegates they will receive based on Monday’s result.
After Iowa, three more states – New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada – will hold standalone, early contests in February. Then, starting 1 March, the calendar starts to fill up, beginning with “Super Tuesday”, when 12 states will hold nominating contests. The primary election will then continue until 7 June, when the final six states, including California, hold their elections.
Where will the candidates be on the night?
How the Iowa caucuses work: a confusing election process explained Read more
Most candidates will be holding election night parties in and around the state capitol of Des Moines on Monday night to watch the results. Some are already in New Hampshire, though. Ohio governor John Kasich has long since written off Iowa to campaign almost exclusively in the Granite state and former Florida governor Jeb Bush will fly to New Hampshire on Monday after a last minute campaign swing through Iowa. Both candidates are currently polling at 2% in Iowa.
What happens next?
Most of the candidates will go off to New Hampshire with charter planes expected to depart Des Moines for Manchester sometime after midnight on Tuesday morning. However, one or two Republican candidates may try to skip New Hampshire to shore up their campaigns in South Carolina, which holds the third Republican primary this year, and it’s likely that at least one candidate will end their campaign after Iowa.
• This article was amended on 4 February 2016 to clarify the answer to “Can unregistered voters take part?” An earlier version said “Any Iowan over the age of 18 can participate”.Expand Workers at mass burial site putting bodies in bags in Sloviansk on July 24, 2014. Human Rights Watch
Today, Ukrainian authorities exhumed a mass grave in Sloviansk, in eastern Ukraine. By the time I left the site, they had discovered eight decomposed bodies and they were still searching for more. From April until July 5, the city, now back under Ukrainian government control, had been under the control of anti-government insurgents.
Two neighbors who usually walk their dogs on the lawn next to the burial site told me that on the morning of June 11 an excavator arrived and dug a hole. Later, they said, they saw two men in camouflage drive a truck to the newly dug hole and dump in bodies wrapped in cellophane. The women said the truck returned to dump more bodies an hour later, perhaps 15 altogether.
It’s too soon to say whether the people buried there were victims of a crime. Several local residents believed the bodies came from the nearby morgue. At the time the bodies were allegedly dumped, there was no electricity in parts of Sloviansk, which would have caused a problem for refrigeration facilities used to store bodies in the morgue. When the women asked the insurgents who was being buried, the insurgents said they were unidentified bodies.
According to the two neighbors, later that evening the insurgents brought two priests to the grave, who seemed to be saying a prayer over the burial site.
Among the police, forensic experts, and journalists standing around the grave witnessing the exhumation, there were several local residents searching for loved ones who went missing when insurgent forces |
C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0033R1, Re-enabling shared_from_this (revision 1).
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0005R4, Adopt not_fn from Library Fundamentals 2 for C++17.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0152R1, constexpr atomic::is_always_lock_free.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0185R1, Adding [nothrow-]swappable traits, revision 3.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0253R1, Fixing a design mistake in the searchers interface.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0025R0, An algorithm to "clamp" a value between a pair of boundary values.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0154R1, constexpr std::hardware_{constructive,destructive}_interference_size.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from option #2 in P0030R1, Proposal to Introduce a 3-Argument Overload to std::hypot.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0031R0, A Proposal to Add Constexpr Modifiers to reverse_iterator, move_iterator, array and Range Access and apply the resolution of LWG Issue 2296 - std::addressof should be constexpr. This issue is published in P0304R0.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0272R1, Give'std::string' a non-const '.data()' member function.
Apply to the C++ Working Paper the Proposed Wording from P0077R2, is_callable, the missing INVOKE related trait.The Canadian Press
NEW YORK -- The National Lacrosse League added a fourth Canadian franchise on Thursday by giving unanimous approval to a plan for the Washington Stealth to relocate to the Vancouver area.
The Vancouver Stealth will play at the Langley Events Centre starting in the 2014 NLL season, the league said in a statement.
The Stealth, previously based in Everett, Was., have been one of the most successful franchises in the nine-team league over the past five years. The team reached the final in three of the last four seasons and won the championship in 2010.
"The Stealth will represent and draw from all over the Metro Vancouver area and beyond," said Langley Mayor Jack Froese. "The township of Langley is extremely proud to have the Stealth and the NLL call the LEC home.
"We welcome our residents and visitors to the township who look forward to watching and cheering for the Stealth."
The Toronto Rock, Calgary Roughnecks and Edmonton Rush are the other Canadian franchises in the nine-team league. Details on the Vancouver Stealth's ticket pricing, season tickets, sponsorships and other plans are expected to be released next week.When this first popped on Reddit, I was positive it was a fake, yet hilarious, photoshop job.
But Class Struggle is a real board game, released in 1978 by NYU professor Bertel Ollman. It was even translated into multiple languages, including Spanish and German.
Besides Class Struggle, Ollman has a number of notable accomplishments. First, looking awesome. Second, he was Sean Hannity’s professor at NYU. Hannity accused Ollman of giving him a poor grade at NYU for being a conservative, a claim Ollman rebuked on Fox New’s “Hannity & Colmes.”
Class Struggle was published by board game maker Avalon Hill. In the game, according to Board Game Geek, “the Workers move around a board while trying to survive against the Capitalist who control everything. As the Workers unite they take power from the Capitalist players but if they do not succeed in uniting the Capitalist will win.”
Many of the rules are just like real life capitalism: you don’t get to pick what class you play as, and if you’re one of the lower classes, sucks for you. Capitalists get to roll first and decide the turn order of the game.
The game is now hard to find, and one copy on Ebay is currently going for over a hundred dollars. A copy is on sale on Amazon for $177 as well.
You can read the rules here, and check out more pictures below or.
Chance Cards:
[H/T Reddit, Images: Imgur]A Contemplation on Music
Have you seen the welcome address to parents of the incoming freshman class at Boston Conservatory? It was delivered by Karl Paulnack, director of the music division at Boston Conservatory.
One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.
The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works. One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.
Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.
Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture why would anyone bother with music? And yet from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning. ”
On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless.
Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.
And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang We Shall Overcome. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.
From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts.
Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects. I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.
I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.
Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier even in his 70¹s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.
What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle.”
How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me? Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.
What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:
If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft. You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevys. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor or physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should it together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.Unions have been at the forefront of drives to raise the minimum wage to $10, $12, or $15 an hour. Take Fight for $15, funded by the Service Employees International Union, demonstrations that occur regularly outside fast food outlets. Or, take Black Friday demonstrations outside Walmart, organized annually the day after Thanksgiving by OUR Walmart, funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers. But now that unions have achieved their goal in Los Angeles, their leaders want to exempt unionized workplaces from the minimum wage hike.
Reasonable people might think that unions’ battles to raise the minimum wage are motivated by concern for low-income Americans. The union-funded Los Angeles campaign, Raise the Wage, stated, “Raise the minimum wage -- and not just a little, but enough to bring the hundreds of thousands of Angelenos who power our economy into the middle class. It's good for business, it's good for taxpayers, and, most of all, it's the right thing to do for workers, who have earned it.” The Los Angeles City Council was persuaded, and voted to increase the minimum wage in Los Angeles to $15 an hour. (For prior E21 coverage by Jared Meyer see here.)
Although the union-funded Raise the Wage campaigned so vociferously in favor of a $15.25 minimum wage, unions are seeking exemptions from the higher wages for their members. The exemption, or escape clause, would allow them greater strength in organizing workplaces. Unions can tell fast food chains, hotels, and hospitals that if they agree to union representation, their wage bill will be substantially lower. That will persuade employers to allow the unions to move in.
One of the leaders of the Raise the Wage coalition, Rusty Hicks, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, stated, “With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both. The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them. This provision gives the parties the option, the freedom, to negotiate that agreement. And that is a good thing."
Everyone wants to “negotiate an agreement that works for them both,” in Hicks’s words. Teens that need summer jobs would like to work out such agreements, as Meyer and I show in our new book, Disinherited: How Washington Is Betraying America’s Young, so they can get their foot on the first rung of the career ladder. But unions are only in favor of exemptions for organized labor.
Once the higher minimum wage bill is signed into law, with the exemption for unions, then organizing becomes a win-win for employers and unions. Unions get initiation fees of about $50 per worker and a stream of dues totaling 2 percent to 4 percent of the workers’ paychecks. Employers get a lower wage bill.
The losers in this scheme are employees, who have to pay union dues out of their paychecks. Jobs become more scarce as wage levels rise and some less-skilled workers become unemployed.
Los Angeles unions have not yet won the exemption to the $15 minimum wage they desire. But other unions have. In many cities unions support minimum wage hikes, and then negotiate an exemption, in order to force employers to unionize.
Consider the minimum wage increase for hotels close to Los Angeles Airport that was passed in 2006. Under the Hotel Worker Living Wage Ordinance, employers had to pay $9.39 an hour if health insurance was provided, and $10.64 an hour without health insurance. Unionized hotels were exempt.
In California, San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, Long Beach, and San Jose all have minimum wage laws with exemptions for unionized workplaces. One example: The San Jose Minimum Wage Ordinance contains Section 4.100.050, entitled Waiver Through Collective Bargaining, that states, “…all or any portion of the applicable requirements of this Chapter may be waived in a bona fide collective bargaining agreement, provided that such waiver is explicitly set forth in such agreement in clear and unambiguous terms.”
Further north, Seattle-Tacoma Airport had the first $15 minimum wage in the United States, voted into law in 2013. Yet employers that have collective-bargaining agreements are not subject to the higher wage. Section 7.45.080 of the SeaTac Municipal Code reads, “All of the provisions of this chapter, or any part hereof, including the employee work environment reporting requirement set forth herein, may be waived in a bona fide collective bargaining agreement…”
Union exemptions to minimum wage laws are not limited to the West Coast. They can also be found in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois.
Unions are resorting to campaigning for higher minimum wage laws and then carving out exemptions for themselves because they are desperately short of members. Their membership has been steadily declining over the past three decades. In 1983 (the earliest year with comparable data), 20 percent of American workers belonged to unions. By 2014 only 11 percent of American workers, and only 6.6 percent of private sector workers, were union members. Union membership is 3 million below 1983 levels, despite an increase in employment of 48 million.
Instead of exempting union workers from the minimum wage, it would make sense to exempt teens and low-skill workers, because they are the ones most harmed.
Rather than caring about low-income Americans, unions care about their own power. Dues and initiation fees are often used to pay for political contributions. Unions donated $60 million to the 2014 campaign, almost all to Democrats. Don’t expect municipalities with Democrat governments elected with these donations to stand in the way of union hypocrisy.
Interested in real economic insights? Want to stay ahead of the competition? Each weekday morning, e21 delivers a short email that includes e21 exclusive commentaries and the latest market news and updates from Washington. Sign up for the e21 Morning eBrief.Last year’s post-Brexit decline is reversed as Ucas receives more than 61,000 applications by early October deadline
Britain’s universities appear to have avoided a repeat of last year’s post-Brexit slump in applications, with figures showing record numbers of students competing for prestigious Oxbridge and medical school places.
Led by increases in prospective students from inside and outside the European Union, as well as higher numbers applying from England and Wales, Ucas received more than 61,000 applications for places by its early October deadline.
The total – the highest on record – marks a turnaround in the numbers applying since last year when Brexit was blamed for a fall-off in applications especially among EU students, which were down by 9% in October 2016.
In England the enthusiasm comes from this year’s students taking A-levels who are applying for places on the most competitive courses in record numbers.
“At a time of uncertainty it’s encouraging that UK higher education remains so attractive, not only to UK students but also those from EU countries and internationally,” said Clare Marchant, the Ucas chief executive.
“However, we’ll need to wait until after the 15 January 2018 deadline to understand what the overall demand for UK higher education looks like,” she added.
MPs demand urgent action from Oxbridge to widen admissions base Read more
The early deadline is reserved for applications to high-demand courses requiring interviews and entrance exams, such as medicine, dentistry and veterinary sciences, as well as undergraduate courses at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
About a third of the October deadline applicants are applying to study medicine. This year there were nearly 21,000 applicants to medical schools, the largest number since 2014.
The improvement in both EU and non-EU numbers comes after UK universities have ramped up their overseas student recruitment strategies. Many universities that had placed little effort into recruiting EU students – for which they receive the same tuition fees as UK students – have become more active in the past year, to prepare for post-Brexit competition.
International students from outside the EU saw the biggest surge as their numbers rose by 12% – an additional 1,350 applications – well above the increases of about 1% seen in recent years.
EU applicants for 2018 places were up by 6%, partially reversing the fall of 9% last year but still remaining below the levels seen in the years before the Brexit referendum result.
“With 6,610 applicants at the October 15 deadline, there are more applicants domiciled in the EU than in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales combined,” Ucas analysts noted.
The large increases in terms of numbers came from England, with a 7% rise compared with the previous year. That means about 2,500 more students from England are applying to the most competitive courses, adding to the highest total in five years.
In particular there was a 13% increase in first-time applicants in England applying to medical schools and associated courses – suggesting that any fears over the NHS’s future are not dissuading students from a career in medicine.
A report by the Sutton Trust published on Thursday suggests that some prestigious courses could be even more competitive if universities were willing to tailor their admissions to help disadvantaged applicants.
The report argues that lowering A-level requirements for disadvantaged pupils by just two grades – such as ABB rather than AAA grades – could lead to a 50% increase in the number of pupils on free school meals being admitted to leading universities.
The Sutton Trust said that while many universities already use social and economic contexts in making offers, most give little or no information to applicants about which factors they look at.
“This lack of transparency means that potentially eligible students – often those with fewer networks and least access to information – may be unaware that they could benefit,” the trust said.U.S. Pushes Back Against U.N. Anti-Violence Resolutions
The Donald Trump administration is trying to limit the scope of United Nations anti-violence resolutions that aim to bolster protections for women and children.
The fight is playing out in closed-door U.N. negotiations, with a legalistic U.S. approach meant to defend states’ rights under the U.S. Constitution, including the right of parents and schools to physically discipline children.
But other U.N. delegates and critics say that the American stance could set back international efforts to secure legal protections from violence for women and children around the world. For instance, Russia largely decriminalized acts of domestic violence earlier this year.
American conservatives have long been suspicious of what they see as U.N. threats to U.S. sovereignty, and especially U.N. efforts to broaden the rights of children. They view those efforts as a threat to parental control over their offspring and to the practice of corporal punishment, which is still legal in public schools in more than 20 states in the United States, particularly in the South. The United States is the only country in the world that is not party to the 1990 Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The point of the first resolution under consideration at the U.N., said one of several delegates who spoke to Foreign Policy on condition of anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations, is to “press the principle that it is never okay to use violence against children.”
The nub of the matter: the condemnation of “all forms of violence.” The United States proposed replacing that with the phrase “unlawful violence,” according to a copy of a confidential negotiating text reviewed by FP.
During a closed-door meeting on Nov. 3, the U.S. delegate noted that some mild forms of violence against children — including corporal punishment — are legal in the United States and many other countries, according to several diplomatic sources.
U.S. government lawyers say “they need to use the term ‘unlawful’ in order to safeguard States’ rights,” the delegate added. But the U.S. proposal raised concerns among several delegations that Washington wants to preserve legal wiggle room to justify some acts of violence.
“We had a pretty absurd discussion on the Convention for the Rights of the Child,” said one European ambassador. “They want to speak of unlawful forms of violence against children, implying there are lawful forms of violence against children.”
The U.S. diplomatic push comes amid conservative fears of legal liberal overreach.
“There seems to be an expanding definition of what violence means that is pretty concerning,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer. He noted reports that controversial speech can sometimes be considered violence on college campuses. “This language opens the door to an expansive definition of violence and could come into conflict with the way we understand it,” he said.
Still, since General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding, “I’m not sure how much efforts should be put into this,” he said.
On Monday, the European Union, which is leading the negotiations over children’s rights, plans to formally present its anti-violence resolution without including Washington’s amendment. That would leave the the United States two main options. It could back down, allowing the resolution to be adopted, and then state U.S. reservations. Or it could force the General Assembly to put the measure to a vote, a strategy that would likely highlight Washington’s isolation.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations declined to comment while the talks are underway and did not respond to a request to identify the U.S. negotiators.
During that Friday meeting, the U.S. delegate also noted that other offensive activities, such as pornography, have legal, constitutional protections in the United States.
“The room was taken aback,” said one European diplomat.
The chairperson responded that child pornography is illegal in the United States, and asked the official to seek clarification on his government’s position. But in an effort to address U.S. concerns, the European Union agreed to amend the language to make it clear it was only condemning child pornography. The United States has not raised any concerns about pornography during subsequent negotiations.
The negotiations are playing out against the backdrop of a growing international movement to end corporal punishment. Currently, 53 nations have laws prohibiting the use of corporal punishment against children.
A majority of U.S. states have outlawed corporal punishment in schools, including the use of a wooden paddle. But several states, particularly in the Midwest and South, preserved the practice, with 15 states still explicitly permitting it as of 2016. A 2009 study by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch of the practice’s application showed that it was primarily used to discipline children with disabilities.
The U.S. position hasn’t won any support, even from among the nearly three dozen countries that allow some form of whipping, flogging, or caning of minors. Delegates from countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Singapore say the U.S. proposal is not necessary.
U.S. pushback hasn’t been limited to violence against children.
A draft resolution obtained by FP shows that the Trump administration also sought to remove language granting detained children the legal right to “maintain contact with their family through correspondence and visits from the moment they are arrested.” The U.S. prefers weaker language indicating detained children should be “permitted” to maintain such contact with their families. A Nov. 9 draft of the resolution indicated that the U.S. had failed to win support for this amendment either.
And in a separate U.N. resolution promoting a more central role for women in development, the United States also pressed earlier this month for an amendment prohibiting only “unlawful violence” toward women.
In a closed-door meeting last week, a U.S. negotiator noted that a comprehensive ban all forms of violence might pose a risk to generally acceptable activities, like hockey or boxing, according to a second European ambassador and one other source.
Critics shot back.
“The Trump administration has gone beyond disparaging multilateralism to take unprecedented positions that are completely out of line with global consensus and that deliberately hurt women,” said Shannon Kowalski, director of advocacy and policy at the International Women’s Health Coalition, which has been closely tracking the negotiations.
“By taking such an extreme position, the U.S. would turn into a leading voice for perpetuating abuse and denying justice to millions of women and girls in countries where some of the most common forms of violence are still legal,” she said.Mario Anzuoni / Reuters Chance The Rapper won the award for Best New Artist in addition to the Humanitarian Award at the BET Awards.
It’s one (rather humbling) thing to be honored with BET’s Humanitarian Award ― it’s another to be praised by Michelle Obama and to have her call you a friend. But leave it to Chance The Rapper to accomplish both by the age of 24.
In addition to taking home the award for Best New Artist during the 2017 BET Awards, which aired Sunday, the rapper and activist became the youngest person to receive its Humanitarian Award.
His list of social deeds can go on for days, which is probably why he was able to get a shoutout from our favorite first lady.
“We are so incredibly proud of you, Chance,” the former FLOTUS began. “We have known Chance and his family since he was a wee little baby rapper and it has been a thrill watching him come into his own in so many ways.”
Frederick M. Brown via Getty Images Michelle Obama also grew up in Chicago and has known Chance and his family for years.
“In addition to making some really amazing music, Chance has been taking that big bright spotlight that follows him around and shining it on our hometown of Chicago,” she continued. “Chance is showing our young people that they matter, they have something inside of them that is worthy of being expressed.”
After the first lady’s touching words, cameras caught Chance with tears in his eyes.
His acceptance speech, which he said was impromptu because he wanted to “speak from the heart,” proved his accolades from Mrs. Obama were well deserved.
After declaring a love for black people, Chance went into a spiel about how this country can start making things right.
“I had plans originally to try to tell the world and everybody watching how to make it a better place,” he said.
“To tell everybody in this government that y’all need to let everybody out of jail for selling weed before y’all start making it legal for people to sell it and make capital off it,” he continued, making pointed eye contact with the camera.
“I was going to tell the Chicago public school system not to take out a loan from Chase Bank when they know that our schools are planning on failing in our district,” he said to increasing applause.
Before ending his speech, Chance declared that he also wants to work on himself and become a better father, cousin, etc.PS4 Sold 1.3 Million Units in Japan During 2015, PS Vita Moved Over 1 Million
With 2015 now complete, Famitsu compiled data from the year (December 29, 2014 to December 27, 2015) in Japan, revealing that the retail video game market saw ¥321 billion in revenue, which is down 13% year-on-year. For a breakdown, software sales were down 16% to ¥191 billion, with console sales down 8.5% to ¥130 billion.
The ¥321 billion last year is the lowest since 1988, suggesting that consumers are moving towards digital (Famitsu’s results didn’t include digital numbers).
According to Media Create numbers (including the last week of 2015), Monster Hunter X for 3DS was the #1 selling game of 2015, moving 2.44 million units. It’s followed by Yo-kai Watch Busters: Red Cat Team/White Dog Squad on 3DS at 1.97 million, Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer on 3DS at 1.28 million, and Splatoon on Wii U at 1.06 million.
On Famitsu’s list, no PlayStation games cracked the top 10.
Just like 2014, the 3DS was the #1 selling piece of hardware in 2015, moving 2.3 million units. In 2nd place is the PlayStation 4 with 1.33 million, bringing its lifetime total in Japan to 2.26 million. The worldwide lifetime PS4 total is sitting at 35.9 million units.
Here’s how each system performed in 2015, according to Media Create (lifetime in brackets):
3DS (includes all models) – 2,347,554 (20,194,610) PS4 – 1,330,410 (2,255,980) PS Vita (including PS Vita TV) – 1,069,471 (4,492,546) Wii U – 877,082 (3,000,365) PS3 – 219,103 (10,237,637) Xbox One – 20,624 (66,582)
Do you think the PS4 will overtake the 3DS in 2016?
[Source: Famitsu via MCV, NeoGAF, Dualshockers]Although Google has vocally expressed its opposition to a new European law that requires them to remove any searchable link upon user request, the search engine giant is currently working hard to comply with the controversial ruling. According to execs, Google is currently struggling to address more than 70,000 “right to be forgotten” requests.
According to CNET, the European Union Court of Justice ruled in May that internet users must have the right to ask search engine companies to remove links that might infringe upon |
that Rome was incapable of protecting them, might defect and pledge their allegiance to the Carthaginians.
Since Fabius won no large-scale victories, the Roman Senate removed him from command. Their chosen replacement, Gaius Terentius Varro, led the Roman army into the debacle at the Battle of Cannae. The Romans, after experiencing this catastrophic defeat and losing countless other battles, had at this point learned their lesson. They utilized the strategies Fabius had taught them, and which, they finally realized, were the only feasible means of driving Hannibal from Italy.
This strategy of attrition earned Fabius the cognomen "Cunctator" (the Delayer).
Later usage [ edit ]
The strategy was used by the medieval French general Bertrand du Guesclin during the Hundred Years' War against the English following a series of disastrous defeats in pitched battles against Edward, the Black Prince. Eventually du Guesclin was able to recover most of the territory that had been lost.
The most noted use of Fabian strategy in American history was by George Washington, sometimes called the "American Fabius" for his use of the strategy during the first year of the American Revolutionary War. While Washington had initially pushed for traditional direct engagements and victories, he was convinced of the merits of using his army to harass the British rather than engage them both by the urging of his generals in his councils of war, and by the pitched-battle disasters of 1776, especially the Battle of Long Island. In addition, with a history as a Colonial officer and having witnessed Indian warfare, Washington predicted this style would aid in defeating the traditional battle styles of the British Army.[2]
However, as with the original Fabius, Fabian strategy is often more popular in retrospect than at the time. To the troops, it can seem like a cowardly and demoralizing policy of continual retreat. Fabian strategy is sometimes combined with scorched earth tactics that demand sacrifice from civilian populations. Fabian leaders may be perceived as giving up territory without a fight, and since Fabian strategies promise extended war rather than quick victories, they can wear down the will of one's own side as well as the enemy. During the American Revolution, John Adams' dissatisfaction with Washington's conduct of the war led him to declare, "I am sick of Fabian systems in all quarters!"
Later in history, Fabian strategy would be employed all over the world. Used against Napoleon's Grande Armée, the Fabian strategy proved to be decisive in the defense of Russia. Sam Houston effectively employed a Fabian defense in the aftermath of the Battle of the Alamo, using delaying tactics and small-unit harrying against Santa Anna's much larger force, to give time for the Army of Texas to grow into a viable fighting force. When he finally met Santa Anna on the fields of San Jacinto, Houston chose the time for attack equally well, launching his forces while the Mexican Army was lounging in siesta. The resulting victory ensured the establishment of the Republic of Texas. With the victory at San Jacinto, Houston's detractors were able to see the validity of his delaying tactics. During the First World War in German East Africa, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and General Jan Smuts both used the Fabian strategy in their campaigns.[3]
During the First Indochina War, the Vietnamese independentists used the Fabian strategy by utilizing delaying and hit-and-run tactics and scorched-earth strategy against the better-equipped French forces, which prolonged the war but later made both the French high command and home front weary against it, much worsened by the eventual Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu.
Fabian socialism [ edit ]
Fabian socialism, the ideology of the Fabian Society which originated in 1884 and launched the Labour Party in the United Kingdom in 1904, utilizes the same strategy of a "war of attrition" in their aim to bring about a socialist state. The advocation of gradualism distinguished this brand of socialism from those who favour revolutionary action.
See also [ edit ]Hideo Kojima enjoys toying with his fan base. The Metal Gear creator's track record of surprises includes swapping out the legendary Solid Snake with a new rookie protagonist and forming a fake development studio to mislead gamers. Kojima’s history of hijinks has been in full swing on the road leading to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and its prologue, Ground Zeroes. Game Informer traveled to Kojima Productions' headquarters in Tokyo, Japan to cut through MGS V’s shroud of mystery.
Game Informer’s three-part cover story is divided into sections focusing on the history and future of Kojima, Ground Zeroes, and The Phantom Pain. We had four hours of exclusive hands-on time with Ground Zeroes, which we used to play through the main mission and experiment with extra modes. For The Phantom Pain, we have new details straight from Kojima and a host of gorgeous new screenshots showing off Kojima Productions' Fox Engine. Our massive 20-page Metal Gear blowout is the perfect way to get ready for Ground Zeroes’ March 18 release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, as well as learn what to look forward to with The Phantom Pain.
The cover image of Snake/Big Boss below is new, unique art from talented Metal Gear Solid artist, Yoji Shinkawa.
On top of our exclusive Metal Gear Solid V content, the March issue is packed with a host of new features and hands-on previews. An in-depth article explores the history of YouTube’s popular “Let’s Play” shows. The Black Mesa Modification Team shares the challenging development history of its Half-Life remake. Following up on last month’s Top 50 Games of 2013, we reflect on the greatest mobile games from the second half of last year. We also have new previews of Dark Souls II, Dying Light, Elder Scrolls Online, and more.
Print subscribers can watch for their issues to arrive in the coming days. If you subscribe digitally, your March issue will be available later today on PC/Mac, iPad, Android, and Google Play. You can also get the latest issue through third-party apps on Nook, Kindle, and Zinio starting tomorrow. To switch your print subscription to digital, click here, or to create a new subscription to the digital edition, click here.
Our deluge of Metal Gear Solid V coverage doesn’t end with the cover story. Readers can look forward to an entire month of bonus online coverage at gameinformer.com, including video interviews with Kojima Productions' art director Yoji Shinkawa, Konami’s worldwide technology director Julein Merceron, and Kojima himself. We also have extended hands-on impressions of Ground Zeroes and exclusive articles on the Metal Gear Solid series. Bookmark our coverage hub so you don’t miss out on all the great stuff coming your way – click the link banner below to visit the page.
For a sneak peek at what to expect in our month of exclusive features, check out our Metal Gear Solid V coverage trailer below or on YouTube.
You can also follow our Metal Gear Solid V updates and other stories by following Game Informer on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.The Dodgers have already added one starting pitcher this trading season, as Ricky Nolasco will make his Dodgers debut on Tuesday night in Arizona against the Diamondbacks. But the team is not done shopping for pitchers. The Dodgers are looking for a reliever too, and might find one from the Brewers, per Danny Knobler of CBS Sports.
Knobler reports that the Milwaukee trio of John Axford, Francisco Rodriguez and the left-handed Mike Gonzalez are being shopped by Milwaukee.
Axford, 30, is 3-3 with a 3.86 ERA with 39 strikeouts and 15 walks in 37⅓ innings. He is the most expensive financially, as he has a $5 million salary (roughly $2.2 million remaining if acquired Thursday, for instance) this season and three more years of arbitration eligibility remaining, at an already inflated salary thanks to 105 saves from 2010-2012.
Per Knobler:
"Axford's a risk," said one scout from another team who saw him recently. "His stuff is good, but the command isn't there. I'd be worried about putting him in the eighth inning. K-Rod's changeup is really coming back. He might help someone."
Both Rodriguez, 31, and Gonzalez, 35, are free agents at the end of the season. Rodriguez has allowed just three runs in 22 appearances in 2013, with a 1.25 ERA, nine saves, 25 strikeouts and six unintentional walks in 21⅓ innings. Rodriguez's exact salary details are unknown but Jon Morosi of Fox Sports reported that Rodriguez is owed less than $1 million for the remainder of the season, but also that interest in Rodriguez has been "lukewarm" so far this season.
The southpaw Gonzalez has put up a 3.19 ERA in 45 games, with 40 strikeouts and 15 unintentional walks in 31 innings.
Knobler mentions that all five National League West teams have shown interest in the Brewers relievers as well as starter Yovani Gallardo. Morosi reports that the Diamondbacks and Brewers have had discussions about Axford, Rodriguez, and closer Jim Henderson, and mentions the Tigers and Orioles have shown interest as well.David Feeney's cavalier approach to politics and process may be about to end his career and Labor's hold on one of its historically safest seats.
Just 18 months after Liberal preferences allowed Feeney to defend his seat of Batman by a whisker from the rampaging Greens, Labor faces the unwelcome possibility of a byelection in a seat he won in July 2016 with just over 51 per cent of the two-party preferred vote.
David Feeney could lose his career. Credit:Chris Hopkins
It would come in the wake of Victorian Labor's thrashing at the hands of the Greens in the Northcote byelection, the state seat that takes in a good part of Feeney's federal electorate.
Pollsters, Labor strategists and journalists were stunned by the 11 per cent swing against Labor, a swing boosted by the Liberals' decision not to run a candidate in the Northcote race.WASHINGTON, DC - Massachusetts' continued commitment to clean, solar energy is paying off, according to a just-released report by The Solar Foundation, which shows the state second only to California in solar jobs. Reacting to the news, Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), said this remarkable progress is a result of several factors:
“When it comes to creating new, clean energy jobs, Massachusetts has been a model to follow. Strong forward-looking leadership and smart public policies are paying big dividends for the state. Massachusetts has added 3,000 new jobs just in the past year – an impressive 46 percent increase over 2013 – and we look forward to working with Gov. Charlie Baker and his administration to keep this tremendous momentum going.”
The 678 megawatts (MW) of solar energy currently installed in Massachusetts ranks the state 5th in the country in installed solar capacity and is enough to power 110,000 homes. Average installed residential and commercial photovoltaic system prices in Massachusetts have fallen by 10 percent in the last year. In 2013, $789 million was invested in Massachusetts to install solar for home, business and utility use. This represented a 50 percent increase over the previous year and is expected to grow again when all the numbers are in for 2014. There are currently more than 346 solar companies at work throughout the value chain in Massachusetts.
###
About SEIA:
Celebrating its 41st anniversary in 2015, the Solar Energy Industries Association® is the national trade association of the U.S. solar energy industry. Through advocacy and education, SEIA® is building a strong solar industry to power America. As the voice of the industry, SEIA works with its 1,000 member companies to champion the use of clean, affordable solar in America by expanding markets, removing market barriers, strengthening the industry and educating the public on the benefits of solar energy. Visit SEIA online at www.seia.org.
Media Contacts:
Ken Johnson, SEIA Vice President of Communications, [email protected] (202) 556-2885
Samantha Page, SEIA Press Officer and Communications Manager, [email protected] (202) 556-2886INDIANAPOLIS – Kyle Busch played the Tom Brady card Sunday in an oh-so-perfect summation of all the intangible instigation he brings to NASCAR that resonates well beyond his boundless talent.
After his first win in the Brickyard 400, and his fourth in the past five Sprint Cup races, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver was asked about those who insist he is unworthy of championship eligibility because he missed the first 11 races of the season.
“I don’t care what people say,” Busch said. “They pay me to be behind the wheel, and unfortunately due to injury, I wasn’t able to attend the first 11 races of the season. It’s not like I didn’t want to be there, but my team was still there, and if we win a championship, then it’s not that they’re going to take it away from me.
“As far as right now, Tom Brady is going to be suspended for the first four games of the season, and then he’s probably going to go on and compete for a championship and might even win the Super Bowl, and I doubt anybody is going to take away a Super Bowl championship from that gentleman.”
And then he doubled down in the home of the other team embroiled in the Deflate-gate scandal that resulted in a suspension for the quarterback of the New England Patriots.
“If (Indianapolis Colts quarterback) Andrew Luck got suspended for four weeks and then he participated in the championship game, he’d still be considered a champion,” Busch said. “Either way.”
NASCAR has entered its peak “Rowdy” phase in every way possible.
And it’s glorious.
A season whose first half largely was missing the drama that makes stock-car racing alluring has landed on the storyline that just keeps giving.
That Busch was giving it back Sunday night makes it even better.
The lightning rod of the Sprint Cup Series is armed with innumerable fodder to troll NASCAR Nation with incessant justification.
Yes, if you like applying the letter of the law with the zealotry of a corporate drone who worries about how to staple expense reports, then there might be a rational argument to be constructed for why Busch shouldn’t qualify for the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
But if you’re of a sound mind, it’s fallacy. He missed 11 races because his car smacked a wall unprotected by a SAFER barrier at Daytona International Speedway, leaving his right leg and left foot a jangled mess.
Complicit in those circumstances, NASCAR deservedly granted Busch a waiver from the rule requiring him to start every race to make the Chase. But he still had to win and make up an 11-race points deficit to reach the top 30 in the standings.
Nine races into his comeback, he’s on the cusp of achieving both well before the regular-season deadline. It’s inconceivable he could be deemed undeserving of racing for the title.
The high ground belongs to the driver that many love to hate.
This is a good thing. Busch, 30, is a recent father and a more mature and measured version of the brash and irascible star who once was famous for storming off after races and smashing a guitar in victory lane.
But another side of Busch still lurks that is polarizing and alluring all at once. Though he has yet to win a championship, he shares some of the swagger that makes Brady a superstar some can’t stand.
In the most memorable stretch of his career before this five-weak tear, Busch once flipped off his former Hendrick Motorsports team members while winning eight of his first 22 starts with JGR in 2008.
It wasn’t the classiest, but it was a captivating moment in a sport too often bleached of its personalities. NASCAR needs its villains, even if Busch donning a black hat is more about archetypes and caricatures than real life.
The surge has magnified his magnetism in a way best expressed Sunday by Joey Logano, who has finished runner-up to Busch twice in three weeks.
“I’m glad he’s back and all, but geez oh Pete, you don’t have to come back like that,” Logano said. “Man, we’ve been working our guts out all year, and he comes right back and is doing it. That’s amazing, the run they’re on. Obviously he’s definitely going to make it into the Chase.
“He’s got four wins? Golly.”
That kind of awe would prompt a smirk from Busch.
And a scream from his detractors.
Much like Brady and his Patriots, there often isn’t much harmony in the land of Rowdy.
And that means happiness in the world of NASCARRelated Video shows beheading of Copts at IS hands; Egypt declares week of mourning President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi said Egypt reserves its right to retaliate against the killing of 21 Egyptian Copts by the Islamic State (IS) group in Libya at the suitable time and place.
The president added that the National Defence Council has met on Sunday night to decide the course of action to be taken in response.
IS published a graphic video on the internet Sunday purportedly showing the beheading of Coptic Christians it said it had kidnapped recently, and vowed to fight "crusaders."
In a televised speech on Sunday night, El-Sisi said he ordered the Egyptian government to provide full support to the families of the victims, and tighten a ban Egyptians' travel to its western neighbor. He also said he issued directives to the government to take necessary steps in order to secure and facilitate the return of Egyptians trying to leave Libya. El-Sisi added he commissioned Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri to travel to New York in order to hold talks with senior United Nations officials and members of the Security Council. The minister, El-Sisi said, would "demand the international community live up to its responsibilities by taking necessary actions in line with the UN convention, and to declare that what is happening in Libya threatens international peace and security."
Short link:One survivor, Muhammad Aslam, said he heard two loud blasts before the factory filled first with smoke, then with the desperate screams of his fellow workers. “Only one entrance was open. All the others were closed,” he said at a hospital, describing scenes of panic and chaos.
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Mr. Aslam, who was being treated for a broken leg, said he saved himself by leaping from a third-floor window.
Hundreds of anguished relatives gathered at the site, many of them sobbing as they sought news. Some impeded the rescue operation, and baton-wielding police officers tried to disperse the crowd but failed.
“If my son does not return, I will commit suicide in front of the factory,” one woman shouted before news cameras as relatives tried to console her.
The death toll rose quickly. By evening, the Karachi commissioner, Roshan Ali Sheikh, said that 289 people had died, most of them men. The provincial health minister, Sagheer Ahmed, put the toll at 248, which he said was the number of bodies accounted for at major hospitals. The number was expected to rise further.
In the shoe factory fire in Lahore, 25 people were reported killed and dozens wounded. Officials said that blaze had been set off by a generator that caught fire and ignited chemicals stored nearby in the factory, illegally located in a residential neighborhood. Most of the victims were men under 25.
The fires immediately revived long-running questions about the regulation of Pakistan’s manufacturing sector, centered in Karachi, and of the vital textiles industry in particular.
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Textiles are a major source of foreign currency for Pakistan, accounting for 7.4 percent of its gross domestic product in 2011 and employing 38 percent of the manufacturing work force. Pakistani cotton products are highly sought in neighboring India and form the backbone of a burgeoning fashion industry that caters to the elite. President Asif Ali Zardari’s government has often called on the United States to drop tariff barriers to Pakistani textile imports, which it says would be preferable to traditional aid.
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But the industry suffers from weak regulation, characterized by lax oversight and corruption. Business owners often put profits over safety, workers’ rights advocates say.
On Wednesday evening the police raided the home of the owner of the Karachi factory, Abdul Aziz, who appeared to have gone into hiding. According to an online business information service, his company, Ali Enterprises, manufactured denim, knitted garments and hosiery and had capital of between $10 million and $50 million.
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His nephew, Shahid Bhaila, the chief executive officer of the company, was also being sought for questioning. The police said both men had been placed on the exit control list, barring them from leaving the country.
The Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the most powerful political party in Karachi, announced three days of mourning. The city electricity company said it would cancel all outstanding bills for the families of those affected as a good will gesture.
The cause of the fire remained unclear. Geo News, the largest news channel, speculated that it had been started by extortionists, reporting that Mr. Aziz had previously faced a demand for a shakedown payment of more than $100,000, which he refused.
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But others said an electrical fire was more likely. Wali Muhammad, a former electrical inspector, said that most accidental fires are caused by short circuits in equipment. But since 2003, he said, inspectors had been forbidden by law from visiting factories in Karachi and Punjab; it was not immediately clear why.
“This is criminal negligence,” he told Geo News, referring to the ban.
Another mystery surrounded the locked factory doors. Some survivors said the exits had been shuttered to prevent workers from slipping out early; others said it was the consequence of a recent break-in.
A majority of the garment workers came from Orangi Town, a poor working-class neighborhood in Karachi. Seventeen of the victims came from the same street, local news media reported.
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The factory building suffered severe structural damage in the blaze, and officials feared it would collapse on rescue workers during the day.
While many distraught family members set up camp near the factory, others moved between city hospitals, seeking news of loved ones. One man said he was looking for his cousin, who earned $70 a month as a cashier. “He’s still missing. I’m afraid he may have been working in the basement,” the man said.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called on the government to mount an immediate investigation. “The head of the firefighting operations in Karachi has noted that the factory was dangerous, flimsily built and had no emergency exits,” said Zohra Yusuf, chairwoman of the rights group. “Why did all of that escape official attention earlier?”
Workplace safety is guaranteed under Pakistan’s Constitution, but labor leaders say that government oversight has crumbled rapidly in recent years, along with a general decline in governance.
Sharafat Ali of the Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research, a labor rights group, said that 151 workers died in accidents in 2011. The state was partly responsible for the deaths, he said, because its civil servants “silently and criminally allow violation of laws and regulations established to ensure health and safety provisions at work.”One of the greatest scientists in history, Johannes Kepler, saved his mother from being burned as a witch almost 400 years ago. Ulinka Rublack, author of The Astronomer and the Witch, explains the extraordinary tale
© Wikimedia Commons
© Wikimedia Commons, courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Astronomer And The Witch is published by Oxford University Press.
Three places to find out about witches in
“Johannes Kepler was a major figure of the early modern scientific revolution and is widely regarded as one of the greatest astronomers who ever lived. His laws of planetary motion helped to lay the foundations for modern astronomy and physics, and a planet, NASA mission and spacecraft have all since been named after him.But the most dramatic episode in Kepler’s life remains little-known: in 1620, he abandoned his work to save his mother, Katharina, from being brutally tortured and burned at the stake on a charge of witchcraft.Katharina’s case has received limited attention, often in biographies and fictional treatments. Some of these accounts have recycled fabricated evidence that was used by the prosecution at the time for dramatic effect, leaving the impression that Katharina was certainly a woman of dubious character. Kepler’s own image sometimes fares little better.Usually, when we try to find out about historical witchcraft trials, there is limited evidence available.In this case, it was possible to reconstruct the whole story. That means we can use Katharina’s case to explore the often overlooked question of how these trials affected individuals and families in sharp focus and harrowing detail.Remote as the idea may seem to modern audiences, many people in Early Modern Europe genuinely believed that the devil and his army of witches were trying to subvert Christianity. Between 1500 and 1700 this paranoia spiralled into a frenzy of witch-hunts.Perhaps as many as 50,000 people – mostly women – were executed as witches, or as they were sometimes called in England, “cunning folk”.The climate of fear reached its peak in the German states, including Johannes Kepler’s native Württemberg, and the experiences of its victims were often horrific. Torture was frequently used to extract a confession, after which the alleged witch was burned.The evidence from Katharina’s own case has been remarkably well preserved because of her son’s involvement. The complete trial papers are held in the regional archives in Stuttgart, while Rublack was also able to consult numerous surviving local archives to place the trial in its historical context.These reveal the terrifying prospect that Katharina would have faced when she was accused in 1615. In Württemberg, the most common form of torture for alleged witches was to stretch the woman by pulling her up on a wheel – a departure from the more generic use of thumbscrews.Two years earlier, the lawyers of Tübingen, who later tried Katharina, had decided to show mercy to one woman who was destined for the stake by tying a bag of gunpowder to her upper body, so that her heart would be ripped out as soon as it came into contact with the flames.Katharina’s own trial began in 1615 when she was accused by neighbours in her home town of Leonberg. At the time, she was 68, and the case would drag on for six draining years. For the last 14 months, she was held in appalling conditions in a prison cell, attached to the floor with an iron chain.The “evidence” brought against her included claims that Katharina had poisoned people with wine and herbal remedies, killed local livestock, and that she could turn herself into a cat. Even close friends warned that she would probably be executed.In 1620, however, as the trial reached its peak, Johannes Kepler stepped in. Abandoning his studies in the Austrian city of Linz, the scientist put his life on hold and moved his family to southern Germany to lead his mother’s defence. No other public intellectual would ever involve himself in a similar role.His defence was a pioneering triumph of reason over the abuse and counterclaim that usually characterised witch trials. Having spent years defending his views in academic circles, Kepler was able to dismantle the inconsistencies in the prosecution case, and show that the “magical” illnesses for which they blamed his mother could be explained using medical knowledge and common sense.Friends in high places may also have helped. After Kepler’s withering defence, the lawyers of Tübingen demanded a final trial in which Katharina was shown the instruments of her torture.The idea was to terrify her into confessing, but Kepler had contacts among the lawyers themselves, who may have tipped him off that the act was only for show, and that no real torture was planned.In the autumn of 1621, Katharina was finally set free. Yet the study shows that the experience had been devastating for her and her family. Both Kepler’s brother and sister had distanced themselves from their own mother to protect their reputations. Exhausted, Katharina herself died just six months after the trial’s close.Kepler was also haunted by what had happened. Returning to Linz, he found a story he had written in his youth describing a clever young man and his witch mother.Kepler began to construct a scenario in his own mind in which this narrative, featuring as it did clear parallels with him and his mother, had leaked into public consciousness in Leonberg, and ultimately led to Katharina’s prosecution.Riddled with guilt, Kepler later published this piece, entitled Dream, with reams of footnotes explaining that any resemblance was pure conjecture. His intense feelings of guilt and anger after his mother’s death are likely to have been a psychological reaction after the immense emotional strain he had endured during the past six years.It is still difficult to understand the lives of women in history without an appropriate sense of context. Johannes Kepler and his mother lived through one of the most epic tragedies in the age of the witch-craze, yet they kept their spirit. It is high time to re-evaluate the way in which they have both been portrayed.”Magic, Witches and Devils in the Early Modern World reveals how magic, diabolical witchcraft and ghostly encounters inspired fear and curiosity on an unprecedented scale between the 15th and 18th centuries. The exhibition illuminates the roots of our obsession with supernatural power and explores a world where the Devil was understood as a real and present danger in daily life. Until August 21 2016.See the Grade I-listed building where the Lancashire Witches were convicted and condemned to die. Experience the dungeons and imagine what it was like to have been imprisoned there.Alloway Auld Kirk is the burial place for the poet's father and the setting for Tam o' Shanter's brush with the "hellish legion" of witches in Burns' epic poem.Narbonne (France) (AFP) - Three resorts in France were poised Tuesday to join three other seaside towns in banning the burkini, the full-body Islamic swimming garment that has sparked concern about religious extremism.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls also weighed in on the debate, lashing the wearing of the burkini as "not compatible with the values of France and the Republic" and saying he supported mayors who ban it if they acted in the public good.
In the southwest, the mayor of the resort town of Leucate, Michel Py, was to sign a municipal decree later Tuesday that would ban the burkini on public beaches, the town hall said.
The decree, which runs until August 31, will bar access to public beaches to "any person who is not properly dressed, respectful of moral behaviour and secularism, hygiene and bathing safety."
"The wearing of bathing clothes which are associated with these principles is also forbidden," according to the decree, seen by AFP.
Leucate is located on the Mediterranean coast, 35 kilometres (20 miles) from Perpignan.
In the northern French department of Pas-de-Calais, the mayor of the Channel town of Oye-Plage said Tuesday he would also move to ban the burkini after seeing a woman wearing "a complete cape and gloves, covering her face and her eyes" as she headed to the beach on Sunday.
In the nearby upmarket resort of Le Touquet, local mayor and MP Daniel Fasquelle said he would also implement a burkini ban in the coming days "to fight against religious proselytising."
"There are no burkinis in Le Touquet at the moment, but I don't want the town hall to be caught offguard if we are affected by this phenomenon," Fasquelle told AFP.
- String of jihadist attacks -
France has been hit by a string of jihadist attacks over the last 19 months that have left the country on edge and fretting over home-grown religious extremism.
Partly as a result, the burkini has become embroiled in a fierce debate about perceived religious symbols and their place in a strongly secular country. To critics, the garment is associated with an intolerant and sectarian strand of Islam.
On July 14 Nice was the target of an attack claimed by the Islamic State group when a Tunisian ploughed a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day, killing 85.
And on July 26, a priest was killed in his church in northwestern France by two attackers who had proclaimed their allegiance to IS.
The following day, the Cote d'Azur city of Cannes banned the burkini and the nearby resort of Villeneuve-Loubet followed suit in early August.
- Beach brawl over burkinis -
The Corsican town of Sisco on Sunday became the third to introduce a ban after a brawl in a cove between locals and families of North African origin left five people injured.
A witness said the violence broke out after tourists took pictures of women swimming in burkinis on the Mediterranean island. Investigators are still probing what happened.
The first ban on the burkini has been attributed to Mandelieu-la-Napoule, close to Cannes, where it was discreetly barred in July 2013.
The text of the municipal decree has been used, typically word for word, in bans elsewhere.
Cannes mayor David Lisnard said he had signed off on the burkini ban out of "respect for good customs and secularism", a founding principle of the French republic.
But Villeneuve-Loubet mayor Lionnel Luca had a different argument, saying swimming "fully dressed... (was) unacceptable for hygienic reasons."
The bans are opposed by some, who contend they are a populist ploy, violate human rights and likely to inflame tensions.
The Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) mounted an unsuccessful legal challenge to the ban in Cannes.
It is now taking its case to the Council of State, the highest judicial authority in France for administrative matters.
But Valls, in an interview published on Wednesday with the southern regional newspaper La Provence, said he supported the ban.
"I understand mayors who, at this time of tension, respond by looking for solutions, by avoiding disturbances to public order," Valls said.
"I therefore support those who have passed (burkini) decrees if they are impelled by the will to encourage people to live together and not by ulterior political motives."
Valls added: "Beaches, like all public areas, must be protected from religious claims. The burkini is not a new range of swimwear, a fashion. It is the expression of a political project, a counter-society, based notably on the enslavement of women."
However, Valls ruled out a nationwide law to fight the burkini, saying "overall regulations on proscribing clothes cannot be a solution."WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.— Lashing back, Donald Trump heatedly rejected the growing list of sexual assault allegations against him as “pure fiction” on Thursday, hammering his female accusers as “horrible, horrible liars” as the already-nasty presidential campaign sank further into charges of attacks on women.
Campaign foe Hillary Clinton said “the disturbing stories just keep on coming” about her Republican opponent, but she let first lady Michelle Obama’s passionate response carry the day. Obama, in battleground New Hampshire, warned that the New York billionaire’s behavior “is not something we can ignore.”
READ MORE: Here are the sexual assault allegations facing the Republican candidate
After years of working to end “this kind of violence and abuse and disrespect … we’re hearing these exact same things on the campaign trail. We are drowning in it,” Obama declared, her voice cracking with emotion. “We can’t expose our children to this any longer, not for another minute, let alone for four years.”
WATCH: Donald Trump lashed out at the women who have accused him of sexual misconduct, as more alleged victims come forward. Jackson Proskow reports on Trump’s response and the fallout.
With Election Day less than four weeks away, Republican Trump was again forced to defend himself against allegations of sexual misconduct, five days after a video surfaced in which he bragged about kissing and groping women without their permission.
Similar behaviour was detailed by women who accused Trump in articles published late Wednesday by The New York Times and the Palm Beach Post. Separately, a People Magazine reporter offered a first-person account accusing Trump of attacking her while she was in Florida to interview him and his pregnant wife.
Ever defiant, the New York billionaire denied the allegations and blamed them on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the complicit news media as he campaigned in Florida. He promised to sue his media critics and said he was preparing evidence that would discredit his female accusers, whom he called “horrible people. They’re horrible, horrible liars.”
He went further during an evening appearance in Columbus, Ohio, saying he “never met” some of the women.
“I don’t know who they are,” he insisted and said they “made up stories.”
READ MORE: New York Times responds to Trump libel threat, would welcome court to ‘set him straight’
“These vicious claims about me, of inappropriate conduct with women, are totally and absolutely false. And the Clintons know it,” he said earlier. He offered no evidence discrediting the new reports except to ask why his accusers had waited years and then made their allegations less than a month before the election.
His comments came soon after he called a reporter “a sleazebag” for asking whether Trump had ever touched or groped a woman without her consent.
Trump’s attacks on his accusers’ credibility marked an awkward break from campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, who earlier in the week highlighted a Clinton tweet that said “every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”
READ MORE: Donald Trump says sexual misconduct accusations are way to distract public from Wikileaks
Conway hoped to encourage more women to come forward with allegations against Bill Clinton, building on the campaign’s Sunday decision to bring three of the former president’s accusers to the second presidential debate.
“His campaign is promising more scorched-earth attacks. Now that’s up to him,” Clinton said during a San Francisco fundraiser. “He can run his campaign however he chooses. And frankly, I don’t care if he goes after me.”
Trump running mate Mike Pence ditched the national reporters who pay to travel with his campaign in Pennsylvania. The |
be able to have that child and have that experience, not destroy it and chop it up.”
Rep. J.D. Sheffield, R-Gatesville, a family physician, said forcing women to carry their pregnancies to term in these cases was “unethical.”
“Why should the heavy hand of government come into that most heart-rending decision?” Sheffield asked lawmakers before the vote.
Democrats were mostly united against the measure, but the House’s GOP majority rebuffed an effort to halt Schaefer’s amendment on an 82-49 vote. The amendment later passed by a similar margin.
Rep. Jessica Farrar, D-Houston, decried the amendment but also the tenor of the overall debate, after Schaefer declined to discuss the matter with her. Fighting tears, she said it reflected a new “level of misogyny” she had experienced in the House this year.
Democrats then raised procedural objections that threatened to kill the overall bill, which could cripple a key part of the state’s health oversight system. So its overall sponsor, Rep. Four Price, R-Amarillo, asked that the bill be sent back to a committee.
Most screening and diagnostic testing doesn’t occur until the second trimester, said Kate Connors, a spokeswoman for the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “And 20 weeks is right smack in the center of that,” she said.
“It’s hard to definitively address identification of abnormalities before and after 20 weeks because that’s just not a medically relevant milestone,” Connors said. “Gestation is gradual, but other than [Down syndrome], most major abnormalities are identified in the second trimester.”
About 0.5 percent of abortions performed in Texas are done after the 20th week.
Schaefer also won approval for an amendment to increase the reporting requirements for abortion facilities from once annually to monthly.
Follow Brittney Martin on Twitter at @beedotmartin.It was one of those, “please, please, let this send,” kind of moments when you hope a weak airport WiFi connection doesn’t disconnect, a low-battery indicator doesn’t shut down your laptop — who knows where there’s an outlet in this airport — and your email actually sends to your million dollar client when the message popped up and your stomach drops: “Oops!”
Like some kind of creepy, American Psycho moment, a hardly-discernible, non-apologetic message from Gmail put this exact dagger into my heart and sent me wondering what went wrong.
Sure, of course, just lemme look up error #001. What?
Google’s Chrome browser gives off an even worse error message that doesn’t make things better, just a wanna-be-hipster-piece-of-software knocking off a Susan Kare classic laughing in your face when you’re frustrated:
Maybe this is part of some awful brand initiative. After all, Google is a place of smiles. An every-color-of-the-rainbow logo, and three square meals place to work with unbelievable benefits. But, then again, Google is hardly alone in this kind of “smile when you’ve fallen” approach to error messages.
Microsoft is sadly considering implementing the same, cutesy thinking in a revamp of their blue screen of death as a part of their otherwise exciting, new Windows 8 operating system:
(windows.staenz.com)
Oh, great. My 14 year-old cousin is writing error messages in Redmond.
Fortunately, Microsoft offers some advice. Just search for the error message, “HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED”…oh wait, this is the blue screen of death. My computer is totally effed.
Not to be oops-outdone by Google, Microsoft’s XBox website includes the word, “Oops!” twice in an error message, first in the header and then as the first word to explain the header. Obviously, after frustrating someone, the best thing to do is say “Oops!” over and over again.
Sure, I’ll “like” that page.
And if you thought the non-profit Mozilla Foundation avoided this kind of creepy, cutesy error messaging in their Firefox browser, you thought wrong.
The legoman is sorry that you can’t load your favorite TV show.
In times like this, there’s always YouTube, right? Millions of fun videos to help us laugh at times of stress.
Facebook?
(Downtime Blog)
Grab some music off my Apple iCloud?
(MacRumors)
Check my Twitter feed?
Is there no escape from this cute hell‽
The hip company Plaxo — your address book for life — has not only embraced the “oops” but entered another level of creepy. Shhh…this error is just “our little secret.”
(Dfbills)
What’s happening?
You know, not too long ago, whenever something in software was confusing to users, software-makers had a brilliant, can’t fail, simple solution: add a how-to in the help section. Instead of spending hours making strange features straightforward, software companies passed the buck to the user: “Um, we can’t figure out how to make it easy to do, so just read the manual.”
Now it seems like there is another, new kind of awful simple solution for glitches and errors that infuriate people: a cutesy smiley face. After all, no one cares if you ruin their life as long as you do it with a smile, right?
(spinoff.comicbookresources.com)
The root of Oops!
In 1925, a New Yorker cartoon caption is credited with being the first published instance of “Whoopsie Daisy!” But the real root of the “oops” phenomenon in software might be pointed to the Linux operating system.
(Linux-mag)
This is your fault, Penguin. Please stop looking at me like that.
Upon “a bug in the kernel” Linux kicks back an OOPS error message. First developed in 1991, Linux’s code for error messages may have crept into the developer’s subconscious eventually leading to today’s proliferation of “oops.” Here’s an example:
Unable to handle kernel paging request at virtual address 211e2018 c0129577 *pde = 00000000 Oops: 0000 CPU: 0 EIP: 0010:[<c0129577>] Not tainted Using defaults from ksymoops -t elf32-i386 -a i386 EFLAGS: 00010083 eax: d7ee5000 ebx: b420e080 ecx: c164e000 edx: c1615d04 esi: c16073d0 edi: 00000246 ebp: 000001f0 esp: d7c5de84 ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018 Process mount (pid: 25, stackpage=d7c5d000) Stack: 00000000 c0309c00 000001f0 00000000 c01fadb7 c16073d0 000001f0 c1615a40 c1615700 c1615a40 c01fa126 00000001 000001f0 00000000 c022f793 c1615a40 00000001 00000000 000001f0 d7b6fde0 d7c5df14 0000006e bfffec0c 00000018 Call Trace: [<c01fadb7>] [<c01fa126>] [<c022f793>] [<c01f8acb>] [<c01f8720>] [<c01f9450>] [<c0106d40>] [<c0106c4f>] Code: 8b 44 81 18 89 41 14 83 f8 ff 75 1d 8b 41 04 8b 11 89 42 04
(If you’re curious about all the hex, an explanation is available from madwifi.)
When cute works
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with cute.
(Cute overload)
Cute works well when you expect nothing from something. Like, babies.
LOL, he pooped his pants!
Awww, he farted!
Haha, he just puked on me!
But cute doesn’t work when you have expectations. Like, with adults.
Please, use the toilet...and the toilet paper.
Ohmygawd, that smells awful!
Do you need to go home?
So when a company like Google was still young, hip and start-upy, their error messages were indeed cute. Those silly Nooglers!
(Geekrant)
How fresh!
But now that they are a publicly traded, 186 billion dollar company that we rely on for important business communications, which could make or break jobs, their cute error messages are about as cute as a Bill Gates tossing floppy disks. In other words, just plain creepy.
Turn it down from 11
The language of error messages in old software like MS-DOS were notoriously unfriendly.
Oh yeah, duh, ff0a8e6c shouldn’t have been pointing to HAL.DLL!
So, people who care about user experience have provided guidance. So, so many articles about writing good error messaging have been written over the past three decades. Here’s one. Here’s another. And another. And another. And another. And another from Yahoo! writers. Another, equating error messages to lost revenue. Another, on 404s…
But today’s insulting cutesy error message writers have swung the pendulum too far. A common recommendation to use natural language to turn an incomprehensible “Error: Stack Overflow” has not turned into something polite and understandable, but instead an insulting “Oops! Aw, snap!”
What we need to do is dial it down from 11 on the friendly meter…11 is just too creepy. There is a happy middle ground where developers can apologize and software can provide the user polite guidance about what to do next. Website, app, software, you screwed up; help the user get their desired task completed ASAP.
To paraphrase Jon Stewart, oops is not the four letter word I would have chosen.
(The Daily Show) For the impatient, start at 6:52
Related postsTHE SHELL OF Gawker has settled with Hulk Hogan for $31 million, ending a years-long fight that led to the media company’s bankruptcy, the shutdown of Gawker.com and the sale of Gawker’s other sites to Spanish-language broadcaster Univision.
Gawker founder Nick Denton in a blog post today said that the “saga is over”.
The invasion-of-privacy case, which revolved around a sex tape posted on Gawker.com, resulted in a $140 million verdict won by the former professional wrestler in a Florida court.
It became even more notorious when it emerged that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel had secretly bankrolled the suit.
Thiel was outed as gay by a Gawker-owned website in 2007.
The settlement instead means Hogan will get $31 million as well as 45% of the proceeds from potential sale of Gawker.com, said Elizabeth Traub, a spokeswoman for Hogan’s lawyer, David Houston.
Gawker.com is dormant but its archives remain online.
Houston said in an emailed statement that “all parties have agreed it is time to move on”.
Denton said in the blog post that he was confident that an appeals court would have reduced the $140 million verdict, but “an all-out war with Thiel would have cost too much, and hurt too many people, and there was no end in sight…Gawker’s nemesis was not going away”.
Thiel has said he would support Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, “until his final victory”.
‘True stories’
Denton also said that as part of the settlement, three “true stories” — about Hogan and two others who had also filed suit — are being “removed from the web”.
Univision, which bought Gawker Media’s other sites for $135 million, has already deleted several posts from the properties it now owns, which include tech blog Gizmodo and women-oriented site Jezebel, because they were tied to litigation.
The two others mentioned by Denton, a journalist and a man who says he invented email, will settle with Gawker for a total of $1.25 million, the bankruptcy court papers indicated today.
Denton himself also had to file for personal bankruptcy because of the Florida court’s verdict.
Court documents filed today said there have been settlement talks between Gawker and Denton as well, although they have not reached a final settlement.Now that it’s got two wheels hanging over the side of the cliff, it’s clear the NHLPA’s approach to the lockout was doomed from the outset.
As soon as it kicks off, GM or Ford or whomever is losing big money. Their supply channel runs dry. Their competitors pick up the slack. They need to get to back to work to satisfy shareholders and analysts, who only think as far as quarterly returns.
Instead, they’ve been flipping through the Workplace Negotiations 101 playbook, where labour has the advantage over management. Take an auto shutdown.
First and foremost, they have approached this as a generic labour fight. It isn’t. It isn’t even a sports labour fight. It’s a hockey labour fight, a completely unique beast.
In the NHL, this power balance is flipped on its head.
Labour, on the other hand, can afford to suffer in the short term. Their earning window is open for decades. Small concessions mean long-term dollars. Each passing day increases the pressure on management to resolve the problem.
Players are the ones who must think short term. If an average NHL career is six or seven years long, a lost season represents as much 15 per cent of their total earnings from hockey. In many cases, it accounts for far more.
Ownership has a monopoly on hockey. Previous lockouts have taught them that fans will return, no matter how long they’re gone. In this instance, management knows that incremental gains will spin out into tens of millions of dollars saved over the coming decade.
It may be antithetical to the athletic mindset (‘Never stop’), but no amount of variation from the 50/50 split can uniformly benefit the union membership enough to make up for that loss. That’s the whole point of unions — to spread the joy and pain around equally. At this point, the NHLPA is fighting for its 1 per centers.
Nevertheless, the union has followed the auto-fight route — dig in, and then take it to the customer. They held off real bargaining until the last minute. They continue to move forward like time is their ally, though the noose has grown so tight we can see the blue in their faces from the back of the room.
The split of the money, the ‘make whole’ pact, the length of contracts — these are parentheticals.
There are only two issues here, the same ones that govern all negotiations: Who wants it more? Who has the leverage?
Jay Krupin is a vastly experienced labour negotiator with the Washington, D.C.-based firm of BakerHostetler. Add this to his bona fides — he’s also a hockey fan. Unlike everyone involved on the players’ side just now, he’s also a pragmatist.
“The owners want to change the economics of hockey. They want that more than the players want to make more money. Then it becomes an issue of leverage. And the owners have the leverage.”
This is what Fehr, an American with a background in that country’s national pastime, cannot see. There is no pressure from below, not in the States. ESPN doesn’t give a damn about this story, as they did in similar instances with the NFL, NBA and MLB. The PA’s PR machine is pumping out memos no one reads. The owners know that, and the owners are all Americans.
Far more importantly, while stoppages have badly wounded baseball and, to a lesser extent, basketball, they’ve been an odd spur to the NHL’s business. There’s a pecuniary case to be made that lockouts are good for hockey. Since the league’s revenue has grown to record highs in each of the years since the lost season of 2004-05, why wouldn’t owners want to access that cheap stimulus package again?
This fact seems to escape Fehr. In one of his New York news conferences on Thursday, he flippantly admitted he wasn’t conversant in the particulars of the previous lockout. Fehr is a man for a fight, but given how this thing has shaken out so far, he isn’t well suited to this fight.
Even the weeks spent arguing over 50/50 seem pointless in retrospect. The NBA took three months to come to roughly the same revenue split. Many of those franchises share owners and/or buildings.
Knowing that recent deals are always the benchmark for new deals, why didn’t the PA retrench around that number from the outset? Duking it out on 50/50 smacks of theatre. But of course, Fehr gets paid either way.
Krupin believes there was one point on which the PA might have bent ownership to its will. That advantage passed untaken five weeks ago.
“I didn’t believe they’d lose the Winter Classic,” Krupin says. “When they let that go, I knew they were ready to lose the season. Now that it’s gone, there’s really no reason to have a season.”
What would you do now?
“If I was an owner, I’d hold pat.”
And if you were working for the PA?
“Try to negotiate on some small issues, to save face. Take what you can and live to fight another day.”
So — give in.
What we have now is the ragged end of a chess match between a master and a novice. Ownership is chasing the NHLPA’s king across the board toward an inevitable end, but the union does not have the sense to retire.
Surrender isn’t their best option. It’s the only one they have left.
They must now be coming to a realization that should have dawned on them from the outset, that management is not only willing to lose another season, but that it’s been hoping to all along.
MORE
Toronto Star NHL lockout coverageCorey Clark | Democrat senior writer
Charles Morgan Engel, C. Morgan Engel-USA TODAY Sports
I really thought I was done writing about Jimbo Fisher.
Honestly, I did.
I covered, at length, how poorly I thought he handled the coaching rumors this November. And I also covered, at length, how he turned FSU back into a national power and was the perfect hire for Florida State eight years ago.
So I thought he was in the rear-view. Truly, I did.
Then came Monday. And Jimbo Fisher sped up on our tails like Smokey and the Bandit, ramming into our bumper with a "Hey, you guys mind if I take one more shot at FSU before I put these A&M boots on?"
In case you missed it, Fisher was introduced as the new Texas A&M coach on Monday afternoon in College Station. And he made a point, early on in the press conference, of taking a not-so-subtle shot at his former employer.
"You can have the greatest coaches in the world," Fisher said. "But if the administration doesn’t see things in the way you see things, and allow you to do things that way, nothing can be achieved."
Darn right!
Preach it, Jimbo!
Nothing can be achieved at all.
Except for, you know, six 10-win seasons, three ACC Championships, a national championship, a Heisman Trophy, a school-record 29-game winning streak, a national record 29 players drafted in three years, and five straight New Year's Six bowl game appearances.
View | 150 Photos
Photos: Jimbo Fisher through the years
I was really expecting - hoping, I guess - that Fisher would speak only glowingly about Florida State. It's the school that took a chance on him as an assistant coach. It trusted his vision. Made him rich. Gave him almost everything he asked for. It celebrated the trophies. Gave him yearly raises. And stood by him even in the midst of the worst season in 40 years.
Just be positive, Jimbo.
"Florida State was great to me and my family," he could've said. "But I'm ready for a new challenge."
But he didn't do that. Instead he took more thinly veiled shots at FSU.
"I never had any intentions of leaving Florida State," Fisher said. "After (A&M athletic director Scott Woodward) contacted me, and I saw his vision and researched the resources at A&M, it was a no-brainer. There was an opportunity and a challenge here that I just couldn’t pass up."
A no-brainer. Nice.
Another Fisher quote from Monday: "I always say this: are you interested in being good or are you committed to being good?”
Those $45 million buyouts just don't mean as much as they used to I guess.
It's true Fisher is getting $75 million guaranteed from Texas A&M. And nobody, I think, is begrudging him the opportunity to cash in. If the Aggies want to pay that kind of money for a guy that is 17-12 in his last 29 games against FBS teams, well, they have every right to do so. And he has every right to accept it.
What he doesn't have a right to do, in the opinion of FSU fans, is paint Florida State as some cheap, uncommitted, second-tier program that doesn't have the resources to be competitive with the big boys anymore.
That's the narrative he's been trying to sell, it seems. And FSU fans are tired of it.
"He is really showing some low class and this is now beyond just a poor relationship with boosters," a fan tweeted at me on Monday. "He's a flat out liar."
"I sure hope Jimbo cuts Jameis Winston a check for getting him that payday," said another. "Funny how things were not bad when your winning 29 straight."
And another: "Now he is trash talking the school that gave him his shot and NC???"
And another: "I really want to wish him the best at A&M but if he keeps taking shots at FSU, I hope he never wins another game."
And another: "I hope we announce the plans for the new football only facility on the same day we announce our new coach just to spite Jimbo. Dude's handled this so poorly."
And another: "He is such a huge disappointment to take a swipe at FSU like this."
So, yeah, they're angry.
With good reason. They're sick and tired of hearing about what Florida State doesn't have. Of being made to feel less-than by a coach who had more than almost anyone else in the country during his time here.
Did he have a football-only facility? No.
But did he have a beautiful stadium? Yep.
Did he have his indoor practice facility? Yep.
Did he get new locker rooms and upgraded coaches offices? Yep.
Did he get substantial raises for his assistants? Yep.
Did he have a contract that guaranteed him over $40 million? Yep.
Did he have assurances that a football-only facility was going to be built? Yep.
Did he have one of the most recognizable brands in college sports? Yep.
Did he have a passionate fan base? Yep.
Did he get to recruit from the most fertile area in the country? Yep.
Did he get to tout his program's unrivaled history and tradition over the last four decades? Yep.
Did he get to walk past national championship trophies and Heisman trophies every day he walked into his office? Yep.
Did he seem to appreciate any of that? Nope. Not really.
I don't think most Florida State fans are upset Fisher left for that kind of money. I really don't. I just think they were frustrated that he kept consistently bringing up what FSU didn't have, without at the very least seeming to value all the positives FSU offers as well.
But guess what? Now Fisher has everything he could want, right?
He's got a stadium that seats 100,000. He's got a football-only complex. He's got brand-new boots. He's got boosters with enormous pockets, who are desperately starved for championships. And he'll get to recruit in one of the most fertile areas in the country.
So it's all set up for him now! No excuses not to succeed! Certainly can't lose 35-3 to the likes of Boston College again if you have your own football mansion!
Meanwhile, FSU fans will just have to wait and see if Fisher's replacement can somehow manage to win a few games here and there.
It'll be tough. Florida State won't offer $75 million guaranteed. And it doesn't even have a football-only complex. And yet, somehow, someway, it's still managed to win more games than any program in the country since 1980.The No. 4-ranked Stanford men's gymnastics finished second in the semifinals of the NCAA Championships on Thursday in Ann Arbor, Mich., qualifying to Friday's finals for the ninth consecutive season.
The Cardinal scored 433.550 to finish behind No. 1 Oklahoma (440.000) and ahead of third-place No. 5 Illinois (432.850). No. 8 Iowa finished fourth (425.950), followed by No. 9 California (425.700) and No. 12 William and Mary (415.350).
Stanford senior Sean Senters. Photo by Don Feria/isiphotos.com. Stanford senior Sean Senters. Photo by Don Feria/isiphotos.com.
It was an up-and-down meet for the Cardinal, which needed a strong finish on rings in its final rotation to secure a qualifying position.
After a difficult result on pommel horse in the fifth rotation put the team in third place, Stanford delivered the scores needed on rings to finish second and advance to the finals.
Sean Senters had a great meet, finishing first in both of his events. He scored a career-high 15.450 on floor and earned a 15.250 on vault to claim the individual victories.
Paul Hichwa won his second consecutive individual title with a 15.350 on high bar. He won the MPSF title in the event two weeks ago at the conference championships.
After missing the first part of the season due to injury, Brian Knott continued to provide Stanford with significant contributions, finishing first on parallel bars with a 15.300.
Akash Modi won the all-around title with an 87.450, recording four top-10 finishes. He placed third on pommel horse (15.050) and parallel bars (15.050), tied for fifth on floor (15.250) and finished ninth on vault (14.750).
Stanford got off to a great start on vault, posting a meet-best 73.950 to take an early lead. The Cardinal remained in the lead after recording a 73.050 in its second rotation on parallel bars.
Stanford faced its first round of adversity on high bar when two gymnasts scored 12.900. Performing in the anchor position, Hichwa helped get the Cardinal back on track with a competition-best 15.350. Stanford scored 70.200 on the event but slipped to third place.
The Cardinal carried the momentum from Hichwa's routine to its next rotation on floor, where it posted a 75.000 -- the team's second-highest score on the event this season.
Along with Senter's first place result, Modi tied for fifth (15.250) and Michael Levy placed ninth (15.150).
The strong floor rotation bumped the Cardinal up to second place heading to pommel horse. However, Stanford would again encounter challenges when two gymnasts recorded scores of 13.300 and 12.650.
Modi paced the Cardinal with a team-best 15.050 to finish third, while Knott went 14.550 to tie for 10th. Stanford finished the rotation with a 69.650 and slipped back into third place, holding a narrow advantage over Iowa.
Stanford finished strong on rings with a series of consistent performances to score 71.700 and secure a spot in Friday's finals. Dennis Zaremski capped the competition with a team-best 15.300 to place fourth.
Stanford will pursue its sixth NCAA title Friday at 4 p.m. (PT).
Softball
Stanford managed just three hits in dropping a 7-0 Pac-12 Conference contest to visiting Washington on Thursday night.
The Huskies led, 1-0, entering the fifth inning before scoring five runs, two earned, to take a stranglehold on the game.
The Cardinal (1-9, 24-15) lost its eighth in nine games.
The two teams meet again Friday at 7 p.m.
One positive for Stanford was Tylyn Wells, who threw two scoreless innings in relief, striking out three.
Wells entered the game with the bases loaded and no outs in the sixth, getting two quick outs before walking in a run.
She also recorded a hit in her last at bat.
Sand volleyball
Lauren Birks and Jordan Burgess won their match at No. 2 singles, but visiting St. Mary's beat Stanford, 4-1, Thursday.
The Cardinal (2-7) plays twice Sunday at Pacific, meeting Sacramento State at noon, and the host Tigers at 3 p.m.
The Gaels clinched the win at No. 1 as Jordan Shaw and Samantha Tinsley defeated Brittany Howard and Carly Wopat, 21-14, 21-13.
Jordan Shaw is the daughter of former Stanford men's and women's volleyball coach Don Shaw and the sister of current Cardinal men's volleyball player James Shaw.The Paul Adelstein and Adam Brooks drama starring Inbar Lavi will return with another 10-episode run in 2018.
Bravo is keeping Imposters in the house.
The NBCUniversal-owned cable network has renewed the scripted drama starring Inbar Lavi for a second season, producers announced Monday during a For Your Consideration Emmy panel. The drama from creators Paul Adelstein and Adam Brooks will return with 10 new episodes in 2018, with production resuming in the fall.
The series follows a persona-shifting con artist and her three most recent victims, who pursue her in a game of cat and mouse. Rob Heaps, Parker Young, Marianne Rendon, Stephen Bishop and Brian Benben co-star.
"Adam, Paul and our wonderful cast and crew are delivering a mad and merry show that makes us all proud," said Jeff Wachtel, president and chief content officer at NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment. "We're excited that even more people will be able to join the party next season."
Imposters, which wrapped its run April 11, averaged 1.4 million total viewers per episode, spiking 23 percent among the key adults 18-49 demographic in the second half of the season. When factoring in delayed viewing, the series ranks as a top 10 cable show among adults 18-49.
"Imposters has truly resonated with our audience and critics alike with its unique brand of suspense and humor," said Frances Berwick, president of Lifestyle Networks, NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment. “We’re excited to see what the future holds for this unlikely band of flawed but lovable characters that our talented creators and actors have fully brought to life.”
Imposters is Bravo's third scripted series and joins Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce and half-hour comedy Odd Mom Out. The drama is produced in-house by Universal Cable Productions.(Reuters) - More than 100 companies, including most of high-tech’s biggest names, joined a legal brief opposing President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban, arguing that it would give companies strong incentives to move jobs outside the United States.
The companies - including Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Google Inc (GOOGL.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) - banded together late on Sunday to file a “friend-of-the-court” brief with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
They argued that the executive order temporarily banning citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and all refugees “inflicts significant harm on American business.”
Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) and SpaceX were among other companies signing onto the brief on Monday, raising the number of signatories to 127.
Musk is among the few tech executives on Trump’s business advisory council. He has been forced to defend his participation in recent days, particularly since Uber Technologies Inc’s [UBER.UL] chief executive, Travis Kalanick, quit the group on Thursday following the travel ban.
The new Republican president’s Jan. 27 executive order sparked protests and chaos at U.S. and overseas airports in the weekend that followed. Trump has defended the ban as necessary to ensure tougher vetting of people coming into the United States and better protect the country from the threat of terror attacks.
On Friday, U.S District Judge James Robart in Seattle, ruling on a lawsuit challenging the order filed by Washington state and Minnesota, temporarily lifted the ban. The federal government appealed the decision, which was heavily criticized by Trump.
In their brief, the companies argued that the order created uncertainty for companies depending on talent from overseas and global business travel to innovate and create jobs in the United States.
“Highly skilled immigrants will be more interested in working abroad, in places where they and their colleagues can travel freely and with assurance that their immigration status will not suddenly be revoked,” the brief said. “Multinational companies will have strong incentives... to base operations outside the United States or to move or hire employees and make investments abroad.”
“Ultimately, American workers and the economy will suffer as a result,” the companies argued.
A major theme of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was bringing back jobs he said had been moved to other countries.
Responding to the lawsuit, the federal government argued in legal filings that the president was exercising his constitutional authority to control U.S. borders and that the law allows him to suspend the entry of any class of foreigners who “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Companies that initially joined the brief included Facebook Inc (FB.O), Twitter Inc (TWTR.N), Intel Corp (INTC.O), eBay Inc (EBAY.O), Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) and Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL], as well as non-tech corporations such as Levi Strauss & Co [LEVST.UL] and Chobani Llc.
The brief hailed the contributions inclusive immigration policies have made to the American economy. It said that immigrants or their children have founded more than 200 of the companies on the Fortune 500 list.
People hold protest signs during Friday prayers to show solidarity with the Muslim community at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, U.S. February 3, 2017. REUTERS/Kevork Djansezian
Trump’s agenda on immigration, trade, cyber security, tax reform and other issues has caused deep consternation in the tech industry. Before the travel ban, most companies said they wanted to work with him and avoided any direct confrontations.
But the immigration restrictions provoked a broad backlash in Silicon Valley, where foreign-born nationals are an integral part of the tech economy. There have been peaceful protests at Google and Facebook. Uber was the target of a boycott, and scrambled to reassure its many immigrant drivers that it was on their side.
Partly because of pressure from their rank-and-file, big tech companies have separated themselves from much of corporate America in directly confronting Trump policies. Only a handful of non-tech companies joined the friend-of-the-court brief, though some of the lawyers involved said that was mainly because the group came together very quickly through personal contacts.Tuesday on Fox New Channel’s “On the Record,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an outspoken supporter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, addressed Trump’s policy initiatives, including his latest on childcare.
When asked by host Brit Hume if such a policy proposal was “conservative,” given the questions about how it would be financed, Gingrich argued Trump was more of a conservative along the lines of former British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher and that he represents more of an anti-Washington movement.
“[L]ook, he represents the same tradition of conservatism as Churchill and Thatcher in Great Britain,” Gingrich said. “Thatcher was not somebody who walked in there and said, ‘Let’s wipe out everything.’ She was very tough and then she privatized things like the telephone system.”
“My view is that the world has changed dramatically and that you’re going to see a permanent upsurge against Washington government,” he continued. “You’re going to see a permanent rebellious attitude. I mean this whole turning ‘deploarables’ around into the opposite is something that a lot of traditional and intellectual Republicans don’t understand, wouldn’t be comfortable with … Frankly, some of these guys think that the ‘deplorables’ are real.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poorRepublicans say they will only reauthorize health insurance coverage for millions of children if they, too, can get something in the process.
Barely 12 hours after passing a historically unpopular tax scam that creates a $1.4 trillion hole in the federal budget, Republicans are now refusing to reauthorize funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) — at least until they can figure out a way to get something for themselves along the way.
Federal funds for CHIP, which provides health insurance to millions of low-income children and pregnant women, expired on Sep. 30. The program has historically enjoyed widespread bipartisan support. Even in the midst of partisan bickering, lawmakers have generally agreed to come together on this important issue.
But not this year.
While Republicans say they still support the idea of funding CHIP, they won’t just pass a clean bill to renew funding and ensure that children don’t lose access to health insurance. Instead, they want to exploit the program’s popularity and use it as a vehicle to force through their own unpopular agenda items.
According to Bloomberg health policy reporter Alex Ruoff, GOP Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said Wednesday that Republicans in the Senate want to use CHIP reauthorization to pass “something else that isn’t as popular as CHIP.”
“If they can add something … then leadership will take a look at that and see if they can accomplish more than just CHIP in one bill,” Rounds said, according to Ruoff.
If Congress fails to renew funding for CHIP, an estimated 1.9 million children across the country stand to lose health insurance during the month of January alone, according to a new report from the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families (CCF). An additional 1 million children could lose coverage by the end of February if Congress doesn’t act.
“For years there has been bipartisan effort to get kids covered through CHIP and Medicaid. Now it is being eroded by Congressional inaction,” said Joan Alker, CCF’s director.
Despite Democrats’ best efforts, it looks as though funding will not be renewed until the new year — by which point some state programs may have already run out of money.
Nationwide, CHIP extends low-cost health care to nearly 9 million children every year. In 20 states, pregnant women also qualify for coverage through CHIP.
The program is highly effective across the board, providing coverage for routine health care |
," he said.
"The government's legislation will directly benefit those people who were convicted under our old laws against homosexuality and cross-dressing by ensuring their criminal record does not appear whenever they apply for a job or a volunteer position.
"But an apology from the Premier will go even further because it will help heal the damage inflicted by our old laws, including blackmail, ostracism, ignominy, hate crimes and even sometimes suicide."
In 2016 Victorian premier Daniel Andrews also apologised to people convicted of historic gay sex offences, while South Australian premier Jay Weatherill made a general apology to the LGBTI community for past unjust laws.
Australian states and territories vary in how they have dealt with people affected by historic gay sex convictions.
Victoria, NSW and the ACT have introduced schemes to expunge the offences, while Queensland has committed to a scheme but is yet to legislate. The Northern Territory government is seeking advice on the issue and has signalled it may be a complex process.
In South Australia a 2013 amendment allowed people convicted of historical sex offences to apply to have their convictions “spent” – but not expunged. This is also the case in Western Australia, where it is illegal to discriminate against a person on the basis of a spent conviction.
When a conviction is “expunged”, it is erased in the eyes of the law. The conviction no longer shows up on police records, people are not required to disclose it for any reason and they cannot be denied a job because of it.
A conviction being “spent” only allows the criminal record to be amended after a time period of not offending – in SA and WA it is 10 years. There are also certain circumstances where a spent conviction must be disclosed.Veteran journalist Dan Rather leads a chorus of people calling on the president to acknowledge the heroism of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Rick Best
Pressure is mounting on the US president, Donald Trump, to make a comment on the racist attack in Portland, Oregon that left two men dead
Portland knife attack: tension high as 'free speech rally' set for weekend Read more
The pair have been honoured as heroes by Portland’s mayor and the FBI, but the president has remained silent, despite tweeting 10 times on Sunday on topics ranging from healthcare to fake news.
Pleas are now mounting on social media for Trump to make a statement on the attack, which was carried out by a suspected white supremacist.
Dan Rather, the veteran American journalist, led the charge on Facebook, calling on Trump to acknowledge the “brave Americans who died at the hands of someone who, when all the facts are collected, we may have every right to call a terrorist”.
app-facebook Dan Rather 18 hours ago. Dear President Trump, Their names were Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Ricky John Best. One was a recent college graduate. The other was an army veteran and father of four. I wish we would hear you say these names, or even just tweet them. They were brave Americans who died at the hands of someone who, when all the facts are collected, we may have every right to call a terrorist. A third brave man, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, was wounded in the knife attack. This story may... not neatly fit into a narrative you pushed on the campaign trail and that has followed you into the White House. They were not killed by an undocumented immigrant or a "radical Islamic terrorist." They were killed in an act of civic love, facing down a man allegedly spewing hate speech directed at two teenage girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab. That man seems to have a public record of "extremist ideology" - a term issued by the Portland Police Bureau. This "extremism" may be of a different type than gets most of your attention, or even the attention in the press. But that doesn't make it any less serious, or deadly. And this kind of "extremism" is on the rise, especially in the wake of your political ascendency. Most people who study these sorts of things do not think that is a coincidence. I do not blame you directly for this incident. Nor do I think other people should. But what a President says, who he has around him, and the tone he sets can set the tone for the nation at large. Perhaps Portland, Oregon is off your radar. It is, after all, a rather liberal place. It's even a "sanctuary city." But it is still an American city. And you are its President. Two Americans have died leaving family and friends behind. They are mourned by millions more who are also deeply worried about what might come next. I hope you can find it worthy of your time to take notice. See More 246K 9.5K 142K
Rather wrote in an emotional post that although the story “may not neatly fit into a narrative you pushed on the campaign trail and that has followed you into the White House”, the men were “not killed by an undocumented immigrant or a ‘radical Islamic terrorist’”.
“This ‘extremism’ may be of a different type than gets most of your attention, or even the attention in the press. But that doesn’t make it any less serious, or deadly,” he wrote.
Rather finished his post by noting that Portland might not be on the president’s radar because it is a liberal city, but “it is still an American city. And you are its President”.
By Sunday night the post had had 370,000 likes and 8,7000 comments. His tweet linking to the Facebook post had been liked 15,000 times.
Rather’s sentiments were echoed by scores of Twitter users who were dismayed by the president’s failure to speak about the double murder.
Tony Posnanski (@tonyposnanski) Trump's tweets today...
4 About Fake News
1 Congratulating a man who assaulted a reporter
1 About Europe trip
0 Denouncing Portland attack May 28, 2017
Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) Trump tweeted 2x today celebrating a candidate that assaulted a journalist but has said nothing yet about the 2 heroes murdered in Portland. May 28, 2017
Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) Donald Trump has yet to mention Portland heroes, a 23-year-old and a Vet, who gave their lives to protect Muslim women from an extremist. https://t.co/k7zbjpqctm May 28, 2017
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) Call me crazy but had a Muslim killed two white Christians in Portland I suspect our president would have said something May 29, 2017
Meanwhile, one of the teenagers who Best and Namkai-Meche stepped in to protect from the attack has paid tribute to the men. Destinee Mangum, who was travelling with a Muslim friend when the attack began, said the men had saved her life.There's been a lot of anticipation for Device, the new project from Disturbed's David Draiman, over the past year. But now the biggest update yet comes with Draiman confirming an all-star lineup of guest musicians for the album, as well as details on the disc's first single and a tentative release date.
Draiman says, "Crazy! Finally able to talk more about this amazing band. The first single off our debut record debuts at radio on Feb. 19 and we have a tentative release date for the record of April 9." Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, Deep Purple singer-bassist Glenn Hughes, Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows, System of a Down singer Serj Tankian, Rage Against the Machine guitar great Tom Morello and Halestorm frontwoman Lzzy Hale will all make appearances on the disc.
In addition, Draiman confirmed that his live band will employ Evanescence / Dark New Day drummer Will Hunt and Dope / Eve to Adam guitarist Virus. Aside from Draiman, the band's only other permanent member is onetime Filter guitarist Geno Lenardo.
Draiman also mentioned that the video for 'Vilify,' which will serve as the aforementioned lead single, is filming today (Jan. 11). He concludes, "Album artwork coming soon! Can't wait for all of you to hear this."
As previously reported, Draiman has described Device as an industrial band in the vein of Ministry and early Nine Inch Nails.THE Socceroos have been left to clean up a mess after The Project hosts Waleed Aly and Peter Hellier sparked an international incident whilst interviewing Tim Cahill. Courtesy: Channel 10
RADIO host Gus Worland and Socceroos great Andy Harper have exploded at The Project panellists Waleed Aly and Peter Helliar this morning after jokes they made about the Socceroos’ trip to Honduras for their World Cup qualifier.
Speaking on the Triple M Sydney Grill Team, Worland called the pair “d***heads” and said he can’t believe anyone would watch the Channel 10 program.
Aly and Helliar sparked an international incident ahead of the first leg in San Pedro Sula on Saturday morning (AEDT) when they made jokes about the city being the former “murder capital of the world” in an interview with Aussie talisman Tim Cahill. Aly asked Cahill if the Socceroos were sure they wanted to win in enemy territory given the city’s reputation while Helliar suggested there are similarities between playing against Honduras and playing against “ISIS”.
“Waleed and Peter Helliar — they’re just disrespectful and they just don’t understand it and they just don’t get it,” Worland said.
“Tim Cahill is trying his best to get himself sorted out to go to the second biggest sporting event in the world behind the Olympics, maybe even the number one event in the world. It’s disrespectful to those countries, (it’s) disrespectful to Syria who have gone through unbelievable hardship.
“And then to bring up ISIS — they’re d***heads and that show just really p****s me off because they think they’re so much cleverer than everyone else and that just proves it.
“They would have sat down and worked out these jokes knowing that Tim Cahill is not interested in playing these jokes. He’s trying to get himself ready for the biggest game of his career.
“Those d***heads have got to pull their heads in.
“I just don’t understand anyone understanding The Project or liking it.”
‘IT’S EMBARRASSING HEARING CHEAP JOKES LIKE THAT’
Former Socceroo Andy Harper is in Honduras on commentary duties and also criticised what he called a “media beat-up” about the safety issues in San Pedro Sula, laying the boot into The Project.
“I’ve been here a couple of times now to Honduras and to this city San Pedro Sula and I’ve loved every second of being here,” Harper said on SEN Breakfast.
“There’s been a lot spoken, there’s been a lot reprinted here about the Australian press coverage. That chat apparently that took place on a program on Channel 10 didn’t go down well here at all.
“To be honest it’s a little bit embarrassing hearing cheap jokes like that being made.
“People here are sensitive about the social conditions. They’re a very poor country in a very poor part of the world, they don’t need to be told that, they don’t need their nose being rubbed in it which is how they’ve felt.
“It’s taken a little bit of smooth talking to guarantee them that not all of Australia really thinks like that — let’s focus on the game.”
HELLIAR RESPONDS TO HEAT
Peter Helliar clearly isn’t too fazed by the extra attention he’s receiving, making light of the situation when he appeared on Nova 96.9’s Fitzy and Wippa on Thursday morning.
The host of new Channel 10 quiz show Cram was happy to poke more fun at Honduras even after the backlash to his and Aly’s comments.
“I’ve probably received a couple of death threats but I have received more death threats from One Directioners over the years so all is relative,” Helliar said.
“The Honduras version of Cram is on hold though. I just heard back, they’re waiting to see how this settles.
“I hope they (Honduras) finish in the top two in the next couple of games against the Socceroos, I really do.”
Helliar also joked about regularly holidaying to Honduras and said “they’re a lovely people, it’s a lovely country and I’ve got nothing but respect for the Hondurans”.
HONDURAS WANTS TO ‘KILL AUSSIES OFF’
Media commentators this week joined Honduras football president Jorge Salomon in condemning the two Network 10 stars over their comments, which have featured in Honduran media outlets.
Socceroos players, including Cahill, have been forced to address concerns from Honduras media about the lack of respect Australian media commentators have shown the nation that finished fourth in the CONCACAF zone’s World Cup qualification.
The situation has been spiralling in Honduras to the point that star Honduran striker Antony Lozano declared his team will be aiming to “kill them off” when asked about the Socceroos this week.
The situation all began to get out of control when Aly appeared to suggest it’s not safe to travel to Honduras and Helliar made his “ISIS” joke after making light of Australia defeating Syria in its most recent tie to advance to this stage of the qualification process.
Cahill was on the show to promote Channel 10’s new broadcasting arrangement to screen A-League games, but — after Cahill starred in Australia’s World Cup qualification play-off win against Syria — all the focus was on the Socceroos’ tie against Honduras.
Here’s how the interview went:
Carrie Bickmore: So, Honduras. Are you going to win?
Tim Cahill: It’s a massive game. We’re looking forward to it. It’s going to be difficult. It’s never going to be easy and we’re excited.
Waleed Aly: I was very excited. I was so excited. I was going to get my tickets booked. I was going to fly over there. I decided to do some googling of Honduras and it turns out we’re going to San Pedro Sula which apparently is — or once was — the murder capital of the world. So, anyway, good luck without me. Do you think it’s a good idea that you win?
TC: It doesn’t matter where we go for us. It doesn’t matter. We’re there to win and that’s it. There’s nothing holding us back now. We want to go to a fourth consecutive World Cup.
Peter Helliar: So you beat Syria. Now you’re going to the murder capital of the world. If you win this, I think you play ISIS. But they’re calling you the danger man? The coach is saying you’re the danger man. They have to stop you.
TC: Well that’s good because, firstly, I don’t know if I’m going to get a game. I have to do well here (in the A-League). Get selected, stay fit. It’s a big challenge. I’m excited for it. It doesn’t matter where we play. There’s a massive prize at the end of it.
The light-hearted comments have been branded disrespectful in Honduras.
Salomon even took the extraordinary step of calling a press conference to address reports in Australian media and showed a video of what he said is the “real” Honduras — a tourist’s paradise.
“We are upset with some Australian media that have put the name of Honduras in bad, they have played with the name of our country, that has bothered us all and I think it is something we cannot allow,” Salomon said according to Diario Mas.
“Everything that Australian media has published is false, that’s why we want to show you through videos the real Honduras.”
In October, National Honduran newspaper El Heraldo, based in the capital Tegucigalpa, reported that the country had been “mocked” by “two presenters of a famous Australian night show”.
Written in Spanish, the newspaper went onto criticise Helliar for trying to make a joke about linking the murder rates of Honduras with the ongoing unrest in Syria.
Just touched down in Honduras to discover Channel 10’s The Project is in the news. Locals not happy with the way their country is being portrayed. pic.twitter.com/pyA1syPF91 — Murray Shaw (@MurrayShaw1) November 7, 2017
Media watch in Honduras. Literally. Channel 10 in the local press. Anger at aussie perception heating up to racist claims pic.twitter.com/lQ9SSlKHyh — David Weiner (@davidweiner9) November 7, 2017
The newspaper also criticised Socceroos boss Ange Postecoglou’s decision to make a light-hearted joke in an interview reported by Channel 9 about the logistical nightmare the team faces travelling to Honduras with all their equipment, coaches, support staff and security.
“Australians seem to have a lot of fun with the social problems of other countries,” El Heraldo reported.
Cahill was forced to address the Honduran resentment towards the Australian press when he landed a day after teammates on Tuesday night (AEDT).
Ever the statesman, Cahill came with a message of respect — contrary to some sensational media reports of the country’s security situation.
“As players, we respect the country and people, which is most important,” he said.
“What media say is different to what players think.
“I’m happy here in Honduras.
“It is a country I already respect a lot but we want to get a good result in the match.
“I know Victor Bernardez as a player and he used to play for the national team. For (national team veteran Maynor) Figueroa too, we have the utmost respect.
“We’re coming here to play football. It’s about football and enjoying that occasion and us taking in the surroundings.”
Locals have been unimpressed with Australian media reports painting the country as hostile or violent, with a particular distaste for the use of the “murder capital of the world” tag the city cannot shake.
HOW DANGEROUS IS SAN PEDRO SULA?
There’s no disputing San Pedro Sula’s horrific crime rate that until recently made it the world’s most dangerous city. Honduras’ second-biggest city has a homicide rate of 112 killings per 100,000 people.
By comparison, Australia’s rate is one per 100,000.
But statistics only tell one side of the story; much of the violence is gang- related and confined to well-known no-go zones.
San Pedro Sula built up an unenviable reputation in the past as the most murderous city in Honduras — itself part of Central America’s notorious Northern Triangle, along with Guatemala and El Salvador, where gang violence, drug trafficking, poverty and corruption are rife.
Five years ago, a Mexican NGO called the place the second most violent city in all of Latin America, after Juarez in Mexico.
But now, after four years of stepped-up military and police patrols and aggressive street crackdowns, things have improved, authorities insist.
When Australia face up to Honduras in the stadium, surrounded by barbed wire, there will be 1,200 police and soldiers deployed inside and outside the venue, police spokesman Jorge Rodriguez said.
A government policy to get tough on violence in San Pedro Sula has seen 2000 armed militarised police spread across four battalions set-up in the area — and it’s made a massive difference, according to Santos Leonel Reyes, a guard at the government morgue which conducts autopsies of victims of violent deaths.
“It’s calm now because there are patrols 24 hours a day in all the city — there are no more turf wars between the gangs,” he said.
“There were an average of 24 bodies a day coming in here. Now there are three a week.”
— with AAP, AFPES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account
An American who sparked a backlash by handing out badges encouraging Londoners to talk to strangers on the Tube today said: "Haters gonna hate".
NHS worker Jonathan Dunne made and handed out 500 badges designed to be worn by commuters who wanted to strike up a conversation on the Underground.
But the badges, which carried the question 'Tube chat?', sparked outrage on social media from Londoners who considered solitude on their commute sacrosanct.
The 42-year-old responsible for them hit back, though, telling sceptics the badges are for lonely people who want some company.
"Haters gonna hate," Mr Dunne told the Standard. "Who cares if that’s what they’re writing about? If people are really upset by 500 tube chat badges then they need to get a life.”
After the Tube chat badges were handed out this morning at Old Street, Londoners took to social media in their swathes to condemn the idea of talking to a stranger during their commute.
Some Twitter users even chose to make their own mock badges, telling people not to talk to them.
And Mr Dunne, who is from Colorado and now lives in Green Lanes, revealed that he had difficulty handing out the 500 badges before making it into work.
He said: "It's rush hour so it's sort of running the gauntlet.
"The reaction to the badges was about 80/20, 80 percent really negative and 20 per cent positive but it's completely voluntary.
"I thought it would be a fun thing to do, handing out the flyers and chatting to people but it didn't go so well.
"People wouldn't take one, saying they might end up talking to a psychopath."
Mr Dunne added that the idea behind the badges came from an activity he organised as an administrator at the NHS and from his Colorado upbringing.
He said: "I organised an activity at the NHS to coincide with the Olympics and to get people involved but no one came.
"My wife and I both come from small towns in America and locally we know everyone.
"If you go to the supermarket there you know everyone at least by their face, but as soon as you walk out of the door in London you're anonymous."
Despite wearing a badge on his commute home yesterday, Mr Dunne said nobody tried to speak to him on the Tube.
But he added that he would be wearing one home tonight and that "hope springs eternal"
He also revealed that he was planning on making more badges to hand out, despite criticism from Londoners and his wife.
He said: “When I do it again I’m not going to do it at a station, being somewhere different will bring up a completely different reaction.
“At a station people put a guard up and I think I could have been holding anything and people would have told me to go away.
“I’m thinking about doing another hundred but my wife isn’t too keen."Halide versions of common image-processing algorithms are faster and required fewer lines of code
Source: MIT Researchers from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT have presented a new programming language called Halide. The language is designed to simplify the development of image processing applications on modern computer systems. The embedded domain-specific language (DSL) aims to enhance the efficiency of algorithms such as those for camera raw pipelines, bilateral grids, Laplacian filtering and image segmentation.
"Not only are Halide programs easier to read, write and revise than image-processing programs written in a conventional language, but because Halide automates code-optimisation procedures that would ordinarily take hours to perform by hand, they’re also significantly faster," said the researchers. The team used Halide to rewrite various common image-processing algorithms and found that their versions were about a third shorter and offered up to six times faster processing speeds. They note that one of the main contributing factors is the highly optimised process parallelisation.
Embedded in C++, Halide runs on platforms such as x86-64/SSE, ARM v7/NEON and CUDA. It supports SIMD units, multiple cores and complex memory hierarchies. The compiler is currently supported on Mac OS X systems (the research team themselves used 10.6 to 10.8) and mainstream Linux distributions such as Ubuntu (12.04). The researchers say that, while Windows builds are technically feasible, they have been neither attempted nor tested within the project. Source code and binaries of Halide are released under the MIT licence. The code for the compiler and for Halide itself are available to download from the project's GitHub page.
(Harald M. Genauck / crve)This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
I remember the first time I realized my anxiety had become a problem. I was with friends in a popular Glasgow bar watching Sunday afternoon soccer. It was quiet, and alongside our table stood three vacant chairs: two with sturdy wooden panels fixed to the space between the top of the backrest and the cushion, and one without. I was sat closest to the seat missing the support and could see that, although otherwise identical to the others, there were no screw holes or any obvious signs that this chair ever had a support panel, or was supposed to have one attached at all.
Why was this, I wondered. Why was this chair missing part of its intended structure? Why had the support not been fitted? Or why was it taken off? Where was the missing support now? How could someone have noticed this defect and not have fixed it? I became entranced and angry. My blood boiled and my palms began to sweat. One eye on the soccer, one on the ill-fitted chair. I eventually went outside to catch some fresh air and to calm down.
I was being irrational, but I couldn't help it. When you suffer from anxiety it's not uncommon for people to doubt your condition. Some folk don't get it, assuming those who exhibit anxiety are seeking attention, or should simply calm down, or chill out. Some of you reading this might scoff at how an inanimate object got me so riled up, whereas some of you might recognize what I'm talking about. Even those who sympathize I find, at times, struggle to accept the condition, given how difficult it can be dealing with someone who's always whinging or worrying. I might be a general pain in the ass, but I'm not lacking in insight.
Medication helps me govern my now-diagnosed nervous disposition, but for many in a similar position the thought of consulting a doctor and seeking remedial treatment can be a daunting prospect. For long enough it was for me.
"I've had anxiety problems for as long as I can remember," explains Irish developer Owen Harris as he showcases his Oculus Rift VR game Deep at EGX Rezzed, an expo for indie games held in London in early March. Using a virtual reality headset, headphones, and a custom-built self-calibrating belt that matches the player's breathing patterns with on-screen movements, Deep is in essence a digital version of a diaphragmatic exercise. By breathing deeply, a reticule in the center of the screen expands and contracts causing the player to ascend and descend respectively around a beautifully rendered underwater expanse full of magnificent cliffs and glittering coral.
I wanted to build my own little isolation tank... for myself. It never really occurred to me to be showing it to other people.
"At some point I came across these deep belly breathing exercises, which is something that hasn't cured my anxiety but has just made everything much easier to manage," continues Harris. "When I do get very stressed out I just go into a quiet room and focus on my breathing and take ten to 15 slow breaths. It doesn't cure the problem, but it'll bring me down from a six down to a four, or a four down a three, and that's a really great thing to have.
"When VR finally arrived—I've been waiting for VR for the longest time, I even got to try out some of the earlier iterations in the 90s—I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to build something where at the end of a stressful day I could just go to, and it'd become my own little isolation tank. I was building this thing for myself—it never really occurred to me to be showing it to other people, but when I brought it to our local developer, Meetup, people were into it. About six months ago I teamed up with a Dutch artist, Niki Smit, and that really accelerated the game so much and now it looks beautiful, it plays beautifully, and I'm starting to be able to use it therapeutically for the first time, which is really great."
Via the virtues of the Oculus Rift, Deep is as much about exploring a vast, unadulterated underwater seascape as it is about utilizing a potential occupational therapy tool. For the player it's simple, yet it's hard to explain how much better it made me feel. I wasn't entirely stressed out during my day visit from Glasgow to London, however just five minutes strapped to Harris's breathing device felt remarkable.
Harris tells me how he became pent up following a few tough meetings at GDC in San Francisco the previous week, and how he turned to Deep as a way of calming himself down. By spending 20 to 30 minutes in Deep while sunk into a beanbag, Harris was able to de-stress and get on with his day.
Perhaps one of the most significant and touching tales of Deep in action is one told by indie developer and regular mental health speaker Christos Reid. His first encounter with Harris's creation profoundly moved him following a presentation alongside Depression Quest designer Zoe Quinn about video games and mental health. While chatting, Reid had a bit of an epiphany after inadvertently divulging something he realized he'd never said out loud before.
"I came off stage, as it were, and I felt like I was heading towards a really bad panic attack," explains Reid as we chat over the phone. "I needed to calm down and I was just really wired. Whatever I was doing wasn't working. I'd spoken to Owen earlier about Deep who suggested I try it now. I said sure, and he put the belt and headphones on me.
I'm wondering if Owen has any idea just how much this game could do for people. Stuff like this is life changing.
"It was weird – I was trying to watch the game, but I had tears at the bottom of the Oculus headset because it calmed me down more than anything ever has in my entire life. I took it off after five minutes or so and he's looking at me—he'd been at the mental health talk and he knew my input was valuable—and asked, 'What do you think?' It was really intense—I just started crying. I was just trying to get the words out because I was so emotional because I had never had such an effective anxiety treatment before. Nothing has ever helped me the way Deep did.
"I cried, and then he started crying in response—there was just these two developers stood crying in the middle of a cafe. It was brilliant. I then eventually got the words out and told him [ Deep] had helped me more than anything. It was just this really emotional experience and since then we've kept in touch."
Reid's story perfectly outlines just how powerful Deep is and could be. His self-confessed fragile state prior to testing Deep may have seen his emotions running higher than "normal," yet the relief felt following his time deep breathing underwater stands testament to the game's wide-reaching potential.
After all, Reid is but one player. He notes how he genuinely cannot wait to get a VR headset sorted and for Harris to set him up with a custom controller, yet at the same time stresses the importance of getting Deep out to the masses. This is something he truly hopes Harris recognizes—that Deep could touch so many people's lives.
"The amazing thing about it is that people find it interesting in general, they find breathing exercises interesting in general," adds Reid. "But what I'm wondering is if Owen has any idea just how much this game could do for people to help their anxiety. Stuff like this is life changing, because people don't always want to go to CBT, people don't want to take medication, and to be able to put a headset on and just relax and explore and just have an experience that's purely focussed around your well being—it's so rare.
"He built a custom control to teach people deep breathing, which is hugely important because breathing exercises are a massive part of coping with panic attacks. I really hope that this is the start of something incredible because I think this is the sort of thing that people should be paying attention to in a big way, because I think Owen could be a colossal force for good in games development."
Approximately two to five percent of the world's population has anxiety in some way or another. It's also said that Generalised Anxiety Disorders count for as much as 30 percent of the mental health problems seen by GPs. Like Reid says, though, many people won't receive treatment from doctors, therapists, or counselors for anxiety, and thus won't receive medication.
But video games? Around 44 percent of human beings with internet access are now playing them—that's roughly 700 million people, according to the Spil Games industry report of 2013—and the total number of players worldwide is well over a billion. Surely a medium so accessible, interactive, persuasive and expressive is something Deep needs to be part of on a macro scale. I ask Harris how he plans to market this sleeping giant.
"We really don't know," he says, frankly. "On one hand, my favorite thing to do is travel. The game has taken me on five or six trips already, so it's already wildly successful as far as I'm concerned. The game may continue on as more of a museum or exhibition piece, or an installation piece, or we might see if the interest is there to produce a commercial version of the controller and see if it's the kind of thing people would want.
"That's a ways away, but these are questions we'll be asking ourselves nearer the summer time. Our design challenge that we set ourselves is that the game should be able to sit without change in a place of value: in a therapeutic center; in a game show, like Rezzed; Burning Man; or an art gallery. It should have a place and a value in all of those places—that's what we're trying for."
More information about anxiety and how it can be treated can be found here.
Follow Joe on Twitter.Ethics Lawyers Call Trump's Business Conflicts 'Nakedly Unconstitutional'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AFP/Getty Images Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AFP/Getty Images
Will Donald Trump's new job as president create ethical conflicts with his long-running role as a business owner?
Trump sees no problem. "I have a no-conflict situation, because I'm president," Trump said at a recent press conference. He was correctly referring to the federal conflicts-of-interest law that covers Cabinet secretaries, but not presidents.
Still, ethics experts say other restrictions do apply to presidents, setting up serious ethical problems for the new administration.
"A president is not permitted to receive cash and other benefits from foreign governments," Norm Eisen tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And yet, Donald Trump is getting a steady flow of them around the world and right here in the United States."
Eisen, who served as President Obama's special counsel on ethics and government reform, has joined forces with Richard Painter, the former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, to speak out publicly about Trump's potential conflicts of interest.
Eisen describes Trump's business entanglements as "frankly and nakedly unconstitutional.... It is extraordinary that we'll have a president who is violating the constitutional conflicts clause, the so-called Emoluments Clause, as soon as he takes the oath of office," he says.
Painter concurs with Eisen's assessment. "The president needs to focus on protecting the United States and American interests in a very dangerous world," Painter says. "I really hope that President Trump takes the steps he needs to, to be free of conflict of interest in that endeavor."
Interview Highlights
When [Trump] makes his decisions to use America's military force, or threaten it abroad, how will we know that he is not putting ordinary Americans' lives at risk in order to protect his properties, and his pocket and his wallet?
On questions that arise because Trump hasn't released his tax returns and detailed financial reports
Norm Eisen: So many people in the heartland of the country rightly are angry that their lives have been devastated by economic and trade developments of recent years, and also, many of them have [gone] themselves or sent their kids abroad to fight America's wars.
With Donald Trump receiving these enormous sums from foreign governments, and having strong property interests and relationships in many foreign governments, when he makes his decisions on domestic and economic policy, how will we know that he is not using the White House to do deals for himself at the expense of the people who voted for him? When he makes his decisions to use America's military force, or threaten it abroad, how will we know that he is not putting ordinary Americans' lives at risk in order to protect his properties, and his pocket, and his wallet, rather than in the best interest of our country?
On how Trump's business loans could interfere with his ability to regulate banks
Richard Painter: Consider, for the example, the debt from Deutsche Bank. Now, Deutsche Bank is a private bank, but we already know about very large loans from Deutsche Bank, and so that's a dependency relationship, and yet the president is supposed to be regulating or supervising the people who regulate the financial services sector.
They're talking about repealing Dodd-Frank... and scaling back on bank regulations, making it easier for banks to loan money against collateral, which is almost always real estate, and that's what they're talking about doing in this administration, and here's the president of the United States, dependent upon banks — some government-owned, some private banks, all over the world — and there's a serious conflict of interest there.
On the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight calling the director of the Office of Government Ethics, Walter Shaub Jr., to come before his committee after Shaub criticized Trump's plan to address business conflicts
Painter: That congressional committee of so-called oversight in government reform has been a politicized body engaged in politicized investigations for a long time.... And now what we have is the chairman of the committee, instead of focusing on the serious problems with respect to the president-elect's conflicts of interest and the potential constitutional violation that we will have on Friday [Inauguration Day] because of the foreign government payments, that committee doesn't want to focus on that, all they want to do is start to harass the Office of Government Ethics and try to investigate the Office of Government Ethics simply because [Director] Walter Shaub had the courage to speak out and say exactly what I've been saying... that the president's divestiture plan is inadequate....
This is just pure partisan politics coming out of the House Oversight Committee, and I'm embarrassed, as I say, having been a Republican for many years, to see them bringing partisan politics into their work and now harass the Office of Government Ethics for doing its job.
On the security risks posed by having the Trump name on buildings around the world
Painter: Do you want to put the name of the president of |
NEW DELHI: A Delhi court on Monday granted anticipatory bail to an IndiGo woman pilot, who has been named by DGCA for procuring flying licence by allegedly submitting forged marks certificates.Additional sessions judge Renu Bhatnagar granted relief to Meenakshi Singhal after her counsel said she had joined the investigations."The accused has joined the investigation. It is also stated that the custodial interrogation of the accused is not required now. The people who had supplied the fake marksheets have already been arrested," her counsel Vijay Aggarwal said.Moving the bail application, the accused stated that she was a 40-year-old unmarried woman who was the only support for her aged parents. Counsel Aggarwal also stated that the women in the country should be given a special status and the accused being an unmarried woman could not be kept in jail.Allowing the plea, ASJ Bhatnagar said, "Since the accused is a female and she has already joined the investigation and her custodial interrogation is not required... it is hereby ordered that in the event of arrest, the accused be released on bail."The court asked the accused to furnish a personal bond of Rs 20,000 with one surety of the same amount.Share
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New Android Malware Steals Secretly via Premium SMS
Malware among smartphone and mobile devices is something that many of us never give a second thought to until we encounter a serious threat on our own device.
When it comes to mobile device malware, Android devices always come to mind as smartphones and tablets running the operating system are the most vulnerable and hackers are taking advantage of the gaping hole with a resurgence of threats like the Android.Trojan.MKero.A malware that secretly subscribes victims to premium SMS services.
Bitdefender has uncovered CAPTCHA-bypassing Android malware, purposefully left in Google Play apps by unscrupulous developers, with the aim of subscribing thousands of users to premium-rate services.
The Android.Trojan.MKero.A malware was first discovered in 2014 and has since been distributed to users installing Android apps from unverified sources, mostly far outside of the Google Play store’s infrastructure. Such third party apps come in many different forms and are known for including malware that installs on Android devices.
The Trojan’s sophistication lies in its ability to bypass CAPTCHA authentication systems by redirecting these requests to Antigate.com, an online image-to-text recognition service.
Once the SMS services is subscribed to, the user is unknowingly exploited by participation in unknowing services that eventually reward the hackers behind the scheme with a pay day at the expense of the device user’s texting and data plan.
If each victim is subscribed to at least one premium-rate number that charges a minimum $0.5 per SMS each month, the total financial losses from this Android-based malware could amount to $250,000.
Antigate.com relies on actual individuals to recognize CAPTCHA images, which makes it easy for requests to return to the malware in seconds because it mistakenly thinks there is human interaction. The malware then processes the covert subscription.
When conducting its own research, Bitdefender was already monitoring malware-like behavior and found that recent versions had stopped using the highly advanced packer – that eased its detection – but still used obfuscated strings.
“Among the Google Play apps that disseminate the trojan, two have between 100,000 and 500,000 installs each, which is a staggering potential victim count,” said Catalin Cosoi, Chief Security Strategist at Bitdefender. “Our research confirmed that these have been weaponised for a while, with one app going back by at least five iterations and has been regularly updated.” “The malware has been built with covert capabilities to operate silently on the victim’s Android device,” Catalin Cosoi continued. “A mobile security solution is the only way to identify malicious apps, regardless of where they were downloaded, and stop threats from causing financial harm or personal data loss.”
The infographic below is a representation from Bitdefender demonstrating the attack timeline process for Android.Trojan.MKero.A conducting its malicious activities over a wide array of specific targets.
At least one developer, Like Gaming, is publishing more than one of these malicious apps, which is the malware’s first occurrence in the official Google Play store. Developers have found new ways of packing it into seemingly legitimate apps that can bypass Google’s vetting system, Google Bouncer.Researchers at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience and Kanazawa University, Japan, have succeeded in imaging structural dynamics of living neurons with an unprecedented spatial resolution.
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a leading tool for imaging, measuring, and manipulating materials with atomic resolution – on the order of fractions of a nanometer.
AFM images surface topography of a structure by “touching” and “feeling” its surface by scanning an extremely fine needle (the diameter of the tip is about 5 nanometers, about 1/100 of light wavelength or 1/10,000 of a hair) on the surface.
This technique has been applied to image solid materials with nanometer resolution, but it has been difficult to apply AFM for a soft and large sample like eukaryotic cells and neurons without damaging the sample. Additionally, image acquisition with conventional AFM is too slow to capture fast cellular morphology changes.
Researchers have extensively modified the AFM system for imaging eukaryotic cells and neurons with high spatial and temporal resolution.
This new system allows for analysis of cell morphology changes with a spatial resolution ~20-100 fold better than that of a standard light microscope.
Imaging structural dynamics of living cells and neurons
While progress has been made over the past decades in the pursuit to optimize atomic force microscopy (AFM) for imaging living cells, there were still a number of limitations and technological issues that needed to be addressed before fundamental questions in cell biology could be address in living cells.
In their March publication in Scientific Reports, researchers at Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience and Kanazawa University describe how they have built the new AFM system optimized for live-cell imaging. The system differs in many ways from a conventional AFM: it uses an extremely long and sharp needle attached to a highly flexible plate. The system is also optimized for fast scanning to capture dynamic cellular events. These modifications have enabled researchers to image living cells, such as mammalian cell lines or mature hippocampal neurons, without any sign of cellular damage.
“We’ve now demonstrated that our new AFM can directly visualize nanometer-scale morphological changes in living cells”, explained Dr. Yasuda, neuroscientist and scientific director at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.
In particular, this study demonstrates the capability to track structural dynamics and remodeling of the cell surface, such as morphogenesis of filopodia, membrane ruffles, pit formation or endocytosis, in response to environmental stimulants. An example of this capability can be visualized in movie 1, where a fibroblast is imaged before and after treatment with insulin hormone, which intensely enhances the ruffling at the leading edge of the cell. Another example is seen in movie 2, where the morphological changes of a finger-like neuronal protrusion in the mature hippocampal neuron are observed.
According to Dr. Yasuda, the successful observations of structural dynamics in live neurons present the possibility of visualizing the morphology of synapses at nanometer resolution in real time in the near future. Since morphology changes of synapses underlie synaptic plasticity and our learning and memory, this will provide us with many new insights into mechanisms of how neurons store information in their morphology, how it changes synaptic strength and ultimately how it creates new memory.
Source: Max Planck Florida Institute for NeuroscienceIt was a week light on truly humiliating losses that were not immediately followed by Most Extreme Coach Termination, so we'll go with LSU in this space since it's rough to see your national championship hopes severely damaged right after you thought you'd rescued them. The Tigers were losing, and then were winning, and then were losing again in the span of about a minute and a half, causing the usual implosion on LSU boards. But first:
TigerFan244: Why are we called "Corndogs"???? I don't get it The Dude's Rug: I don't get it either. I love corndogs. A UGA dude threw one at me last night and I ate it. High C: I ate one last night CajunRevolution: Does anyone actually eat corn dogs around here? Geaux Tahel: Cant you read? PeaRidge Watash: Everyone knows LSU fans smell like bourbon anyway.
And now:
Congrats Chavis on the first regulation loss in history while scoring 40+ This is the worst defense in the history of LSU. We should not be this bad even if we lost 11 starters. Recruiting is the problem. We have 11 players starting on one side of the ball who really should not be playing SEC football. Shame that we finally got an offense and now the defense fricks them over.
This does not go over well:
The OP is 17. Fact. GTFO dip shite.
Lou Tepper is laughing at your post as we speak.
Then the shocking reveal!
[If the OP was 17] that would mean he was a mere 7 yr old when he signed up at TD. Impressive.
Elsewhere:
things I'd rather have at MLB - a cardboard cutout of Kevin Minter
- a $100 bill
- a pretty girl
- a pizza
- a stop sign
- orange cones
- a mean looking scarecrow
- a basket of puppies
Someone suggests a $50 bill would do it, but the OP disagrees:
I feel a hundred is more flashy and recognizable, and we need something a RB might actually slow down for, since our MLB is apparently of no interest or concern.
Also:
Does Anyone Remember the Depression after Georgia in 1998? Baton Rouge was like a ghost town. I remember all the radio shows people were not mad, they were sad. It was like a funeral.
ballscaster: I remember being really sad after that game. I was 18 back then. Now that I'm 23 and with a math degree, I'm mature enough to move on with my life and not let college football upset me so much. HeadyBrosevelt: Watch out! We got a math major here! lsu_mike: Man you only aged 5 years since 1998. That's incredable StadiumDormRat'72: Inviting ridicule upon yourself to deflect some of the frustration and criticism being taken out on your team. That's commendable. Well-played, sir. ballscaster: I try to be Christlike.
And in that you succeed. Jesus had no idea how many fish he had, either. Ballscaster and friends win the internet. Finally:
LSU! You are the recipient of the Tears of Unfathomable Sadness. Don't spend them all in one place.
The rest of the week in spleen:
ACC
Georgia Tech lost to Virginia Tech back on Thursday, and continued using Nerd God as their PSA, which delights me, but not some others:
I don't think Bobinski has ever played one single down of college football, and I know CPJ has not. How can you expect for us to be successful? And to put a nerd on national tv before a game to represent us? Embarrassing! It's a certain sign to me that the powers to be want to deemphasize FB at GT and be in the second rate bottom of the ACC.
I don't have much else from GT, which seems to be saving it up for a future debacle. There is this after Johnson went for it on fourth and two at his own 30 late:
Just flat out stupid! I'm sorry but I still can't get past why CPJ went for it on our own 30 yard line towards the latter part of the game, is he just flat out stupid!??
MTrain: I dont even try to figure out what CPJ is doing. he's like a troll Highriser987: I think ur right, he wants to make us butthurt or force a massive bigcry outbreak.
FWIW, most of the people in that thread thought it was the right move what with GT's slow, no-throw offense.
Finally, Stingtalk has the most entertaining profanity filter on the internet:
öööö That is all.
GoTech19: I totally ööööing agree. Great ööööing start GTCrew4b: Same öööö different game. JEMJacket: im about to lose my öööö already renegadeagle: what the umlating umlat u.m.l.aaaaaaaaaaaaa.tttttt
By the way:
ElCidBUZZingFAN: This appears to the most appropriately named game thread in the history of StingTalk.
Yup.
NOTRE DAME saw Tommy Rees throw interceptions on his second and third attempts, fell behind 14-0 as a result, and never recover. Barstool Sports pawed through the Jen Bielema-level reaction on Twitter and came out filthy, but covered in pageviews. My favorite is from one Connor Korenchuk, who ends his hatetweet with a hash tag that lets you know he's all right:
The actual, non-subway alumns have a bigger problem, though: Notre Dame did not stick around to sing a song after the game. The student paper has four(!) articles on ND not singing their alma mater after the loss:
Early Exit by Irish Adds Insult to Injury
- "Part of what makes Notre Dame the Notre Dame family is that we treat our student athletes as students and athletes," Finan said. "… Telling them to go into the locker room tells me that [Kelly] values them as athletes before students and that’s incorrect."
Praise Thee Notre Dame
- If you are a player, don’t listen to [Brian Kelly]. Stay. It’s your choice. If you are a student, don’t support this decision. By all means, boo the players who turn their backs on you.
Tradition Transcends Winning and Losing
- Originally, this seemed to be some players who in their frustration had lost sight of our tradition. That would have been pretty terrible. But it was so much worse to find out that in fact, they had been following the new "policy" of the Notre Dame football team.
I Stand By My Team
- What though the odds, I stood by my team because loyalty, unity and support are infinitely more important than a win or a loss. I still do, and always will, stand by my team. And at the end of the next game my team loses, I hope they will stand with me. We are a family. We are ND.
Notre Dame problems. Like going to the national title game last year.
Is Kelly more disliked than Weis, Davie, or Ty?
by Whitefieldwarrior (2013-09-29 10:04:30) I can honestly say, it sure feels that way. Count me in as one that just loathes this arrogant prick. He's a 8 win coach at this level. Last year he had a special group of kids that found a way to win in spite of him. There's a reason we lose recruits in the 11th hour, transfers every off-season, and we haven't had a year that we haven't had issues off the field under his watch. I put that square on Pig Face.
Most people disagree with this while making it clear they dislike Kelly, and then this guy…
Everyone knows a Brian Kelly. The mid-level manager that thinks he should be running the company.
HE IS RUNNING THE COMPANY.
BIG TEN
Purdue lost by 31 points to a MAC team—tying the worst-ever loss by a Big Ten team to a MAC team—and then things got worse, as two receivers were arrested. For shoplifting. Tie bars. From Kohl's. BIG TENNNNNN!
It's bad.
Purdue put on one of the most pathetic showings I can remember and was absolutely manhandled by the Huskies.
But it's worse that…
That was back in 2009 under good old Danny Hope. That’s the only time these two teams have played and Purdue lost 21-28 but honestly it wasn’t even that close.
…that post isn't even about what just transpired. This is the post about what just transpired:
Purdue, We’re not Good at Football Purdue got absolutely embarrassed and manhandled in every single way yesterday afternoon in Ross-Ade Stadium as Purdue lost to NIU 55-24. … the 55 points allowed by the Boilermaker defense was the most points allowed in a home game in Ross-Ade Stadium. So there’s that! This was perhaps the worst Purdue football game I’ve ever sat through.
The bad includes this:
The crowd was once again overtaken by opposing fans this time from NIU. Not good.
A MAC school just pulled a Nebraska-at-Notre Dame on Purdue. I'd say this disqualfies them from future participation in the league, but it absolutely does not. Big Ten.
BIG 12
The infallible transitive property of college football states that Oklahoma State is 46 points worse than Maryland after they lost 30-21 to a WVU outfit that was smoked 37-0 by the Terps the week previous. As a group, Cowboy fans are perturbed but mostly just grateful to be watching quality football after decades of dealing with a malevolent octopus god. Only occasionally do they dip into TWIS-worthy material:
Hahahahahahaha, I'm so mad i started to laugh.
Can't run, can't pass, can't catch, can't kick, can't block. Btw, whos our OC again? How come i dont remeber his name
Because you are drunj.
Also:
We just lost to West Va by more points than William & Mary.
I think we suck.
And:
Since some on this board think the reason we got our asses kicked at Arizona last year was due to traveling west into a different time zone, wouldn't that mean we should play better by traveling east into a different time zone??
No one else in the league lost, as a lot of teams took bye weeks.
PAC-12
Washington State trails by a zillion points against Stanford in a driving rain storm. One man responds with hedonistic nihilism. One man, against the darkness.
YOU CAN TAKE OUR SPORTS ENJOYMENT BUT YOU CAN NEVER TAKE OUR POPOCOOOOOORN
Spencer already filed this guy with Pained Red Raider Fan as co-rulers of fandom; Mike Leach called that guy awesome and broke down his form; this space concurs. Guide us in our times of need, Monsoon Popcorn Fiend and Pained Red Raider Fan.
Now for the exact opposite of that guy: USC's relatively brief nightmare with Lane Kiffin is over after a 62-41 loss and tarmac canning. How's our favorite USC fan feeling?
you need to go By: San Clemente FAWK YOURSELF, YOU BRAIN DEAD PIECE OF SHIT RAH RAH. ya, that's right. You are a hunk of CRAP who should stick to making 7 layer bean dips and posting, "a big fight on for groots", on your censored rah rah boards. SHOVE YOUR POM POM UP YOUR ASS. TICKLE YOUR TONSILS TO THE BEAT OF CONQUEST AND SHUT THE FAWK UP. as much as Kiffin. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM. SC
He's consistent. And guess who he wants for head coach? No, seriously, guess. You are going to get it right.
Lexo: CLEM u have me intruiged re GRUDEN San Clemente: He's a workaholic, ADD type. think of Pete carroll with a much much higher IQ, and without the need for mountain dew. sc
Gruden gets his support because he has ADD.
SEC
Ole Miss fans are incensed that a former staffer of theirs, Tyler Siskey, is now an Alabama staffer and was spotted watching the game with binoculars. That is why they scored zero points against the notoriously permeable Alabama D.
Siskey youtube clip! We don't need to let this go! and if it means OM hiring its own lawyers, etc... it needs to be done. Not saying we would have won but clearly that was not a level playing field of fairness! I am sure though if we go to look into it Slive and his band of crooks will "threaten!" Hell, remember the Albert Means case! Proof is in the pudding that bama will win at all cost! This is the reason I will NEVER EVER give them respect! they don't deserve it! I hope the whole NCAA nation looks at this and ruin their reputation! It is also proof that ole Nicky was worried about the players safety and the hurry up offense, so worried he obviously hired a spy!
He can burn in hell with Bear for all I care!
http://youtu.be/kLbSl1ulPXI
Amateur lip-readers have deciphered that clip. In it Siskey proclaims "it's a pass" with Ole Miss in a four-wide shotgun formation on fourth and five two seconds before the snap. To the lawyers!
This is less throwing a rock from a glass house than throwing a rock at a rubber house such that it gives you a concussion (emphasis mine):
It's been "let go" too much The cheaters need to be held accountable. It's past time. Cheating is the only way they are #1. From SEC officials, the crook Slive, to Bammer coaches, to player buying alumni, to tree killing walk-on alumni. They are a sorry ***, unethical, arrogant, win at all cost bunch. Do you seriously believe 5 star athletes from other parts of the nation would attend school in this s---hole without being bought??? I have lived there. It sucks!
Thus ends irony.
On the other hand, this man's screed against Alabama drive-by trolls is a pilot I would get on if I was AMC facing a Breaking Bad-shaped hole in the lineup:
Voyeurs from the land of Gump Well, the voyeurs from the land of Gump are showing up in numbers to check the misery index of their latest vanquished opponent. …indications are that some lurking rubes are manifesting their boorish behavior by reminding their opponent post-contest of the soundness of the victory, as if to inoculate themselves with another weeks worth of self-esteem. If they are indeed here and doing the same, then they indeed know the truth about themselves, if only in those places deep inside that they don’t talk about at parties. … The Adlerian complex is in full effect here as it is an exposition of their efforts to compensate for their self-perceived inferiority to others. According to Alder, these feelings of inferiority may derive from their low position in their family structure, particularly if early experiences of humiliation occurred; a specific physical condition or defect existed; or a general lack of social feeling for others was present. Maybe some guy in the park had a little something in his pocket once and now they spend their time trying to heal themselves by attaching and proclaiming as "theirs" anything that appears alpha to them in an attempt to believe that by this they may be alpha too. This is apparently epidemic. Living vicariously through a football team is an art form in the" Row-Tyyde-Row" state. …But for all you Saturday winners, you will realize that come Monday morning your hemorrhoids will still bleed, your wife’s thighs will still rub and your brother will still be driving that ’92 Camaro and thinking it is cool. The odd stain on your daughter's car seat you will just ignore because you are a little intimidated by her boyfriend as he really is alpha. It will be that way regardless of how your team plays.
Unfortunately, the last bit is not true no matter how much you may squint and hope it to be so.
Etc.
WE LOST TO BUFFALLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOO — TheUConnBlog (@TheUConnBlog) September 28, 2013
NEXT WEEK: Michigan beats Minnesota by a half-point after turning the ball over eight times, causing both fanbases to dissolve! Alabama probably loses to Georgia State! Maryland is probably too good to be Annual Florida State ACC upset, but they'll try! West Virginia probably has a bad time against Baylor! Iowa-Michigan State disgusts all who partake of it!
More from SB Nation college football:
Follow @SBNationCFB Follow @SBNRecruiting
• Government shutdown has Air Force-Navy, Army-BC games in jeopardy
• Spencer Hall’s Alphabetical: Lane Kiffin, Alabama and more
• Who’s next after Kiffin? | Who’s next for USC?
• Oregon is terrifying: the weekend’s best stats
• Longform: Inside Chip Kelly’s offense at New Hampshire
• Today’s college football news headlinesA little more than a year ago, Deepika Padukone confessed on national television that she struggled with depression. Since then she has launched her Live Love Laugh Foundation, which aims to help people fight depression. Last night, Alia Bhatt’s older sister, Shaheen Bhatt opened up about depression to her Instagram followers. The twenty-seven-year-old spoke of how she has lived with the condition through her teenage years and urged more people to come forward with their own experiences. Read her moving Instagram post below:
“I’ve lived with depression on and off since I was about 13 years old. This is not a revelation or a confession. Those who know me know this about me. It’s not something I take any pains to hide, I’m not ashamed of it or particularly troubled by it. It’s just a part of who I am. I have days where I feel good and then I have days where I don’t. One minute everything’s fine and the next it’s like someone turned the light off inside my head. I go quiet and it’s difficult to get out of bed. Like it always does the world around me loses focus and I struggle to make sense of it. Sometimes these bouts last an hour – sometimes they last days.
Today, I’m on day 4. I say I live with depression rather than I struggle with it because for me (and I speak only for myself here) I don’t see why it has to be a struggle.
I once read an idea by an American essayist called Richard Mitchell which stayed with me; it’s now become how I try to approach the dips in my week or month. The idea is this:
To be sick, or to suffer, is inevitable. But to become bitter and vindictive in sickness and suffering and to surrender to irrationality, supposing yourself the innocent and virtuous victim of the evils intentions of the world, is not inevitable.
The appropriate answer to the question – Why me? is the other question – Why not me?
***
Why am I writing about this?
Well, I spend a fair amount of time on social media during the course of my day and today I found myself looking for something to post because it’s been a few days since I’ve posted anything.
I couldn’t find anything so I figured I’d just talk about this – how I’m doing, instead of what I’m doing.
It’s as simple as that, and we could all stand to do a little more of it.
P.S. That picture just seemed to work in this context.”
The post has already received a lot of support and appreciation from Bhatt’s followers. Our hearts go out to Bhatt and we hope she continues to help people embrace mental illness.Everything started out smoothly, building a MVP in a few days is amazing, but after some months of non-stop development it just isn't that simple to implement that great new feature. Your models are full of validations, the controllers are calling methods from another galaxy, everything seems to be tested but bugs keep on rising, like zombies from an apocalyptic (not so distant) future.
Ok. This might been a bit too harsh, but I really felt a bit like that.
The bottom-line was: we were really unhappy with the lack of structure in a vanilla Rails Way. Besides some conventions about database table names and directories for god classes called controller or model, Rails didn't give us any other guidance. So, we started looking around for architectures, or better, gems that enforce architectures and not just talk about how things could be done.
That's when I met Trailblazer, it's a "gem" idealized and created by Nick Sutterer aka @apotonick, yes he's the guy from cells.
Trailblazer is an architecture based on Operations, those are the entry-points of our app, they will define the "internal" API of your application. So it helps you to give back to your models and controllers theirs original responsibilities. A controller shouldn't really know about the underlying domain model, in the same way your Model shouldn't care about end user validations or crazy business logic, models are entities that define what are the data that you can work with. So, what trailblazer give us are some of those "missing" layers on top of the basic MVC stack.
Here's how an Operation looks like:
class Post::Create < Trailblazer::Operation contract do property :title, validates: { presence: true } property :body, validates: { presence: true } end def process(params) validate(params[:post], model) do contract.save end end private def model! Post.new end end
The contract block specifies the properties used by this operation, note that any other :property not described in there will just be ignored and won't be saved to the model. That means that you don't need params.permit(:something) anymore. #winwin
The #process methods receive a hash of params and "processes" them. In our case we want to validate our post params and if everything is ok, save them to our model.
Fine, that's cool, but how do I use those "operations" of yours?
Easy:
class PostsController < ApplicationController # other actions... def create Post::Create.run(params) do |op| return redirect_to posts_path end render :new end end
The great thing here is that our controller actions doesn't need to care about any business logic, they sole role is to call an Operation and operate on its result, that is: if everything went fine we want to redirect our users to the post index page, but if something went wrong we will re-render the :new view.
But dude, I could've done that with an usual if @model.valid? call in my action. Yes you could, but controllers shouldn't be dealing with business logic, what if you wanted to publish! a post whenever it's saved? You would need to add that into the action, and that's not cool. Controllers are there to handle HTTP stuff, they are great for rendering, redirecting, etc.
Another benefit is that operations use Form Objects by default, so we can exterminate all validations in our models. The contract block of an Operation uses reform to create our Form Object, it's responsible for validating and "syncing" data to our model.
class Admin::Post::Create < Post::Create contract do # properties :title and :body # are inherited from Post::Create 'contract' property :author, validates: { presence: true } end def process(params) validate(params[:post], model) do contract.save # you could do special admin stuff here if you wanted/needed end end # model! is inherited end
This Operation defines an extra attribute/property :author, both Operations use the same underlying model, but each one uses only the attributes they need, and process those attributes in their own way.
If you didn't had those separated contracts/form objects your model would probably look like that:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base attr_accessor :validate_author validates :title, presence: true validates :body, presence: true, limit: 3000 validates :author, presence: true, if: :validate_author end # And 'call' our desired 'optional' validation like that Post.new(title: 'foo', body: 'bar', author: '', validate_author: true).save
But since we're using a Form Object to do our validations, we can clean up our model entirely, having it nice and tidy.
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base # We would only list relations here, # or maybe attributes if this weren't an AR model. end
This separation of concerns and responsibilities also helps into creating better tests.
This is a RSpec test for our Operation:
RSpec.describe Post::Create do subject { described_class } describe "#contract" do # If our operation had some custom validations, coercions # and stuff like that we could test it here. # I usually don't test basic validations, # they just work, but it's up to you. end describe "#process" do context "with valid params" do let(:params) { { title: "Isn't it cool?", body: "something useful here" } } it "persists the params" do res, op = subject.run(params) expect(op.model.persisted?).to be_truthy expect(res).to be_truthy end # If our operation had to generate tokens, # send emails and those kind of things # all of them would be tested over here. end context "with invalid params" do let(:params) { { title: "Isn't it cool?", body: "" } } it "does NOT persist the params" do res, op = subject.run(params) expect(op.model.persisted?).to be_falsy expect(res).to be_falsy end end end end
And here is the spec for the controller using our super awesome operation.
RSpec.describe PostsController, :type => :controller do # Other tests ommited... describe "POST#create" do before(:each) do post :create, params end context "with valid params" do let(:params) { { title: 'foo', body: 'not foo enough' } } it { expect(response).to redirect_to(posts_path) } it { expect(flash[:notice]).to be_present } end context "with invalid params" do let(:params) { { customer: {} } } it { expect(response).to render_template :new } it { expect(flash.now[:alert]).to be_present } end end end
See, our controller spec doesn't need to care about persistence or anything business related, it knows that if an Operation succeeds it should redirect to posts_path and if not just re-render the view, and that's what we're testing.
And since we could clean up our model we don't really need a test for it xD
That's all folks!
In the next days I'll post a more in-deep step-by-step guide on using Trailblazer with Rails.
But, if you need any help or just want to chat, checkout the Trailblazer channel on gitter: https://gitter.im/trailblazer/chatI received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review....
17 year old Henry Malone lives in a futuristic, walled off Houston (called the Gulf Market) where full motion advertisements clutter the skies and the sides of buildings. These advertisements feature the image of the people viewing them because everyone has a neural implant called the NEX that connects them, at all times, to a vast network and database of knowledge. This database is controlled by a corporation called Planetary Link which, through the NEX devices has access to an individual's memories and experiences. In this world, accessing unauthorized knowledge is a punishable offense and traveling to other "markets" is not allowed. Henry is a computer tech trainee who is secretly reading textbooks about piloting. He is also a bit of a notable figure as he is the son of a famous astronaut who died mysteriously during a mission. Henry's lie is altered when he is called upon to service the NEX of a girl found unconcious. As he scours her brain looking for the source of the problem, he stumbles upon many images/memories of his father. Now he is determined to find out why she knows so much about his dad.
I thought the premise of a neural implant that allows immediate access to a network of knowledge was a clever idea. The populace of the Gulf Market is depicted as being so caught up in the NEX that they walk the streets bumping into each other and not paying each other any attention because they are so wrapped up in the NEX. They are described as constantly updating their profiles or sharing pictures or stories as a means of getting "shares" (money). It is easy to see the parallel with the infatuation with our current social media.
There is a larger message meant to be delivered by the book about standing idly by while being denied access to knowledge but the book falls a little short here. Planetary Link is clearly the bad guy but we get such a small glimpse of them. Outside of their security team and the drones that survey all that is going on, we don't get to see much the big bad wolf.
The story itself didn't hold much suspense for me, either. The main character Henry, who is a sarcastic kid who is still having a hard time dealing with his dad death, was a well-developed character, as was his friend Mark Watson. The main female character, Riya, was a hard-nosed girl who showed a lot of vulnerability. As the first book of a series, it ended in a bit of cliffhanger, but the ending didn't leave me in suspense either as the next step in Henry's adventure seems to lead to another character who was only briefly mentioned throughout the book.
I would liked to have seen this futuristic world fleshed out a little more for the reader, as well as a deeper look inside of Planetary Link. It would have made for a more enjoyable read.Chester Brown, the Toronto-based graphic novelist best known for his 2003 book, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, will be touring North America in May in support of his latest, Paying For It: a comic-strip memoir about being a john. Painfully candid, the book begins with the collapse of his relationship with long-time girlfriend Sook-Yin Lee, current host of the CBC’s Definitely Not the Opera, then recounts how that split led him to forgo romantic love in favour of paying prostitutes for sex. [SPOILER ALERT] It ends with his discovery of a new kind of monogamy with his “special friend”—a woman he met while she was still a working prostitute and who he continues to pay in exchange for sex.
Q: What do you hope Paying For It accomplishes?
A: Obviously there’s a political undercurrent to the book. I’m trying to make a point. Last fall we had Justice Susan Himel’s ruling basically decriminalizing prostitution. In the wake of that there were all these people saying, ‘Okay, now we have to re-criminalize prostitution and make it illegal for johns to buy sex.’ Stop criminalizing the prostitute, which I agree with, and start criminalizing the john, which of course I don’t agree |
and were challenged in 1875 when a papal encyclical declared the whole ecclesiastical legislation of Prussia was invalid, and threatened to excommunicate any Catholic who obeyed. There was no violence, but the Catholics mobilized their support, set up numerous civic organizations, raised money to pay fines, and rallied behind their church and the Centre Party. The "Old Catholic Church", which rejected the First Vatican Council, attracted only a few thousand members. Bismarck, a devout pietistic Protestant, realized his Kulturkampf was backfiring when secular and socialist elements used the opportunity to attack all religion. In the long run, the most significant result was the mobilization of the Catholic voters, and their insistence on protecting their religious identity. In the elections of 1874, the Centre party doubled its popular vote, and became the second-largest party in the national parliament—and remained a powerful force for the next 60 years, so that after Bismarck it became difficult to form a government without their support.[47][48]
Social reform [ edit ]
Bismarck built on a tradition of welfare programs in Prussia and Saxony that began as early as in the 1840s. In the 1880s he introduced old-age pensions, accident insurance, medical care and unemployment insurance that formed the basis of the modern European welfare state. He came to realize that this sort of policy was very appealing, since it bound workers to the state, and also fit in very well with his authoritarian nature. The social security systems installed by Bismarck (health care in 1883, accident insurance in 1884, invalidity and old-age insurance in 1889) at the time were the largest in the world and, to a degree, still exist in Germany today.
Bismarck's paternalistic programs won the support of German industry because its goals were to win the support of the working classes for the Empire and reduce the outflow of immigrants to America, where wages were higher but welfare did not exist.[34][49] Bismarck further won the support of both industry and skilled workers by his high tariff policies, which protected profits and wages from American competition, although they alienated the liberal intellectuals who wanted free trade.[50]
Germanisation [ edit ]
One of the effects of the unification policies was the gradually increasing tendency to eliminate the use of non-German languages in public life, schools and academic settings with the intent of pressuring the non-German population to abandon their national identity in what was called "Germanisation". These policies often had the reverse effect of stimulating resistance, usually in the form of home schooling and tighter unity in the minority groups, especially the Poles.[51]
The Germanisation policies were targeted particularly against the significant Polish minority of the empire, gained by Prussia in the partitions of Poland. Poles were treated as an ethnic minority even where they made up the majority, as in the Province of Posen, where a series of anti-Polish measures was enforced.[52] Numerous anti-Polish laws had no great effect especially in the province of Posen where the German-speaking population dropped from 42.8% in 1871 to 38.1% in 1905, despite all efforts.[53]
Antisemitism [ edit ]
Antisemitism was endemic in Germany during the period. Before Napoleon's decrees ended the ghettos in Germany, it had been religiously motivated, but by the 19th century, it was a factor in German nationalism. The last legal barriers on Jews in Prussia were lifted by the 1860s, and within 20 years, they were over-represented in the white-collar professions and much of academia.[citation needed] In the popular mind Jews became a symbol of capitalism and wealth. On the other hand, the constitution and legal system protected the rights of Jews as German citizens. Antisemitic parties were formed but soon collapsed.[54]
Law [ edit ]
Bismarck's efforts also initiated the levelling of the enormous differences between the German states, which had been independent in their evolution for centuries, especially with legislation. The completely different legal histories and judicial systems posed enormous complications, especially for national trade. While a common trade code had already been introduced by the Confederation in 1861 (which was adapted for the Empire and, with great modifications, is still in effect today), there was little similarity in laws otherwise.
In 1871, a common Criminal Code (Reichsstrafgesetzbuch) was introduced; in 1877, common court procedures were established in the court system (Gerichtsverfassungsgesetz), civil procedures (Zivilprozessordnung) and criminal procedures (Strafprozessordnung). In 1873 the constitution was amended to allow the Empire to replace the various and greatly differing Civil Codes of the states (If they existed at all; for example, parts of Germany formerly occupied by Napoleon's France had adopted the French Civil Code, while in Prussia the Allgemeines Preußisches Landrecht of 1794 was still in effect). In 1881, a first commission was established to produce a common Civil Code for all of the Empire, an enormous effort that would produce the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB), possibly one of the most impressive legal works in the world; it was eventually put into effect on 1 January 1900. All of these codifications are, albeit with many amendments, still in effect today.
Year of three emperors [ edit ]
On 9 March 1888, Wilhelm I died shortly before his 91st birthday, leaving his son Frederick III as the new emperor. Frederick was a liberal and an admirer of the British constitution,[55] while his links to Britain strengthened further with his marriage to Princess Victoria, eldest child of Queen Victoria. With his ascent to the throne, many hoped that Frederick's reign would lead to a liberalisation of the Reich and an increase of parliament's influence on the political process. The dismissal of Robert von Puttkamer, the highly-conservative Prussian interior minister, on 8 June was a sign of the expected direction and a blow to Bismarck's administration.
By the time of his accession, however, Frederick had developed incurable laryngeal cancer, which had been diagnosed in 1887. He died on the 99th day of his rule, on 15 June 1888. His son Wilhelm II became emperor.
Wilhelmine era [ edit ]
Bismarck's resignation [ edit ]
Wilhelm II wanted to reassert his ruling prerogatives at a time when other monarchs in Europe were being transformed into constitutional figureheads. This decision led the ambitious Kaiser into conflict with Bismarck. The old chancellor had hoped to guide Wilhelm as he had guided his grandfather, but the emperor wanted to be the master in his own house and had many sycophants telling him that Frederick the Great would not have been great with a Bismarck at his side.[56] A key difference between Wilhelm II and Bismarck was their approaches to handling political crises, especially in 1889, when German coal miners went on strike in Upper Silesia. Bismarck demanded that the German Army be sent in to crush the strike, but Wilhelm II rejected this authoritarian measure, responding "I do not wish to stain my reign with the blood of my subjects."[57] Instead of condoning repression, Wilhelm had the government negotiate with a delegation from the coal miners, which brought the strike to an end without violence.[56] The fractious relationship ended in March 1890, after Wilhelm II and Bismarck quarrelled, and the chancellor resigned days later.[56] Bismarck's last few years had seen power slip from his hands as he grew older, more irritable, more authoritarian, and less focused.
With Bismarck's departure, Wilhelm II became the dominant ruler of Germany. Unlike his grandfather, Wilhelm I, who had been largely content to leave government affairs to the chancellor, Wilhelm II wanted to be fully informed and actively involved in running Germany, not an ornamental figurehead, although most Germans found his claims of divine right to rule amusing.[58] Wilhelm allowed politician Walther Rathenau to tutor him in European economics and industrial and financial realities in Europe.[58]
As Hull (2004) notes, Bismarckian foreign policy "was too sedate for the reckless Kaiser".[59] Wilhelm became internationally notorious for his aggressive stance on foreign policy and his strategic blunders (such as the Tangier Crisis), which pushed the German Empire into growing political isolation and eventually helped to cause World War I.
Domestic affairs [ edit ]
Reichstag in the 1890s / early 1900s. Thein the 1890s / early 1900s.
Under Wilhelm II, Germany no longer had long-ruling strong chancellors like Bismarck. The new chancellors had difficulty in performing their roles, especially the additional role as Prime Minister of Prussia assigned to them in the German Constitution. The reforms of Chancellor Leo von Caprivi, which liberalized trade and so reduced unemployment, were supported by the Kaiser and most Germans except for Prussian landowners, who feared loss of land and power and launched several campaigns against the reforms.[60]
While Prussian aristocrats challenged the demands of a united German state, in the 1890s several organizations were set up to challenge the authoritarian conservative Prussian militarism which was being imposed on the country. Educators opposed to the German state-run schools, which emphasized military education, set up their own independent liberal schools, which encouraged individuality and freedom.[61] However nearly all the schools in Imperial Germany had a very high standard and kept abreast with modern developments in knowledge.[62]
Artists began experimental art in opposition to Kaiser Wilhelm's support for traditional art, to which Wilhelm responded "art which transgresses the laws and limits laid down by me can no longer be called art".[63] It was largely thanks to Wilhelm's influence that most printed material in Germany used blackletter instead of the Roman type used in the rest of Western Europe. At the same time, a new generation of cultural creators emerged.[64]
Berlin in the late 19th century
From the 1890s onwards, the most effective opposition to the monarchy came from the newly formed Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), whose radicals advocated Marxism. The threat of the SPD to the German monarchy and industrialists caused the state both to crack down on the party's supporters and to implement its own programme of social reform to soothe discontent. Germany's large industries provided significant social welfare programmes and good care to their employees, as long as they were not identified as socialists or trade-union members. The larger industrial firms provided pensions, sickness benefits and even housing to their employees.[61]
Having learned from the failure of Bismarck's Kulturkampf, Wilhelm II maintained good relations with the Roman Catholic Church and concentrated on opposing socialism.[65] This policy failed when the Social Democrats won a third of the votes in the 1912 elections to the Reichstag, and became the largest political party in Germany. The government remained in the hands of a succession of conservative coalitions supported by right-wing liberals or Catholic clerics and heavily dependent on the Kaiser's favour. The rising militarism under Wilhelm II caused many Germans to emigrate to the U.S. and the British colonies to escape mandatory military service.
During World War I, the Kaiser increasingly devolved his powers to the leaders of the German High Command, particularly future President of Germany, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff. Hindenburg took over the role of commander–in–chief from the Kaiser, while Ludendorff became de facto general chief of staff. By 1916, Germany was effectively a military dictatorship run by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, with the Kaiser reduced to a mere figurehead.[66]
Foreign affairs [ edit ]
Wilhelm II wanted Germany to have her "place in the sun", like Britain, which he constantly wished to emulate or rival.[67] With German traders and merchants already active worldwide, he encouraged colonial efforts in Africa and the Pacific ("new imperialism"), causing the German Empire to vie with other European powers for remaining "unclaimed" territories. With the encouragement or at least the acquiescence of Britain, which at this stage saw Germany as a counterweight to her old rival France, Germany acquired German Southwest Africa (modern Namibia), German Kamerun (modern Cameroon), Togoland (modern Togo) and German East Africa (modern Rwanda, Burundi, and the mainland part of current Tanzania). Islands were gained in the Pacific through purchase and treaties and also a 99-year lease for the territory of Kiautschou in northeast China. But of these German colonies only Togoland and German Samoa (after 1908) became self-sufficient and profitable; all the others required subsidies from the Berlin treasury for building infrastructure, school systems, hospitals and other institutions.
German colonial flag
Bismarck had originally dismissed the agitation for colonies with contempt; he favoured a Eurocentric foreign policy, as the treaty arrangements made during his tenure in office show. As a latecomer to colonization, Germany repeatedly came into conflict with the established colonial powers and also with the United States, which opposed German attempts at colonial expansion in both the Caribbean and the Pacific. Native insurrections in German territories received prominent coverage in other countries, especially in Britain; the established powers had dealt with such uprisings decades earlier, often brutally, and had secured firm control of their colonies by then. The Boxer Rising in China, which the Chinese government eventually sponsored, began in the Shandong province, in part because Germany, as colonizer at Kiautschou, was an untested power and had only been active there for two years. Eight western nations, including the United States, mounted a joint relief force to rescue westerners caught up in the rebellion. During the departure ceremonies for the German contingent, Wilhelm II urged them to behave like the Hun invaders of continental Europe – an unfortunate remark that would later be resurrected by British propagandists to paint Germans as barbarians during World War I and World War II. On two occasions, a French-German conflict over the fate of Morocco seemed inevitable.
Upon acquiring Southwest Africa, German settlers were encouraged to cultivate land held by the Herero and Nama. Herero and Nama tribal lands were used for a variety of exploitative goals (much as the British did before in Rhodesia), including farming, ranching, and mining for minerals and diamonds. In 1904, the Herero and the Nama revolted against the colonists in Southwest Africa, killing farm families, their laborers and servants. In response to the attacks, troops were dispatched to quell the uprising which then resulted in the Herero and Namaqua Genocide. In total, some 65,000 Herero (80% of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Nama (50% of the total Nama population) perished. The commander of the punitive expedition, General Lothar von Trotha, was eventually relieved and reprimanded for his usurpation of orders and the cruelties he inflicted. These occurrences were sometimes referred to as "the first genocide of the 20th century" and officially condemned by the United Nations in 1985. In 2004 a formal apology by a government minister of the Federal Republic of Germany followed.
Middle East [ edit ]
Bismarck and Wilhelm II after him sought closer economic ties with the Ottoman Empire. Under Wilhelm II, with the financial backing of the Deutsche Bank, the Baghdad Railway was begun in 1900, although by 1914 it was still 500 km (310 mi) short of its destination in Baghdad.[68] In an interview with Wilhelm in 1899, Cecil Rhodes had tried "to convince the Kaiser that the future of the German empire abroad lay in the Middle East" and not in Africa; with a grand Middle-Eastern empire, Germany could afford to allow Britain the unhindered completion of the Cape-to-Cairo railway that Rhodes favoured.[69] Britain initially supported the Baghdad Railway; but by 1911 British statesmen came to fear it might be extended to Basra on the Persian Gulf, threatening Britain's naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean. Accordingly, they asked to have construction halted, to which Germany and the Ottoman Empire acquiesced.
Europe [ edit ]
Wilhelm II and his advisers committed a fatal diplomatic error when they allowed the "Reinsurance Treaty" that Bismarck had negotiated with Tsarist Russia to lapse. Germany was left with no firm ally but Austria-Hungary, and her support for action in annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 further soured relations with Russia.[70] Wilhelm missed the opportunity to secure an alliance with Britain in the 1890s when it was involved in colonial rivalries with France, and he alienated British statesmen further by openly supporting the Boers in the South African War and building a navy to rival Britain's. By 1911 Wilhelm had completely picked apart the careful power balance established by Bismarck and Britain turned to France in the Entente Cordiale. Germany's only other ally besides Austria was the Kingdom of Italy, but it remained an ally only pro forma. When war came, Italy saw more benefit in an alliance with Britain, France, and Russia, which, in the secret Treaty of London in 1915 promised it the frontier districts of Austria where Italians formed the majority of the population and also colonial concessions. Germany did acquire a second ally that same year when the Ottoman Empire entered the war on its side, but in the long run supporting the Ottoman war effort only drained away German resources from the main fronts.
World War I [ edit ]
Origins [ edit ]
Following the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke of Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb, the Kaiser offered Emperor Franz Joseph full support for Austro-Hungarian plans to invade the Kingdom of Serbia, which Austria-Hungary blamed for the assassination. This unconditional support for Austria-Hungary was called a "blank cheque" by historians, including German Fritz Fischer. Subsequent interpretation – for example at the Versailles Peace Conference – was that this "blank cheque" licensed Austro-Hungarian aggression regardless of the diplomatic consequences, and thus Germany bore responsibility for starting the war, or at least provoking a wider conflict.
Germany began the war by targeting its chief rival, France. Germany saw France as its principal danger on the European continent as it could mobilize much faster than Russia and bordered Germany's industrial core in the Rhineland. Unlike Britain and Russia, the French entered the war mainly for revenge against Germany, in particular for France's loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871. The German high command knew that France would muster its forces to go into Alsace-Lorraine. Aside from the very unofficial Septemberprogramm, the Germans never stated a clear list of goals that they wanted out of the war.[71]
Western Front [ edit ]
The mobilization in 1914
Germany did not want to risk lengthy battles along the Franco-German border and instead adopted the Schlieffen Plan, a military strategy designed to cripple France by invading Belgium and Luxembourg, sweeping down to encircle and crush both Paris and the French forces along the Franco-German border in a quick victory. After defeating France, Germany would turn to attack Russia. The plan required violating the official neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg, which Britain had guaranteed by treaty. However, the Germans had calculated that Britain would enter the war regardless of whether they had formal justification to do so.[citation needed] At first the attack was successful: the German Army swept down from Belgium and Luxembourg and advanced on Paris, at the nearby River Marne. However, the evolution of weapons over the last century heavily favored defense over offense, especially thanks to the machine gun, so that it took proportionally more offensive force to overcome a defensive position. This resulted in the German lines on the offense contracting to keep up the offensive time table while correspondingly the French lines were extending. In addition, some German units that were originally slotted for the German far right were transferred to the Eastern Front in reaction to Russia mobilizing far faster than anticipated. The combined affect had the German right flank sweeping down in front of Paris instead of behind it exposing the German Right flank to the extending French lines and attack from strategic French reserves stationed in Paris. Attacking the exposed German right flank, the French Army and the British Army put up a strong resistance to the defense of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne, resulting in the German Army retreating.
The aftermath of the First Battle of the Marne was a long-held stalemate between the German Army and the Allies in dug-in trench warfare. Further German attempts to break through deeper into France failed at the two battles of Ypres (1st/2nd) with huge casualties. German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn decided to break away from the Schlieffen Plan and instead focus on a war of attrition against France. Falkenhayn targeted the ancient city of Verdun because it had been one of the last cities to hold out against the German Army in 1870, and Falkenhayn knew that as a matter of national pride the French would do anything to ensure that it was not taken. He expected that with proper tactics, French losses would be greater than those of the Germans and that continued French commitment of troops to Verdun would "bleed the French Army white" and then allow the German army to take France easily. In 1916, the Battle of Verdun began, with the French positions under constant shelling and poison gas attack and taking large casualties under the assault of overwhelmingly large German forces. However, Falkenhayn's prediction of a greater ratio of French killed proved to be wrong. Falkenhayn was replaced by Erich Ludendorff, and with no success in sight, the German Army pulled out of Verdun in December 1916 and the battle ended.
Eastern Front [ edit ]
Front line at the time of cease-fire and at the time of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
While the Western Front was a stalemate for the German Army, the Eastern Front eventually proved to be a great success. Despite initial setbacks due to the unexpectedly rapid mobilisation of the Russian army, which resulted in a Russian invasion of East Prussia and Austrian Galicia, the badly organised and supplied Russian Army faltered and the German and Austro-Hungarian armies thereafter steadily advanced eastward. The Germans benefited from political instability in Russia and its population's desire to end the war. In 1917 the German government allowed Russia's communist Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin to travel through Germany from Switzerland into Russia. Germany believed that if Lenin could create further political unrest, Russia would no longer be able to continue its war with Germany, allowing the German Army to focus on the Western Front.
In March 1917, the Tsar was ousted from the Russian throne, and in November a Bolshevik government came to power under the leadership of Lenin. Facing political opposition from the Bolsheviks, he decided to end Russia's campaign against Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria in order to redirect Bolshevik energy to eliminating internal dissent. In March 1918, by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolshevik government gave Germany and the Ottoman Empire enormous territorial and economic concessions in exchange for an end to war on the Eastern Front. All of the modern-day Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) were given over to the German occupation authority Ober Ost, along with Belarus and Ukraine. Thus Germany had at last achieved its long-wanted dominance of "Mitteleuropa" (Central Europe) and could now focus fully on defeating the Allies on the Western Front. In practice, however, the forces that were needed to garrison and secure the new territories were a drain on the German war effort.
Colonies [ edit ]
Germany quickly lost almost all its colonies. However, in German East Africa, an impressive guerrilla campaign was waged by the colonial army leader there, General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. Using Germans and native Askaris, Lettow-Vorbeck launched multiple guerrilla raids against British forces in Kenya and Rhodesia. He also invaded Portuguese Mozambique to gain his forces supplies and to pick up more Askari recruits. His force was still active at war's end.[72]
1918 [ edit ]
Defeating Russia in 1917 enabled Germany to transfer hundreds of thousands of combat troops from the east to the Western Front, giving it a numerical advantage over the Allies. By retraining the soldiers in new stormtrooper tactics, the Germans expected to unfreeze the battlefield and win a decisive victory before the army of the United States, which had now entered the war on the side of Britain and France, arrived in strength.[73] However, the repeated German offensives in the spring of 1918 all failed, as the Allies fell back and regrouped and the Germans lacked the reserves needed to consolidate their gains. Meanwhile, soldiers had become radicalised by the Russian Revolution and were less willing to continue fighting. The war effort sparked civil unrest in Germany, while the troops, who had been constantly in the field without relief, grew exhausted and lost all hope of victory. In the summer of 1918, with the Americans arriving at the rate of 10,000 a day and the German reserves spent, it was only a matter of time before multiple Allied offensives destroyed the German army.[74]
Home front [ edit ]
A memorial to soldiers killed in World War I
The concept of "total war" meant that supplies had to be redirected towards the armed forces and, with German commerce being stopped by the Allied naval blockade, German civilians were forced to live in increasingly meagre conditions. First food prices were controlled, then rationing was introduced. During the war about 750,000 German civilians died from malnutrition.[75]
Towards the end of the war conditions deteriorated rapidly on the home front, with severe food shortages reported in all urban areas. The causes included the transfer of many farmers and food workers into the military, combined with the overburdened railway system, shortages of coal, and the British blockade. The winter of 1916–1917 was known as the "turnip winter", because the people had to survive on a vegetable more commonly reserved for livestock, as a substitute for potatoes and meat, which were increasingly scarce. Thousands of soup kitchens were opened to feed the hungry, who grumbled that the farmers were keeping the food for themselves. Even the army had to cut the soldiers' rations.[76] The morale of both civilians and soldiers continued to sink.
Revolt and demise [ edit ]
Many Germans wanted an end to the war and increasing numbers began to associate with the political left, such as the Social Democratic Party and the more radical Independent Social Democratic Party, which demanded an end to the war. The entry of the U.S. into the war in April 1917 changed the long-run balance of power in favour of the Allies.
The end of October 1918, in Kiel, in northern Germany, saw the beginning of the German Revolution of 1918–19. Units of the German Navy refused to set sail for a last, large-scale operation in a war which they saw as good as lost, initiating the uprising. On 3 November, the revolt spread to other cities and states of the country, in many of which workers' and soldiers' councils were established. Meanwhile, Hindenburg and the senior generals lost confidence in the Kaiser and his government.
Bulgaria signed the Armistice of Solun on 29 September 1918. The Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. Between 24 October and 3 November 1918, Italy defeated Austria-Hungary in the battle of Vittorio Veneto, which forced Austria-Hungary to sign the Armistice of Villa Giusti on 3 November 1918. So, in November 1918, with internal revolution, the Allies advancing toward Germany on the Western Front, Austria-Hungary falling apart from multiple ethnic tensions, its other allies out of the war and pressure from the German high command, the Kaiser and all German ruling kings, dukes, and princes abdicated, and German nobility was abolished. On 9 November, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed a republic. The new government led by the German Social Democrats called for and received an armistice on 11 November. It was succeeded by the Weimar Republic.[77] Those opposed, including disaffected veterans, joined a diverse set of paramilitary and underground political groups such as the Freikorps, the Organisation Consul, and the Communists.
Constitution [ edit ]
The Empire's legislation was based on two organs, the Bundesrat and the Reichstag (parliament). There was universal male suffrage for the Reichstag, however legislation would have to pass both houses. The Bundesrat contained representatives of the states.
Constituent states [ edit ]
Coat of arms and flags of the constituent states in the year 1900
Before unification, German territory (excluding Austria and Switzerland) was made up of 27 constituent states. These states consisted of kingdoms, grand duchies, duchies, principalities, free Hanseatic cities and one imperial territory. The free cities had a republican form of government on the state level, even though the Empire at large was constituted as a monarchy, and so were most of the states. The Kingdom of Prussia was the largest of the constituent states, covering two-thirds of the empire's territory.
Several of these states had gained sovereignty following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, and had been de facto sovereign from the mid-1600s onward. Others were created as sovereign states after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Territories were not necessarily contiguous—many existed in several parts, as a result of historical acquisitions, or, in several cases, divisions of the ruling families. Some of the initially existing states, in particular Hanover, were abolished and annexed by Prussia as a result of the war of 1866.
Each component of the German Empire sent representatives to the Federal Council (Bundesrat) and, via single-member districts, the Imperial Diet (Reichstag). Relations between the Imperial centre and the Empire's components were somewhat fluid and were developed on an ongoing basis. The extent to which the Emperor could, for example, intervene on occasions of disputed or unclear succession was much debated on occasion—for example in the inheritance crisis of the Lippe-Detmold.
Map and table [ edit ]
Other maps [ edit ]
Administrative map
The Empire in 1900
Population density (c. 1885)
Kingdom of Prussia
Kingdom of Bavaria
Kingdom of Saxony
Kingdom of Württemberg
Colonies in 1914
Imperial territory of Alsace and Lorraine
Election constituencies for the Reichstag
Reichstag election results, 1912
Fields of Law in the German Empire
Different legal systems in Germany prior to 1900
Crime; convicts in relation to the population 1882–1886
Distribution of Protestants and Catholics in Imperial Germany
Distribution of Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Imperial Germany (Meyers Konversationslexikon)
Distribution of Jews in Imperial Germany
Linguistic map of Central Europe, 1906
Detailed 1893 map with cities and larger towns
German Army positions 1914
Language [ edit ]
Percentage of linguistic minorities of the German Empire in 1900 by Kreis
About 92% of the population spoke German as their first language. The only minority language with a significant number of speakers (5.4%) was Polish (a figure that rises to over 6% when including the related Kashubian and Masurian languages).
The non-German Germanic languages (0.5%), like Danish, Dutch and Frisian, were located in the north and northwest of the empire, near the borders with Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Low German was spoken throughout northern Germany and, though linguistically as distinct from High German (Hochdeutsch) as from Dutch and English, is considered "German", hence also its name. Danish and Frisian were spoken predominantly in the north of the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein and Dutch in the western border areas of Prussia (Hanover, Westphalia, and the Rhine Province).
Polish and other Slavic languages (6.28%) were spoken chiefly in the east.[78]
A few (0.5%) spoke French, especially in the Reichsland Elsass-Lothringen, where French-speakers formed 11.6% of the total population.
1900 census results [ edit ]
Linguistic maps [ edit ]
Religion [ edit ]
Generally, religious demographics of the early modern period hardly changed. Still, there were almost entirely Catholic areas (Lower and Upper Bavaria, northern Westphalia, Upper Silesia, etc.) and almost entirely Protestant areas (Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania, Saxony, etc.). Confessional prejudices, especially towards mixed marriages, were still common. Bit by bit, through internal migration, religious blending was more and more common. In eastern territories, confession was almost uniquely perceived to be connected to one's ethnicity and the equation "Protestant = German, Catholic = Polish" was held to be valid. In areas affected by immigration in the Ruhr area and Westphalia, as well as in some large cities, religious landscape changed substantially. This was especially true in largely Catholic areas of Westphalia, which changed through Protestant immigration from the eastern provinces.
Politically, the confessional division of Germany had considerable consequences. In Catholic areas, the Centre Party had a big electorate. On the other hand, Social Democrats and Free Trade Unions usually received hardly any votes in the Catholic areas of the Ruhr. This began to change with the secularization arising in the last decades of the German Empire.
Religious confessions in the German Empire 1880 Area Protestant Catholic Other Christian Jewish Other Number % Number % Number % Number % Number % Prussia 17,633,279 64,64 9,206,283 33,75 52,225 0,19 363,790 1,33 23,534 0,09 Bavaria 1,477,952 27,97 3,748,253 70,93 5,017 0,09 53,526 1,01 30 0,00 Saxony 2,886,806 97,11 74,333 2,50 4,809 0,16 6,518 0,22 339 0,01 Württemberg 1,364,580 69,23 590,290 29,95 2,817 0,14 13,331 0,68 100 0,01 Baden 547,461 34,86 993,109 63,25 2,280 0,15 27,278 1,74 126 0,01 Alsace-Lotharingia 305,315 19,49 1,218,513 77,78 3,053 0,19 39,278 2,51 511 0,03 German Empire 28,331,152 62,63 16,232,651 35,89 78,031 0,17 561,612 1,24 30,615 0,07
Legacy [ edit ]
The defeat and aftermath of the First World War and the penalties imposed by the Treaty of Versailles shaped the positive memory of the Empire, especially among Germans who distrusted and despised the Weimar Republic. Conservatives, liberals, socialists, nationalists, Catholics and Protestants all had their own interpretations, which led to a fractious political and social climate in Germany in the aftermath of the empire's collapse.
Under Bismarck, a united German state had finally been achieved, but it remained a Prussian-dominated state and did not include German Austria as Pan-German nationalists had desired. The influence of Prussian militarism, the Empire's colonial efforts and its vigorous, competitive industrial prowess all gained it the dislike and envy of other nations. The German Empire enacted a number of progressive reforms, such as Europe's first social welfare system and freedom of press. There was also a modern system for electing the federal parliament, the Reichstag, in which every adult man had one vote. This enabled the Socialists and the Catholic Centre Party to play considerable roles in the empire's political life despite the continued hostility of Prussian aristocrats.
The era of the German Empire is well remembered in Germany as one of great cultural and intellectual vigour. Thomas Mann published his novel Buddenbrooks in 1901. Theodor Mommsen received the Nobel prize for literature a year later for his Roman history. Painters like the groups Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke made a significant contribution to modern art. The AEG turbine factory in Berlin by Peter Behrens from 1909 can be regarded as a milestone in classic modern architecture and an outstanding example of emerging functionalism. The social, economic, and scientific successes of this Gründerzeit, or founding epoch, have sometimes led the Wilhelmine era to be regarded as a golden age.
In the field of economics, the "Kaiserzeit" laid the foundation of Germany's status as one of the world's leading economic powers. The iron and coal industries of the Ruhr, the Saar and Upper Silesia especially contributed to that process. The first motorcar was built by Karl Benz in 1886. The enormous growth of industrial production and industrial potential also led to a rapid urbanisation of Germany, which turned the Germans into a nation of city dwellers. More than 5 million people left Germany for the United States during the 19th century.[80]
Sonderweg [ edit ]
Many historians have emphasized the central importance of a German Sonderweg or "special path" (or "exceptionalism") as the root of Nazism and the German catastrophe in the 20th century. According to the historiography by Kocka (1988), the process of nation-building from above had very grievous long-term implications. In terms of parliamentary democracy, Parliament was kept weak, the parties were fragmented, and there was a high level of mutual distrust. The Nazis built on the illiberal, anti-pluralist elements of Weimar's political culture. The Junker elites (the large landowners in the east) and senior civil servants used their great power and influence well into the twentieth century to frustrate any movement toward democracy. They played an especially negative role in the crisis of 1930–1933. Bismarck's emphasis on military force amplified the voice of the officer corps, which combined advanced modernisation of military technology with reactionary politics. The rising upper-middle class elites, in the business, financial and professional worlds, tended to accept the values of the old traditional elites. The German Empire was for Hans |
children never beheld a brighter tree or one more highly colored than the children of Mr. Johnson when the current was turned and the tree began to revolve. Mr. Johnson has been experimenting with house lighting by electricity for some time past, and he determined that his children should have a novel Christmas tree.
"It stood about six feet high, in an upper room, last evening, and dazzled persons entering the room. There were 120 lights on the tree, with globes of different colors, while the light tinsel work and usual adornment of Christmas trees appeared to their best advantage in illuminating the tree."
An Edison Dynamo Rotated the Tree
Johnson’s tree, as the article went on to explain, was quite elaborate, and it rotated thanks to his clever use of Edison dynamos:
"Mr. Johnson had placed a little Edison dynamo at the foot of the tree, which by passing a current through from the large dynamo in the cellar of the house, converted it into a motor. By means of this motor, the tree was made to revolve with a steady, regular motion.
"The lights were divided into six sets, one set of which was lighted at a time in front as the tree went round. By a simple devise of breaking and making connection through copper bands around the tree with corresponding buttons, the sets of lights were turned out and on at regular intervals as the tree turned around. The first combination was of pure white light, then, as the revolving tree severed the connection of the current that supplied it and made connection with a second set, red and white lights appeared. Then came yellow and white and other colors. Even combinations of the colors were made. By dividing the current from the large dynamo Mr. Johnson could stop the motion of the tree without putting out the lights."
The New York Times provided two more paragraphs containing even more technical detail about the Johnson family's astounding Christmas tree. Reading the article more than 120 years later, it’s obvious that the reporter considered the electric Christmas lights to be a serious invention.
The First Electric Christmas Lights Were Costly
While Johnson’s tree was considered a marvel, and Edison’s company tried to market electric Christmas lights, they did not become immediately popular. The cost of the lights and the services of an electrician to install them was out of the reach of the general public. However, wealthy people would hold Christmas tree parties to show off electric lighting.
Grover Cleveland reportedly ordered a White House Christmas tree that was lit with Edison bulbs in 1895. (The first White House Christmas tree belonged to Benjamin Harrison, in 1889, and was lit by candles.)
The use of small candles, despite their inherent danger, remained the popular method of illuminating household Christmas trees until well into the 20th century.
Electric Christmas Tree Lights Made Safe
A popular legend is that a teenager named Albert Sadacca, after reading about a tragic New York City fire in 1917 caused by candles lighting a Christmas tree, urged his family, which was in the novelty business, to begin manufacturing affordable strings of lights. The Sadacca family tried marketing electric Christmas lights but sales were slow at first.
As people became more attuned to household electricity, strings of electric bulbs became increasing common on Christmas trees. Albert Sadacca, incidentally, became the head of a lighting company worth millions of dollars. Other companies, including most notably General Electric, entered the Christmas light business, and by the 1930s electric Christmas lights had become a standard part of holiday decorating.
Early in the 20th century the tradition began of having public tree lighting. One of the most famous, the lighting of the National Christmas Tree in Washington, D.C., began in 1923. A tree, place on the ellipse, at the southern end of the White House grounds, was first illuminated on December 24, 1923 by President Calvin Coolidge. A newspaper report the following day described the scene:
"As the sun sank below the Potomac the President touched a button which lighted up the nation's Christmas tree. The giant fir from his native Vermont instantly blazed with myriad electrics which shone through tinsels and reds, while those who surrounded this community tree, children and grown-ups, cheered and sang.
"The crowds on foot were augmented by thousands who came in motor cars, and to the music of the singers was added the discord of horns. For hours the people thronged to the ellipse, which was dark except in the spot where the tree stood, its brilliancy heightened by a searchlight which shed its rays from the Washington Monument overlooking it."Police tell residents to stay inside as witnesses report that the fugitive, 37, is holding a sawn-off shotgun to his neck
Raoul Moat and police in confrontation as major operation gets under way
Northumbria police said they are negotiating with Raoul Moat tonight in a major operation in Rothbury.
Residents were warned to stay inside amid reports the former nightclub bouncer, 37, is holding a sawn-off shotgun to his neck.
"A man who fits the description of Raoul Thomas Moat has been located in the riverbank area in the vicinity of Rothbury," a police spokesman said.
Marksmen were seen in the riverside area of the town as police activity centred on allotments near the town centre, where a man fitting Moat's description was spotted.
An armed officer on the eastern approach to the village said: "I cannot explain the gravity of the situation. You're welcome to stay here but he [Moat] is on the other side of the primary school tennis courts and he is still armed."
Another added: "We're keeping everybody out of his line of sight because if he gets a shot off we want no one getting hit."
As more armed police surrounded the area, two NHS incident response unit ambulances with CCTV and dark windows arrived at the riverside. Support ambulances and regular ambulances are also at the scene.
There are reports that Moat may have jumped out at a dog walker.
One witness, who did not wish to be named, said the stand-off had started about 7pm: "We just heard loads of shouting which we think was coming from Moat, then we heard police shouting back telling him to get down and lie on the ground," he said.
"He is lying face down with a gun pointing at his own head. About 10 armed police officers are stood surrounding him at a distance of about 30 yards with their weapons trained on him."
Another witness, Peter Abiston, has been watching Moat for an hour. He said Moat, wearing dark-coloured clothing with a baseball cap and white trainers, had his back to the river, with police positioned about 20ft away from him.
"He looks very calm," Mr Abiston told the BBC. "It looks as though the police clearly have it under control."
A further witness, Chris Robertson, said he thought he had seen Moat holding a sawn-off shotgun to his neck: "We walked over and saw the guy standing on the other side of the river," he said. "He looked like he had a sawn-off shotgun pointing to his neck. As far as we know they're in the woods. Basically the whole place is under siege."CREDIT unions have been warned that many of the loans they have given to those who are now in trouble with their mortgages will not get repaid.
CREDIT unions have been warned that many of the loans they have given to those who are now in trouble with their mortgages will not get repaid.
The regulator for the sector also said that one in five credit union loans were in arrears.
Sharon Donnery, the Central Bank official who is registrar for credit unions, told managers of the lending co-ops to improve how they run their organisations.
New rules were being introduced for credit unions and regulators would also have new powers to force the lenders to operate to higher standards, she said.
Ms Donnery told hundreds of managers of credit unions not to assume that their loans would continue to be repaid, even if repayments were being met at the moment.
Many cash-strapped consumers are known to be making payments to the credit union, even though they cannot make payments on mortgages, car loans and credit cards.
People were reluctant to default on a credit union loan in case they close off their last line of credit, experts said.
Ms Donnery told a credit union managers' conference: "Remember that a member may be paying you but in debt to other creditors. As long as that member does not have an overall sustainable solution for their case there is a risk that you will ultimately not get paid."
She said that the largest representative body for credit unions, the Irish League of Credit Unions, had decided not to get involved in a Central Bank move to get credit unions, banks and other lenders to come together and agree to restructure the loans of those who were unable to meet their repayments.
Credit unions claim banks are reluctant to strike deals with over-indebted householders.
But Ms Donnery said that if homeowners who could not meet their payments ended up going through the personal insolvency process, credit unions would come out with very little.
She pointed out that one in five of credit union loans was in arrears for more than nine weeks.
This 20pc figure compares with 11pc of mortgage holders being in arrears for three months or more.
Irish IndependentAPPLE'S NEXT MOVE MISSES THE MARK
(FORTUNE Magazine) – Let's get this straight right away: Apple Computer did the wrong thing. On December 20, Apple announced that it would spend $400 million to purchase Steve Jobs's company, Next Software. The company said it would adopt Next's NextStep operating system for future versions of the Macintosh computer. Most of the commentary I've seen about this decision is off the mark, especially the talk about Jobs coming back to save Apple. That is sheer nonsense. He won't be anywhere near the company. People seem to have a real desire, perhaps even a need, to make excuses for Apple. Everybody wants to find a way to justify what Apple did.
You can't justify it. Apple did precisely the wrong thing. Now the only future for the company is to get smaller and smaller until there's nothing left. In fact, the only sensible conversation to have about Apple is the one in which you argue about how long it will take to die. (Before I go on, you should know that my venture capital partnership, New Enterprise Associates, has a big stake in Be, a computer company that Apple recently considered buying. Instead, Apple bought Next. NEA would have made many millions of dollars if Apple had purchased Be. Jilted by Apple, Be is now considered a company with a less-than-certain future. NEA owned nothing of Next.)
Here are the two basic reasons why buying Next is the wrong move for Apple:
(1) For years, pundits have sat around and talked about why Apple needs a new operating system. Next's technology won't solve that problem.
The existing Macintosh system software does have some serious flaws. It doesn't manage memory very well, so programs tend to bang into one another easily. The Macintosh operating system also makes connecting to the Internet a confusing process for nontechies--at exactly the time when what those users want most is to connect to the Internet.
The NextStep operating system does these things pretty well, in large part because it is built on top of Unix, the preferred operating system of engineers. But if Apple really wants to use Unix as the basis of the future Macintosh operating system, it could work with the version of Unix it licensed years ago for far, far less than $400 million. Most engineers would agree that the version of Unix that Next uses is generally better at managing high-performance applications--but it is still Unix.
Next reportedly brings in annual revenues of over $50 million, mostly from corporate clients attracted by a few things that NextStep does really well. But these are not capabilities that make a big difference to Apple's customers. Apple sells to a totally different market segment--end users, in schools, businesses, and homes. It is very, very difficult to see how Apple will translate the value of Next's software into something meaningful to its own customers.
(2) Anybody who knows Apple Computer knows that the company bought the wrong part of Next.
Next has two parts: the mess of software the company has licensed or developed since it was founded in 1985, and Steve Jobs. Apple has purchased the former. According to the corporate spin, Apple will combine its Next mess with its old mess of Macintosh software and turn the combination into a new, irresistible operating system (code-named "Rhapsody") that will be found in products far more compelling than any existing Macintosh. And Apple will accomplish this feat in a timely fashion, which would be a good thing given that Microsoft, Apple's nemesis, delivers a new version of its Windows operating system every 30 months or so.
Unfortunately, Apple does not need more software. It already has lots and lots of software, and most knowledgeable people in computing will tell you that the less software you have, the better. What's more, Apple has done an abysmal job at managing the stuff it already has, as evidenced by its inability to deliver Copland, which was for years supposed to be the next version of the Mac operating system. Copland, say Apple, has now been supplanted by Rhapsody.
So Apple doesn't need more software. What Apple needs is a visionary who understands how to make really great software and who can provide the leadership to make that happen.
The best candidate might have been Steve Jobs, since he was the guy who browbeat the original Mac team into doing something truly important and historic back in 1984. But Jobs has spent most of the time since December 20 making it clear that he will not actually do anything for Apple once Apple's purchase of Next is complete. In other words, he's going to take his money and run. (There is something really cynical and possibly even disturbing about the founder of a company getting his revenge by taking advantage of the company when it is most vulnerable. Jobs must know how bad a decision Apple has made by buying Next--but he seems desperate to be released from his own bad decisions.)
Apple did get Avie Tevanian, a very smart guy with a long track record designing operating systems. Tevanian is now the engineer in charge of Apple's operating-system design. But Apple needs someone at the top, at least on the executive committee if not in the CEO's job. Tevanian is two levels away from the CEO.
So the question remains: What should Apple have done? The essential problem that Apple has never been able to solve is how to transform promise into reality. It never needed more rocket science. What it needed were the basic skills of running a business--like, say, making a decision to do something, and then actually getting everybody in the company to work toward that goal. Instead, Apple developed a culture in which doing what is good for the customer, or for the company, is viewed as boring and irrelevant. That's how it has trained its customers to never believe anything Apple says.
John Sculley has admitted repeatedly that his biggest mistake as CEO was his inability to control Apple's engineers. In fact, no Apple CEO has come close to doing that. This failure has nothing to do with the decisions that get all the press, such as whether to license the operating system or which microprocessor to use in the Mac. It results from not knowing how to run a business for the benefit of customers and shareholders.
Personally, I had high hopes for the last CEO, Michael Spindler. He was nicknamed "The Diesel" for being a tough, no-nonsense manager when he was running Apple Europe. But not only did he fail to control the engineers, he failed at everything else as well. I also had high hopes for the current CEO, Gil Amelio, who took over Apple nearly a year ago after turning around National Semiconductor with a commonsense approach.
There are signs that Amelio has begun to change Apple's underlying culture by placing a premium on performance. But executives still talk about how impossible it is to predict what will happen at Apple--and about how hard it is to get employees to go along with the program. And now Amelio has gone and bought Next.
Clearly, there is no one in the executive suite who knows how to translate a mess of software into something that will appeal to all those reasonably intelligent people who still want to buy from Apple. The Be operating system, BeOS, is designed expressly for desktop-computer users--in other words, for Apple customers. But, according to some news reports, part of the reason Apple resisted paying $200 million to acquire Be was that Amelio and his team were offended by Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassee, who asked for control over the development of Apple's system software. Isn't it ironic that even Apple's newest leader resisted the very thing that Apple needs most: a visionary with total control over technology development, someone who could direct Apple to a product it could sell to more people, not fewer?
You can take my pitch on Be and Gassee for what it's worth. But here's the bottom line on Apple. Apple has no visionary. Apple has two big messes of software rather than one. And I cannot see, for the life of me, what the Macintosh user gets out of the deal: Based on Apple's track record, would you wait two years to find out whether Apple can turn the Nexintosh into something compelling?
It takes a long time to kill an $11-billion-a-year company. Apple's already down to around $8 billion a year. I give it another three years, until the millennium, to fall the rest of the way to the ground.
STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as mentioned in the column, neither he nor his partnership has financial interests in companies mentioned. Alsop can be reached at [email protected]
REPORTER ASSOCIATE Lixandra UrrestaNYtimes.com Yves Smith links to an interesting article about wind power; apparently it's possible to get a lot more power from a given acreage of wind farm if you design the turbines in a way that minimizes aerodynamic interference. OK, not my field of expertise, to say the least. But there's a broader point this story brings to mind.
Opponents of a strong policy to curb greenhouse gases tend to be fervent believers in the magic of market economies. Yet somehow their faith goes away when it comes to environmental issues. If you seriously believe in markets, you should believe that given the right incentives — namely, putting a price on emissions, through either a tax or a tradable permit scheme — the economy will find lots of ways to emit less. You should definitely not believe, as anti-environmentalists claim, that the result would be economic disaster.
Read the rest of this article at The New York Times >Many Indo-European religious branches show evidence for horse sacrifice, and comparative mythology suggests that they derive from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ritual.
Context [ edit ]
Horses are often sacrificed in a funerary context, and interred with the deceased, a practice called horse burial. There is evidence but no explicit myths from the three branches of Indo-Europeans of a major horse sacrifice ritual based on a mythical union of Indo-European kingship and the horse.[1] The Indian Aśvamedha is the clearest evidence preserved, but vestiges from Latin and Celtic traditions allow the reconstruction of a few common attributes.
Some scholars, including Edgar Polomé, regard the reconstruction of a PIE ritual as unjustified due to the difference between the attested traditions.[2]
Etymology [ edit ]
The Gaulish personal name Epomeduos is from ek'wo-medhu- ("horse + mead"), while aśvamedha is either from ek'wo-mad-dho- ("horse + drunk") or ek'wo-mey-dho- ("horse + strength").
Mythology [ edit ]
The reconstructed myth involves the coupling of a king with a divine mare which produced the divine twins. A related myth is that of a hero magically twinned with a horse foaled at the time of his birth (for example Cuchulainn, Pryderi), suggested to be fundamentally the same myth as that of the divine twin horsemen by the mytheme of a "mare-suckled" hero from Greek and medieval Serbian evidence, or mythical horses with human traits (Xanthos), suggesting totemic identity of the Indo-European hero or king with the horse.
Comparative rituals [ edit ]
Vedic (Indian) [ edit ]
The Indian Ashvamedha involves the following:
the sacrifice is connected with the elevation or inauguration of a member of the warrior caste[ citation needed ] the ceremony took place in springtime the horse sacrificed was a grey or white stallion the stallion selected was one which excelled at the right side of the chariot it was bathed in water it was sacrificed alongside a hornless ram and a he-goat the stallion was dissected and its portions awarded to various deities[ citation needed ]
Roman [ edit ]
The Roman Equus October ceremony involved:[3]
the horse was dedicated to Mars, the Roman god of war the sacrifice took place on the Ides of October, but through ritual reuse was used in a spring festival (the Parilia) two-horse chariot races determined the victim, which was the right-hand horse of the winning team the horse is dismembered: the tail (cauda, possibly a euphemism for the penis) is taken to the Regia, the king's residence, while two factions battle for possession of the head as a talisman for the coming year
Irish [ edit ]
Geraldus Cambrensis recorded a ceremony among the Irish:
There is in a northern and remote part of Ulster, among the Kenelcunil, a certain tribe which is wont to install a king over itself by an excessively savage and abominable ritual. In the presence of all the people of this land in one place, a white mare is brought into their midst. Thereupon he who is to be elevated, not to a prince but to a beast, not to a king but to an outlaw, steps forward in beastly fashion and exhibits his bestiality. Right thereafter the mare is killed and boiled piecemeal in water, and in the same water a bath is prepared for him. He gets into the bath and eats of the flesh that is brought to him, with his people standing around and sharing it with him. He also imbibes the broth in which he is bathed, not from any vessel, nor with his hand, but only with his mouth. When this is done right according to such unrighteous ritual, his rule and sovereignty are consecrated.[4]
The major points of comparison involve:
The king (most likely; Geraldus is somewhat indirect) engages in sexual intercourse with the mare to be sacrificed; The horse is dismembered and cooked in a cauldron, and consumed by the king who is also sitting in the cauldron.
Norse [ edit ]
The Norse ceremony according to the description in Hervarar saga of the Swedish inauguration of Blot-Sweyn, the last or next to last pagan Germanic king, c. 1080:
the horse is dismembered for eating the blood is sprinkled on the sacred tree at Uppsala.
The Völsa þáttr mentions a Norse pagan ritual involving veneration of the penis of a slaughtered stallion.[5] A freshly cut horse head was also used in setting up a nithing pole for a Norse curse.[6]
Archaeology [ edit ]
The primary archaeological context of horse sacrifice are burials, notably chariot burials, but graves with horse remains reach from the Eneolithic well into historical times. Herodotus describes the execution of horses at the burial of a Scythian king, and Iron Age kurgan graves known to contain horses number in the hundreds. There are also frequent deposition of horses in burials in Iron Age India. The custom is by no means restricted to Indo-European populations, but is continued by Turkic tribes.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ Mallory & Adams (2006:437). ^ Dearborn (1997:278, article "Horse"). ^ Frazer ( 553-557). ^ Est igitur in boreali et ulteriori Vltoniae parte, scilicet apud Kenelcunil, gens quaedam, quae barbaro nimis et abhominabili ritu sic sibi regem creare solet. Collecto in unum universo terrae illius populo, in medium producitur, iumentum candidum. Ad quod sullimandus ille non in principem sed in beluam, non in regem sed exlegem, coram omnibus bestialiter accedens, se quoque bestiam profitetur. Et statim iumento interfecto, et frustatim in aqua decocto, in eadem aqua balneum ei paratur. Cui insidens, de carnibus illis sibi allatis, circumstante populo suo et convescente, comedit ipse. De iure quoque quo lavatur, non vase aliquo, non manu, sed ore tantum circumquaque haurit et bibit. Quibus ita rite, non recte completis, regnum illius et dominium est confirmatum: English translation from Analecta Indoeuropaea (Innsbruck, 1981), pp. 188–189. : English translation from Jaan Puhvel, "Aspects of Equine Functionality," in(Innsbruck, 1981), pp. 188–189. ^ DuBois (2006:76). ^ Mallet (1847:155-157).Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas took an assertive tone against Hamas on Saturday, saying he would no longer allow the organization to make policy decisions like signing agreements or initiating conflicts.
Speaking from Cairo, where he is meeting with Arab League foreign ministers, Abbas also mocked Hamas for launching thousands of rockets at Israel in the 50-day conflict, which did relatively little damage in Israel, Ynet reported.
Abbas is expected to declare Sunday that he is suspending talks with Hamas until his demands are met. Abbas has insisted that Hamas cede control of the Gaza Strip to the unity government established last spring between his Fatah faction and Hamas.
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Amid reports that tensions between Hamas and Fatah could hinder the reconstruction of Gaza, senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar said Wednesday he was confident that the Palestinian public wouldn’t hold the group responsible.
What happens next in Gaza “is the responsibility of Mahmoud Abbas because now he is responsible for the government,” he told the New York Times. “We are not responsible.”
Cairo-based senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk said that the organization has already distributed $40 million in Gaza, $2,000 to each family whose home was damaged.
On Wednesday, reports in the Arab media indicated that Egypt was meeting with both the Israeli and Palestinian sides and was preparing to issue invitations to ceasefire negotiations in Cairo, but tensions between Hamas and Fatah over the payment of salaries to Hamas employees and administration of border crossings were delaying the talks.
These reports came a day after Fatah officials reportedly warned that if Hamas did not cede control of the Gaza Strip to the unity government, Abbas’s presidential guard forces would not deploy along the borders and the crossings would remain closed. Egypt has said repeatedly it would not open the Rafah border crossing as long as it was controlled by Hamas.
However, riding an unprecedented wave of popularity following its most recent violent conflict with Israel, Hamas’s leaders have sounded confident that it can maintain support from the people, and since an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire went into effect, Hamas’s leaders have been working the streets to buoy that support.
AFP and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.Cuba May Consider Civil Unions
Mariela Castro Espin, daughter of Cuban president Raul Castro and a leading gay rights activist in the country, says that the nation’s lawmakers will consider legalizing same-sex civil unions this year.
“I believe that the Party Conference may help to define a policy explicitly prohibiting discrimination on sexual orientation and gender identity and, in turn, help to dismantle the prejudices that hinder its adoption,” Castro Espin said in an interview published by the state-run Cuban news agency Cuba Si.
In the interview, Castro Espin said the country’s Family Code is undergoing legal scrutiny, and discussion regarding the possibility of same-sex civil unions is on the legislative agenda for 2012. Despite a virulently antigay past, the Cuban government has increased advocacy for LGBT equality in recent years, supporting anti-homophobia campaigns and paying for gender reassignment surgeries of transgender individuals.Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
The Xbox One could one day make use of a powerful rendering technique called "real-time ray-tracing," an advanced system used to achieve photorealistic lighting effects. Microsoft Studios executive Phil Spencer has confirmed that internal tests are already underway.
"We've done experiments with Realtime Raytracing," Spencer said on Twitter. " A ton of potential with this tech; amazing visuals." You can see a video demonstration of Nvidia's Kepler real-time ray-tracing system on YouTube courtesy of The Verge.
Real-time ray-tracing would conceivably offer up a significant boost in visual quality for Xbox One games, something Microsoft would likely welcome in the wake of the ongoing 1080p debate. The rendering technique would, however, be yet another computational effort for the Xbox One, but it's possible Microsoft could offload that process to its vast network of cloud-powered servers. Respawn Entertainment is tapping into Microsoft's cloud network to help with performance for its upcoming multiplayer shooter Titanfall.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to Congress. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
A few minutes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrapped up a speech to Congress about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Indiana Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski yelled, “Wooh, baby! That was awesome!”
In a cramped, dark room in the basement of the Capitol, sentiments were very different. About a dozen liberal House Democrats—most of whom boycotted the prime minister’s speech—assembled to tear into Netanyahu’s address and Speaker John Boehner’s decision to invite him without the White House’s imprimatur.
Rep. Jared Huffman of California, who attended the speech, accused the prime minister of trying to push the United States into war.
“This is a prime minister who’s never seen a war he didn’t want our country to fight,” Huffman said, adding that diplomats negotiating with Iran shouldn’t be distracted by Netanyahu’s address.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a liberal Illinois Democrat, suggested Netanyahu’s credibility is suspect because he also backed the 2003 war in Iraq.
“What I heard today felt to me like an effort to stampede the United States into war once again,” she said.
Another Democrat compared Netanyahu to George W. Bush’s former vice president. “This speech was straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook,” said Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth. “It was fear-mongering at its ultimate.”
Yarmuth also said that Netanyahu’s requests were akin to those of a small child looking to visit an amusement park.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu basically said that the only acceptable deal was a perfect deal, or an ideal deal,” Yarmuth said. “It’s like the child that says, I want to go to Disneyland every day, eat ice cream and drink Coca-Cola every day, and not go to school.”
Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer, sporting his trademark brightly colored bicycle lapel pin and bowtie, criticized Netanyahu for neglecting to discuss the Palestinian peace process in his address. He also said the Israeli prime minister is too pessimistic about the possibility of healthier U.S./Iran relations.
“All of my friends who visited Iran as private citizens are struck by how friendly and outgoing Iranians are,” he said.
The Republicans in the House chamber (and many of the Democrats) couldn’t have given Netanyahu’s speech a warmer welcome. But for the progressive Democrats who sat the event out and then assembled in the Capitol basement, the day felt like the run-up to the Iraq war all over again.Crashing into a suddenly open car door is one of the biggest dangers to cyclists; every vehicle you pass is a potential IED that could pop off at any moment, with the potential to send you fatally tumbling into oncoming traffic. One Manhattan cyclist with a helmet camera recently captured a visceral look at what it's like to get doored, as well as the aftermath. Skip ahead to the 30 second mark:
Watch the entire clip and you'll be treated to a classic New York City tableaux, as an assertive and opinionated Greek chorus quickly forms to argue over who was at fault. The cyclist blames the cabbie for stopping next to the bike lane, the cabbie insists he warned his fare about the oncoming cyclist, the fare insists she didn't hear the cabbie and bursts into tears, and an assortment of random experts converge on the scene to offer advice and pass judgment.
Our favorite chorus member is probably the Man with Chips who goes on a brief rant about social media before taking the tearful young lady who doored the cyclist under his wing, promising "We're not gonna let him [the cab driver] yell at you no more." #HERO. #CHIPS
But who's going to pay for the damaged door?! We reached out to the man who uploaded the video to YouTube, and we'll update as soon as more information becomes available.
In the meantime, here's some advice for cyclists on how to avoid getting doored. Most experts agree that your best bet is take it slow and always ride four feet away from parked cars, even taking a lane if necessary. (The cyclist in the video above explains that this is why he doesn't ride in bike lanes.)
A Transportation Research Board study reported by Streetsblog in July suggests that bike lanes are much safer when there is a buffer on the parking side of the bike lane: "On one Chicago street, for example, few bicyclists rode outside the door zone when the bike lane had no buffer, then after a two-foot buffer was striped, 40 percent rode outside the door zone."
In 2012, the NYC DOT launched a safety campaign to prevent dooring, producing a video PSA to play on taxi TVs warning passengers to look before opening their doors. The department also released 26,000 stickers for the taxi fleet urging everyone to be aware. Apparently, some people still haven't gotten the message.
Here's another video that uses crash test dummies to illustrate the potentially fatal consequences of getting doored:
Dooring is still only a $150 violation and not a crime.Velkommen til min helt egen hjemmeside, som faktisk er næsten 20 år gammel. Selv navnet på denne side er gået hen og blevet lidt historisk, da webmaster ikke kører taxa mere. Men mon ikke det går, det er vel indholdet og ikke navnet der trækker folk til (faktisk stadig omkring 300 besøgende på siderne om dagen). Her findes i særdeleshed en masse sider om Københavns og Frederiksbergs lokalhistorie. Du kan også læse om mine Kim-bøger og tage en tur tilbage til de skønne 1970´ere på min anden hjemmeside med Glamrock som tema. På Presse-siden er der links til forskellige klip om denne hjemmeside i aviser, radio og TV. Og så en masse andre små og store sider, nogen meget gamle og nogen ikke så gamle, men samlet set viser de hvad der sker inde i min temmeligt snørklede og meget nostalgiske knold. God tur rundt i mit blandede univers, der er en liste over de sidste nye sider HER...By Spike Eskin
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – If the end of Sunday’s Flyers game against the Penguins was any indication of how their potential playoff series may go, we’re probably in for some hard hitting hockey, and not just the players. Flyers coach Peter Laviolette, so furious with the final minutes, had to be held back from going after Penguins coach Dan Bylsma.
Former NHL head coach and current “NHL on NBC” analyst Mike Milbury was thrilled at the series of events that ended the game. “I loved every minute of it. I loved especially the last five minutes of it, and it was great TV. And who knew that Jaromir Jagr in his old age was going to become poetic?” Milbury joined 94WIP’s Angelo Cataldio and The Morning Team on Monday to talk about the bad blood between the two teams.
“It’s not totally uncommon,” Milbury said of Laviolette’s behavior at the end of the game. “I can remember being on such a perch, or at least trying to climb over the boards to get at somebody to make a point. And I thought Dan Bylsma should have taken off his skirt and gone over there,” he said.
One of the instigators of the fight was the Penguins’ Sidney Crosby. “Little goody two shoes [Crosby] goes into the corner and gives a shot to Schenn. Schenn was late to the party, he should have turned around and drilled him right away, but I guess better late than never,” Milbury said. “So you know, Crosby gets cross-checked, big whoop. He said after he came back from his 35th concussion, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore, I’m not going to get into this scrums, I’m going to stay away from that stuff.’ He couldn’t help himself because there’s a little punk in Crosby. He’s not the perfect gentleman. He’s not the sweet kid you see in interviews with his hat pulled down over his eyes. I’d say screw him, hit him,” he said.
“There’s a lot to settle after that.”
**UPDATE** Mike Milbury issued a statementapologizing for the above comments (statement via NBC Pro Hockey Talk).Joshua Tucker: Last week we featured a guest post from political scientists Kyle Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer, and Thomas Zeitzoff concerning Americans’ ability to place Ukraine on a map and how this was correlated with attitudes toward the appropriate U.S. policy response to the Ukraine crisis. We invited the authors to respond to questions raised in response to their original post. The authors have also made available a more detailed and technical description of their methodology and findings here.
*****
We’re encouraged that our blog post last Monday exploring the extent to which Americans can put Ukraine on a map has received so much attention. In a year when lawmakers and pundits have expressed skepticism about the contribution and relevance of the social |
advanced-patron-mod-12
Hired Guns (Bonus Heroic 2+)
NPC: Harrum
Harrum Location: Lower Industrial Sector – Worker’s Quarters (-1610, 2873)
Shadow Extraction (Bonus Heroic 4+)
NPC: Jax
Jax Location: Lower Industrial Sector – High Security Lockdown (2015, 3353)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/gxd0qzA/heavy-prototype-storage-case Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/10281/advanced-reflex-armoring-12, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/10820/advanced-commando-armoring-12 Smuggler http://www.torhead.com/item/fAoKqCD/advanced-skill-armoring-12, http://www.torhead.com/item/8j3N2vK/advanced-patron-armoring-12
The Morgukai (Bonus Heroic 2+)
NPC: Tythan
Tythan Location: Lower Industrial Sector – High Security Lockdown – Alien Outreach Center (2028, 3151)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/2qUhDdm/heavy-prototype-storage-box, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/33827/qs-06-core
Nar Shaddaa: Bonus Series
NPC: Deera
Deera Location: Deucalon Spaceport (-2173, 1809)
Deucalon Spaceport (-2173, 1809) Quests: Art of Interrogation, One Piece at a Time, Diversion, Memory Flush
Art of Interrogation (Part of Bonus Series)
NPC: Uli
Uli Location: Worker’s Quarters – Imperial Intelligence Gadget Warehouse (-1639, 2876)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/deQwPaL/gilded-premium-storage-box Smuggler http://www.torhead.com/item/1Xw9cI6/improved-republic-skill-package, http://www.torhead.com/item/dbHY7dH/improved-republic-mastery-enhancer
One Piece at a Time (Part of Bonus Series)
NPC: Ciqala
Ciqala Location: Worker’s Quarters – Imperial Intelligence Gadget Warehouse (-1621, 2858)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/6emqcAz/heavy-premium-storage-box, http://www.torhead.com/item/gYMtaNv/heavy-small-credit-box
Diversion (Part of Bonus Series)
NPC: Jaysa
Jaysa Location: High Security Lockdown – Alien Outreach Center (2043, 3120)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/6emqcAz/heavy-premium-storage-box Smuggler http://www.torhead.com/item/jKnI9t/corsos-pj-05-shield-generator, http://www.torhead.com/item/cCtTqMw/bowdaars-pj-05-shield-generator
Memory Flush (Part of Bonus Series)
NPC: Carina
Carina Location: High Security Lockdown – Alien Outreach Center (2049, 3144)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/6emqcAz/heavy-premium-storage-box, http://www.torhead.com/item/gYMtaNv/heavy-small-credit-box
Tatooine- Republic
Down the Hole (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Ledo
Ledo Location: Anchorhead Cantina (2241, –3692)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/ayH1OI1/standard-prototype-storage-case, 2 http://www.torhead.com/item/5XqeAqe/tatooine-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18279/transparisteel-onslaught-belt Guardian http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18567/fortified-transparisteel-belt Smuggler http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18429/synthmesh-battle-belt, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18258/plastifiber-barrage-belt Consular http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/19490/veiled-dramassian-silk-waistwrap
Pirate Bullies (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Terminal
Terminal Location: Jundland – Outpost Largona (1712, –1033)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/dYBzwbr/reinforced-prototype-storage-case, 3 http://www.torhead.com/item/5XqeAqe/tatooine-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18172/transparisteel-onslaught-greaves Guardian http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18538/fortified-transparisteel-greaves Smuggler http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18375/synthmesh-battle-leggings, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18200/plastifiber-barrage-leggings Consular http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/19444/veiled-dramassian-silk-legwraps
A Jawa’s Concern (Heroic 4+, unlocked by doing Pirate Bullies)
NPC: Terminal
Terminal Location: Jundland – Outpost Largona (1712, –1033)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/dYBzwbr/reinforced-prototype-storage-case, 3 http://www.torhead.com/item/5XqeAqe/tatooine-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18316/enhancement-reflex-d-adaptor Knight http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18618/enhancement-battle-d-device, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/19169/enhancement-might-d-device
Reap the Whirlwind (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Martik
Martik Location: Jundland – Outpost Salara (34, –1785)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/e3W56qT/reinforced-prototype-storage-box, 3 http://www.torhead.com/item/5XqeAqe/tatooine-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18294/transparisteel-onslaught-vambraces Guardian http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18591/fortified-transparisteel-armguards Smuggler http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18355/synthmesh-battle-armguards, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18310/plastifiber-barrage-bracers Sage http://www.torhead.com/item/9cdSGX/anointed-dramassian-silk-bracers
Search and Rescue (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Danbar
Danbar Location: Jundland – Dreviad Wastes (341, –1452)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/ayH1OI1/standard-prototype-storage-case, 3 http://www.torhead.com/item/5XqeAqe/tatooine-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18135/transparisteel-onslaught-helmet Guardian http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18635/fortified-transparisteel-headgear Smuggler http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18351/synthmesh-battle-headgear, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18146/plastifiber-barrage-headgear Sage http://www.torhead.com/item/9CiAnye/anointed-dramassian-silk-headgear
Breaking the Code (Heroic 2+, may need to unlock via doing quests for nearby Jawa Krikit)
NPC: Terminal
Terminal Location: Jundland – Camp Karnori (1687, -2166)
The Long Goodbye (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Lapad
Lapad Location: The Dune Sea – Outpost Thorazan
Bonus series
Tatooine: Bonus series
NPC: Junter
Junter Quests: Militia Training, Militia’s Trial, Water Pirates, Show of Force
Militia Training, Militia’s Trial, Water Pirates, Show of Force Location: Jundland – Camp Karnori (1701, –2155)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/dYBzwbr/reinforced-prototype-storage-case, 3 http://www.torhead.com/item/5XqeAqe/tatooine-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/14108/scout-assault-cannon
Militia Training (Part of Bonus)
NPC: Junter
Junter Location: Jundland – Camp Karnori (1701, –2155)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/9JBt2x9/reinforced-premium-storage-case, 1 http://www.torhead.com/item/5XqeAqe/tatooine-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18128/phobium-onslaught-helmet
Militia’s Trial (Part of Bonus)
NPC: Junter
Junter Location: Jundland – Camp Karnori (1701, –2155)
Water Pirates (Part of Bonus)
NPC: Dester
Dester Location: Jundland – Outpost Largona (1756, -1063)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/9JBt2x9/reinforced-premium-storage-case, 1 http://www.torhead.com/item/5XqeAqe/tatooine-commendation, Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/10806/commando-armoring-11, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/10250/reflex-armoring-11
Show of Force (Part of Bonus)
NPC: Larcoh
Larcoh Location: Jundland – Outpost Largona (1682, –1063)
Alderaan – Republic
Proof of Treason (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Terminal
Terminal Location: Apalis Coast – Foothill Paths (-1039, 1184)
Special Delivery (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Obatt
Obatt Location: Alsakan Lowlands – Wardpost Duvaal (483, 1724)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/dYBzwbr/reinforced-prototype-storage-case, 3 http://www.torhead.com/item/16zRilL/alderaan-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18136/xonolite-mesh-helmet Smuggler http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18145/fortified-flexiglass-headgear, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18352/fortified-phrik-headgear Consular http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/19592/traditional-dramassian-silk-headgear
Red Handed (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Samara
Location: Glarus Vallery – Panteer Refuge (-1433, -731)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/gxd0qzA/heavy-prototype-storage-case, 3 http://www.torhead.com/item/16zRilL/alderaan-commendation Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18051/xonolite-mesh-chestguard Smuggler http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18068/fortified-flexiglass-jacket, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/18482/fortified-phrik-jacket Consular http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/19552/traditional-dramassian-silk-vestments
Bonus series
Turning the Tide (Heroic 2+, unlock via progressing the bonus series)
NPC: Dolin
Dolin Location: King’s Pass Wardpost Luurdes (1367, 1781)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/5W9gCJK/ornate-prototype-storage-case Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/12878/reflex-barrel-17, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/3019/commando-barrel-17
Into the Killik Warrens (Heroic 2+, unlock via progressing the bonus series)
NPC: Essor
Essor Location: King’s Pass Wardpost Luurdes (1334, 1805)
Survivors (Heroic 2+, unlock via progressing the bonus series)
NPC: Elz
Elz Location: King’s Pass – Syrush Estate (2026, 2223)
Looted Secrets (Heroic 4+, unlock via progressing the bonus series)
NPC: Surik
Surik Location: King’s Pass – House Trader’s Circle (3026, 519)
Alderaan: Bonus Series
NPC: Brom
Brom Location: Organa Castle – Republic Dispatch Center (-712, 1041)
Choice of All Classes http://www.torhead.com/item/5W9gCJK/ornate-prototype-storage-case Trooper http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/10823/advanced-commando-armoring-17, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/10271/advanced-reflex-armoring-17 Smuggler http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/11148/advanced-skill-armoring-17, http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/gear/10986/advanced-patron-armoring-17
Observatory (part of bonus series)
NPC: Linel
Linel Location: King’s Pass Wardpost Luurdes (1341, 1790)
Shipment of weapons (part of bonus series)
NPC: Kamen
Kamen Location: King’s Pass Ulgo Foothills (2006, 1381)
A spy in House Organa (part of bonus series)
NPC: Tyuth
Tyuth Location: King’s Pass – House Trader’s Circle (3072, 473)
Balmorra – Republic
Shifting Priorities (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Feero
Feero Location: Upper Markaran Outpost (-1124, 1009)
Target of Opportunity (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Protarius
Protarius Location: Sobrikarill Vallery (117, 1486)
Industrial Sabotage (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Nic’ala
Nic’ala Location: Sundari Flatlands (839, 1487)
Acquired Taste (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Larindaz
Larindaz Location: Sundari Flatlands (809, 1559)
Local Predators (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Tenn
Tenn Location: Sundari Flatlands (869, 1523)
Hit’em where they live (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Chedd
Chedd Location: Gorinth Canyon (-519, 1794)
Justice for the Lost (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Galway
Galway Location: Moraine Outpost (-505, 1666)
Mandalorian Terror (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Alya
Location: Gorinth Outpost (-17, 1684)
Title: Hero of Gorinth Canyon
Colicoid Massacre: The Evidence (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Holoterminal
Holoterminal Location: Research Grounds (1248, 1911)
Bonus series
Bonus series 1
NPC: Wixx
Wixx Location: Moraine Outpost (-505, 1666)
Moraine Outpost (-505, 1666) Required Quests: Hunting the Mandalorians, Endangered Passengers
Hunting the Mandalorians (part of bonus series 1)
NPC: Rond
Rond Location: Moraine Outpost (-505, 1666)
Endangered Passengers (part of bonus series 1)
NPC: Daven
Daven Location: Moraine Outpost ( –514, 1771)
Bonus series 2
NPC: Gabe
Gabe Location: Next to the planetary shuttle
Next to the planetary shuttle Required Quests: Nowhere to run, The Neutralizer
Nowhere to Run (part of bonus series 2)
NPC: Jojames
Jojames Location: Upper Sundari Outpost (1466, 1233)
The Neutralizer (part of bonus series 2)
NPC: Garik
Garik Location: Upper Sundari Outpost (1466, 1233)
Hoth- Republic
Prisoner Extraction (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Keloh
Keloh Location: Aurek Base (-3430, –1305)
Gamorrean Menace (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Leebo
Leebo Location: Outpost Cresh (-2025, –1043)
The Terror Brigade (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Calia
Calia Location: Outpost Senth (-768, –770)
Taking Inventory (Area 4+)
NPC: AREA
AREA Location: Vehement Sword Wreckage (1952, 473)
Invisible Foes (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Gorellix
Gorellix Location: Outpost Zerek (1262, –88)
Bonus series
Better Droids (Bonus Heroic 2+)
NPC: Kerkarr
Kerkarr Location: Drift Hills Republic Depot (-3103, –290)
Tech Diagrams (Bonus Heroic 2+)
NPC: Fabel
Fabel Location: Drift Hills Republic Depot (-3109, –317)
Signal Jam (Bonus Heroic 2+)
NPC: Jaro
Jaro Location: Drift Hills Republic Depot (-3109, –317)
Humanitarian Aid (Bonus Heroic 4+)
NPC: Maya
Maya Location: Jagged Plains Republic Outpost (-2707. 374)
Frostclaw (Bonus Heroic 4+)
NPC: Neelo
Neelo Location: Jagged Plains Republic Outpost (-2707. 374)
Hoth Bonus Series
NPC: Llic
Llic Location: Aurek Base (-3455, –1281)
Aurek Base (-3455, –1281) Quests: Lost Patrol, Cutting Our Losses, The Beast Lord
Lost Patrol (Part of Bonus )
NPC: Captain Armarak
Captain Armarak Location: Drift Hills Republic Depot (-3092, –278)
Cutting Our Loses (Part of Bonus)
NPC: Farren
Farren Location: Jagged Plains Republic Outpost (-2771, 394)
The Beast Lord (Part of bonus)
NPC: Elsor
Elsor Location: Jagged Plains Republic Outpost (-2771, 394)
Belsavis – Republic
Jungle Flight (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Firehawk
Firehawk Location: Veractyl Vale (445, 814)
The Engineer’s Tale (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Valyn
Valyn Location: Maximum Security Ops Center (-1527, –371)
The Tyrant (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Console
Console Location: Caves of Primeval Warden (-331, –1681)
Prison Scars (AREA 1+, not repeatable)
NPC: AREA
AREA Location: The Scar
Voss – Republic
Savage Connections (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Terminal
Terminal Location: Voss Outlook (63, 1548)
Not Afraid Enough (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Terminal
Terminal Location: Shad-Ka Outpost (1144, 726)
Trial of the First (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Terminal
Terminal Location: Shrine of Healing (-1940, –1853)
Cyber Mercenaries (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Terminal
Terminal Location: Kri-Ta Outpost (665, –1317)
Bonus series
Voss Bonus Series 1
NPC: Halykus
Halykus Location: Kri-Ta Outpost (602, –1317)
Voss Bonus Series 2
NPC: Halykus
Halykus Location: Kri-Ta Outpost (602, –1317)
Corellia – Republic
Under New Management (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Herron
Herron Location: Blastfield Shipyards – Gilded Descent Casino (482, 1326)
Concierge (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Tott
Tott Location: Axial Park – Republic Safe House (843, -3337)
Starfighters of Corellia (Heroic 2+)
NPC: Bathens
Bathens Location: Govrment District – Port Pevaria
Choice of All Classes Ancient Prototype Storage Box,
1 Corellia Commendation
Biological Warfare (Heroic 4+)
NPC: Kirin
Kirin Location: Labor Valley (-2566, –2688)
Chasing the Shadow (Heroic 4+)"FNMA" redirects here. For the airport with this code, see Malanje Airport
The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), commonly known as Fannie Mae, is a United States government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) and, since 1968, a publicly traded company. Founded in 1938 during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal,[2] the corporation's purpose is to expand the secondary mortgage market by securitizing mortgage loans in the form of mortgage-backed securities (MBS),[3] allowing lenders to reinvest their assets into more lending and in effect increasing the number of lenders in the mortgage market by reducing the reliance on locally based savings and loan associations (or "thrifts").[4] Its brother organization is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), better known as Freddie Mac. As of 2018, Fannie Mae is ranked #21 on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.[5]
History [ edit ]
A view, from the southwest, of the Federal National Mortgage Association's (Fannie Mae's) Reston, Virginia facility.
Historically, most housing loans in the early 1900s in the USA were short term mortgage loans with balloon payments.[6] The Great Depression wrought havoc on the U.S. housing market as people lost their jobs and were unable to make payments. By 1933, an estimated 20 to 25% of the nation's outstanding mortgage debt was in default.[7] This resulted in foreclosures in which nearly 25% of America's homeowners lost their homes to banks. To address this, Fannie Mae was established by the U.S. Congress in 1938 by amendments to the National Housing Act[8] as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Originally chartered as the National Mortgage Association of Washington, the organization's explicit purpose was to provide local banks with federal money to finance home loans in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.[9] Fannie Mae created a liquid secondary mortgage market and thereby made it possible for banks and other loan originators to issue more housing loans, primarily by buying Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured mortgages.[10] For the first thirty years following its inception, Fannie Mae held a monopoly over the secondary mortgage market.[9] Other considerations may have motivated the New Deal focus on the housing market: about a third of the nation's unemployed were in the building trade, and the government had a vested interest in getting them back to work by giving them homes to build.[11]
Fannie Mae was acquired by the Housing and Home Finance Agency from the Federal Loan Agency as a constituent unit in 1950.[12] In 1954, an amendment known as the Federal National Mortgage Association Charter Act[13] made Fannie Mae into "mixed-ownership corporation", meaning that federal government held the preferred stock while private investors held the common stock;[8] in 1968 it converted to a privately held corporation, to remove its activity and debt from the federal budget.[14] In the 1968 change, arising from the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, Fannie Mae's predecessor (also called Fannie Mae) was split into the current Fannie Mae and the Government National Mortgage Association ("Ginnie Mae").
Ginnie Mae, which remained a government organization, buys FHA-insured mortgage loans as well as Veterans Administration (VA) and Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) insured mortgages. As such, Ginnie Mae is the only home-loan agency explicitly backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government.[15]
In 1970, the federal government authorized Fannie Mae to purchase conventional loans, i.e. those not insured by the FHA, VA, or FmHA, and created the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), colloquially known as Freddie Mac, to compete with Fannie Mae and thus facilitate a more robust and efficient secondary mortgage market.[15] That same year FNMA went public on New York and Pacific Exchanges.[16]
In 1981, Fannie Mae issued its first mortgage passthrough and called it a mortgage-backed security. Ginnie Mae had guaranteed the first mortgage passthrough security of an approved lender in 1968[17] and in 1971 Freddie Mac issued its first mortgage passthrough, called a participation certificate, composed primarily of private mortgage loans.[17]
1990s [ edit ]
In 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992.[18] The Act amended the charter of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to reflect the Democratic Congress' view that the GSEs "have an affirmative obligation to facilitate the financing of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families in a manner consistent with their overall public purposes, while maintaining a strong financial condition and a reasonable economic return".[19] For the first time, the GSEs were required to meet "affordable housing goals" set annually by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and approved by Congress. The initial annual goal for low-income and moderate-income mortgage purchases for each GSE was 30% of the total number of dwelling units financed by mortgage purchases[20] and increased to 55% by 2007.
In 1999, Fannie Mae came under pressure from the Clinton administration to expand mortgage loans to low and moderate income borrowers by increasing the ratios of their loan portfolios in distressed inner city areas designated in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977.[21] In 1999, The New York Times reported that with the corporation's move towards the subprime market "Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980s."[22]
2000s [ edit ]
[23] Franklin Raines earned $90 million in salary and bonuses while he was head of Fannie Mae.
In 2000, because of a re-assessment of the housing market by HUD, anti-predatory lending rules were put into place that disallowed risky, high-cost loans from being credited toward affordable housing goals. In 2004, these rules were dropped and high-risk loans were again counted toward affordable housing goals.[24]
The intent was that Fannie Mae's enforcement of the underwriting standards they maintained for standard conforming mortgages would also provide safe and stable means of lending to buyers who did not have prime credit. As Daniel Mudd, then president and CEO of Fannie Mae, testified in 2007, instead the agency's underwriting requirements drove business into the arms of the private mortgage industry who marketed aggressive products without regard to future consequences:
We also set conservative underwriting standards for loans we finance to ensure the homebuyers can afford their loans over the long term. We sought to bring the standards we apply to the prime space to the subprime market with our industry partners primarily to expand our services to underserved families. Unfortunately, Fannie Mae-quality, safe loans in the subprime market did not become the standard, and the lending market moved away from us. Borrowers were offered a range of loans that layered teaser rates, interest-only, negative amortization and payment options and low-documentation requirements on top of floating-rate loans. In early 2005 we began sounding our concerns about this "layered-risk" lending. For example, Tom Lund, the head of our single-family mortgage business, publicly stated, "One of the things we don't feel good about right now as we look into this marketplace is more homebuyers being put into programs that have more risk. Those products are for more sophisticated buyers. Does it make sense for borrowers to take on risk they may not be aware of? Are we setting them up for failure? As a result, we gave up significant market share to our competitors."[25]
Alex Berenson of The New York Times reported in 2003 that Fannie Mae's risk is much larger than is commonly held.[26] Nassim Taleb wrote in The Black Swan: "The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deem these events 'unlikely'".[27]
On January 26, 2005, the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 (S.190) was first introduced in the Senate by Sen. Chuck Hagel.[28] The Senate legislation was an effort to reform the existing GSE regulatory structure in light of the recent accounting problems and questionable management actions leading to considerable income restatements by the GSEs. After being reported favorably by the Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in July 2005, the bill was never considered by the full Senate for a vote.[29] Sen. John McCain's decision to become a cosponsor of S.190 almost a year later in 2006 was the last action taken regarding Sen. Hagel's bill in spite of developments since clearing the Senate Committee. Sen. McCain pointed out that Fannie Mae's regulator reported that profits were "illusions deliberately and systematically created by the company's senior management" in his floor statement giving support to S.190.[30][31]
At the same time, the House also introduced similar legislation, the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005 (H.R. 1461), in the Spring of 2005. The House Financial Services Committee had crafted changes and produced a Committee Report by July 2005 to the legislation. It was passed by the House in October in spite of President Bush's statement of policy opposed to the House version, which stated: "The regulatory regime envisioned by H.R. 1461 is considerably weaker than that which governs other large, complex financial institutions."[32] The legislation met with opposition from both Democrats and Republicans at that point and the Senate never took up the House passed version for consideration after that.[33]
The mortgage crisis from late 2007 [ edit ]
Following their mission to meet federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing goals, GSEs such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBanks) had striven to improve home ownership of low and middle income families, underserved areas, and generally through special affordable methods such as "the ability to obtain a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with a low down payment... and the continuous availability of mortgage credit under a wide range of economic conditions".[34] Then in 2003–2004, the subprime mortgage crisis began.[35] The market shifted away from regulated GSEs and radically toward Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) issued by unregulated private-label securitization conduits, typically operated by investment banks.
As loan originators began to distribute more and more of their loans through private label MBSs, GSEs lost the ability to monitor and control loan originators. Competition between the GSEs and private securitizers for loans further undermined GSEs' power and strengthened mortgage originators. This contributed to a decline in underwriting standards and was a major cause of the financial crisis.[36]
Investment bank securitizers were more willing to securitize risky loans because they generally retained minimal risk. Whereas the GSEs guaranteed the performance of their MBSs, private securitizers generally did not, and might only retain a thin slice of risk.[36] Often, banks would offload this risk to insurance companies or other counterparties through credit default swaps, making their actual risk exposures extremely difficult for investors and creditors to discern.[37]
The shift toward riskier mortgages and private label MBS distribution occurred as financial institutions sought to maintain earnings levels that had been elevated during 2001–2003 by an unprecedented refinancing boom due to historically low interest rates. Earnings depended on volume, so maintaining elevated earnings levels necessitated expanding the borrower pool using lower underwriting standards and new products that the GSEs would not (initially) securitize. Thus, the shift away from GSE securitization to private-label securitization (PLS) also corresponded with a shift in mortgage product type, from traditional, amortizing, fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) to nontraditional, structurally riskier, nonamortizing, adjustable-rate mortgages (ARM's), and in the start of a sharp deterioration in mortgage underwriting standards.[35] The growth of PLS, however, forced the GSEs to lower their underwriting standards in an attempt to reclaim lost market share to please their private shareholders. Shareholder pressure pushed the GSEs into competition with PLS for market share, and the GSEs loosened their guarantee business underwriting standards in order to compete. In contrast, the wholly public FHA/Ginnie Mae maintained their underwriting standards and instead ceded market share.[35]
The growth of private-label securitization and lack of regulation in this part of the market resulted in the oversupply of underpriced housing finance[35] that led, in 2006, to an increasing number of borrowers, often with poor credit, who were unable to pay their mortgages – particularly with adjustable rate mortgage loans (ARM), caused a precipitous increase in home foreclosures. As a result, home prices declined as increasing foreclosures added to the already large inventory of homes and stricter lending standards made it more and more difficult for borrowers to get loans. This depreciation in home prices led to growing losses for the GSEs, which back the majority of US mortgages. In July 2008, the government attempted to ease market fears by reiterating their view that "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac play a central role in the US housing finance system". The US Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve took steps to bolster confidence in the corporations, including granting both corporations access to Federal Reserve low-interest loans (at similar rates as commercial banks) and removing the prohibition on the Treasury Department to purchase the GSEs' stock. Despite these efforts, by August 2008, shares of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had tumbled more than 90% from their one-year prior levels.
On October 21, 2010 FHFA estimates revealed that the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will likely cost taxpayers $224–360 billion in total, with over $150 billion already provided.[38]
2008 – crisis and conservatorship [ edit ]
On July 11, 2008, The New York Times reported that U.S. government officials were considering a plan for the U.S. government to take over Fannie Mae and/or Freddie Mac should their financial situations worsen due to the U.S. housing crisis.[39] Fannie Mae and smaller Freddie Mac owned or guaranteed a massive proportion of all home loans in the United States and so were especially hard hit by the slump. The government officials also stated that the government had also considered calling for explicit government guarantee through legislation of $5 trillion on debt owned or guaranteed by the two companies.
Fannie stock plunged.[40] Some worried that Fannie lacked capital and might go bankrupt. Others worried about a government seizure. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson as well as the White House went on the air to defend the financial soundness of Fannie Mae, in a last-ditch effort to prevent a total financial panic.[41][42] Fannie and Freddie underpinned the whole U.S. mortgage market. As recently as 2008, Fannie Mae and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) had owned or guaranteed about half of the U.S.'s $12 trillion mortgage market.[39] If they were to collapse, mortgages would be harder to obtain and much more expensive. Fannie and Freddie bonds were owned by everyone from the Chinese Government, to money market funds, to the retirement funds of hundreds of millions of people. If they went bankrupt there would be mass upheaval on a global scale.[43]
The Administration PR effort was not enough, by itself, to save the GSEs. Their government directive to purchase bad loans from private banks, in order to prevent these banks from failing, as well as the 20 top banks falsely classifying loans as AAA, caused instability. Paulson's plan was to go in swiftly and seize the two GSEs, rather than provide loans as he did for AIG and the major banks; he told president Bush that "the first sound they hear will be their heads hitting the floor", in a reference to the French revolution.[43] The major banks have since been sued by the Feds for a sum of $200,000,000, and some of the major banks have already settled.[44] In addition, a lawsuit has been filed against the federal government by the shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for a) creating an environment by which Fannie and Freddie would be unable to meet their financial obligations b) forcing the executive management to sign over the companies to the conservator by (a), and c) the gross violation of the (fifth amendment) taking clause.
On September 7, 2008, James Lockhart, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were being |
United Kingdom, and colleagues, examined the genetic overlap between Parkinson disease (PD) and Alzheimer disease (AD).
Data sets from the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the United States were used to perform a combined genome-wide association analysis (GWA). The GWA study of AD included 3,177 patients with AD and 7,277 control patients, and the GWA analysis for PD included 5,333 patients with PD and 12,298 control patients. The gene-based analyses resulted in no significant evidence that supported the presence of loci (location of gene) that were associated with increased risk for both PD and AD, according to the study results.
“Our findings therefore imply that loci that increase the risk of both PD and AD are not widespread and that the pathological overlap could instead be ‘downstream’ of the primary susceptibility genes that increase the risk of each disease,” the study concludes.(JAMA Neurol. Published online August 5, 2013. doi:10.1001/.jamaneurol.2013.448. Available pre-embargo to the media at http://media.jamanetwork.com.)
Editor’s Note: This study was supported by Parkinson’s United Kingdom, the Medical Research Council, and numerous other funding sources. Please see the articles for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.
# # #MELBOURNE Knights may have been away from the national spotlight since 2004 but the club’s almost unrivalled production line looks set to continue.
Gun attacker Stipo Andrijasevic’s attacking talents and persistence look set to finally be rewarded as he heads to New Zealand on Monday for a trial with Wellington Phoenix.
Andrijasevic spearheads a Knights side that returns to the national stage tonight when they host WA side Cockburn City at Knights Stadium in the FFA Cup Round of 32.
Knights coach Andrew Marth has left no stone unturned for this encounter, travelling to Perth with assistant Frank Juric to scout Cockburn.
media_camera Melbourne Knights striker Stipo Andrijasevic is set for a shot at the A-League.
Marth, a club legend and former Socceroo, said the club’s first home match since the FFA Cup started in 2014 is a momentous day for the two-time NSL champions.
“We’ve strived to succeed in the FFA Cup since day dot, we had a disappointing loss two years ago but it’s huge for the club getting back on the national stage,’’ Marth said.
“The concept is superb and full credit to Fox Sports for getting behind it, and I’m pleading with Knights fans and the whole of Victoria to support us. It won’t be easy.’’
Now 22, Andrijasevic, who made his senior state league debut with Dandenong City age 16, could finally get a crack at the A-League after injury set him back. The versatile attacker was on the verge of promotion from Melbourne City’s youth team a few years ago before he was felled by a knee reconstruction.
“I’m excited and confident about my ability to go to the next level and this is a great opportunity (at Phoenix),’’ Andrijasevic said.
“I had a great time at Melbourne Heart and had a couple of chances, the injury didn’t go my way. I felt I’ve played well the last four years, and hopefully I can make most of it (the trial).
“My priority is the FFA Cup and this is one of the biggest games of my career.’’
media_camera Andrijasevic’s deserves his opportunity after coming back from injury.
Marth, who captained some of Australia’s best exports in Mark Viduka, Danny Tiatto and Josip Simunic, said Andrijasevic can go on.
“One on one I don’t think there’s anyone better in the league. He’s broken some games open and he’s a versatile attacker,’’ Marth said.
“He was exceptional last season and thought he deserved an A-League chance. He’s continued his good form and really matured and now he’s got the opportunity at Wellington.
“If that doesn’t come to fruition there’s interest elsewhere, but he can make the next step, he’s grown as a player and a man since being given handed the vice-captaincy.’’U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Vincent Brooks talks to Indonesian army officers about Apache attack helicopters during a tour of Garuda Shield exercise equipment on Sept. 24, 2014, on Java Island. In the background is one of four Apaches brought to Indonesia for the exercise, which is the first leg of Pacific Pathways.
FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii — In the wake of President Barack Obama's Asia trip aimed at offering reassurances that the administration remains committed to the Pacific rebalance, U.S. Army Pacific is planning to bolster the land-based force’s relevance in the region.
Under Pacific Pathways, the Army will develop small units that will be forward-deployed for quick response to humanitarian emergencies or regional threats.
The plan is also a way for the Army to create a semi-permanent presence in parts of the Pacific where it’s not politically or financially feasible to establish bases. And because the unit and much of its equipment will remain forward deployed, it will provide an efficient resource in a time of budget cuts and a shrinking military.
But analysts and some military leaders have questioned whether the initiative will duplicate Marines’ skills and assets and is a “solution in search of a problem.”
While the plan would use the series of established military exercises with Pacific nations as “training pathways,” it will also support more substantial exchanges of subject expertise and personnel, USARPAC spokesman Jim Guzior wrote in an email to Stars and Stripes.
The Army is involved in a host of annual multilateral exercises in the Pacific, with countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia and India. Materiel is normally transported to and from each exercise at great expense. Instead of a series of Army units traveling to an exercise for 10 to 30 days and returning home, the new pathways model would deploy a smaller unit whose “nucleus” will move from one exercise to the next, USARPAC commander Gen. Vincent Brooks told reporters earlier this month during a land force symposium held in Honolulu.
And implementation of the plan is months, not years, away.
“We are headed toward being ready to start loading the vessels that are going to move here in a few months,” Brooks said. “It’s not just an idea; we’re going into execution with this.”
The new units would be made up of about 700 troops, although the number will vary depending on the mission. Deployments could potentially last six months or longer.
On Monday, Obama announced a 10-year agreement with the Philippines that gives the U.S. military greater access to certain bases on the archipelago. Pacific Pathways will undoubtedly benefit from large equipment that can be pre-positioned under the agreement.
“I think that Pacific Pathways is a direct response to the Pentagon’s 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance to rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region,” Christopher Dougherty, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., wrote in an email interview with Stars and Stripes. “For decades, Korea has been the primary focus of Army forces in [U.S. Pacific Command], and Pacific Pathways is an attempt to break out of that mindset and demonstrate that the Army can contribute to stability and security beyond the Korean peninsula. If the Army can do that, they may be able to argue more successfully for preserving their end strength and budget.”
Brooks told reporters that Pacific Pathways will be built around a truncated brigade structure, taking its leadership and one or two of its subordinate battalions, then adding elements that are not “organic” to a brigade, such as aviation. The unit will morph to adapt to the particular needs of partner nations and any given exercise.
The number of soldiers under Brooks’ command has increased during the past several years to 106,000, he said, but funding is not keeping pace. Pacific Pathways is “an efficient way for us to use the limited resources that we’re going to have,” he said.
Brooks declined to say from where soldiers for the new unit would be drawn. Outside of South Korea, most of the troops under his command are either in Hawaii or Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state.
The Pacific Pathways concept has drawn skepticism since it went public late last fall.
A Washington Post article in December framed the initiative as setting up a “turf battle” with the Marines, the service that is designed to maneuver amid sea, shore and land.
Indeed, the Marines are already positioned for a similar role. The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit conducts multilateral activities from Okinawa, and by 2016, about 2,500 Marines are expected to be rotating through a southern base in Darwin, Australia, every six months.
In January, the Washington, D.C.,-based Brookings Institution published a brutal assessment of Pacific Pathways by Marine Lt. Col. Aaron Marx, describing the Army’s proposed expeditionary model in the Pacific as not a supplement to the Navy and Marines but as “simply a less-capable replication.” He dismissed it as a Marine Expeditionary Unit “without the ships, the expertise or doctrine.”
During the April land-forces symposium, Maj. Gen. Richard Simcock, deputy commander of U.S. Marine Corps Forces, was asked during a panel how the Marines and Army can clearly define their roles in the Pacific. He said that just as he heard criticism during the 12 years of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that the U.S. didn’t need two armies, he’s now hearing there’s no need for two Marine Corps.
He said the commitment of the Marine Corps as an “extended land force” was “maybe not the best mission” for the service but argued it was what the nation needed during operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. “Pacific Pathways may not be the best fit for the U.S. Army, but it may be what is required for the United States right now and throughout the Pacific region.”
Dougherty called this an “imperfect” analogy because there was “an obvious demand” for more ground forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Put another way, there was a pressing problem and a clear solution,” he said. “Pacific Pathways, on the other hand, looks like a solution in search of a problem. There does not appear to be insatiable demand in the Asia-Pacific region for combined training exercises with U.S. infantry battalions. At a time when the Army’s budget is declining and there are other more pressing problems to solve, this may not be the most efficient use of resources.”
Even some high-ranking brass have wondered aloud about the logistics. Lt. Gen. John Wissler, commander of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Forces Japan, told reporters in April that the Navy’s shortage of amphibious battle ships could inhibit Pacific Pathways.
Even Brooks admitted that bringing Pacific Pathways to implementation has been slow, particularly because it involves diplomatic and military relationships with a number of Asian nations.
“Anything that looks like a change has to be understood and accepted in the region and done transparently,” he told reporters.
Peter Chalk, a senior political analyst at the RAND Corp. who has written about the Army’s future role in Southeast Asia, said the concept of small Army expeditionary forces would enhance the service’s ability to deliver and disseminate humanitarian supplies, restore critical infrastructure and provide emergency medical support.
“I think the key is that they have to be small because within the Asia-Pacific there is still an awareness and a suspicion of large-scale U.S. forces being stationed in their region that would unwittingly involve these countries in regional power plays between Washington and Beijing,” Chalk said.
“If the Army continues to shrink,” Dougherty concluded, “Pacific Pathways may help offset the effects of a smaller force by maintaining combat forces forward. This would greatly reduce the time required to get forces into theater as compared with units stationed in the continental United States, thereby improving the Army’s ability to respond quickly to crises.”
[email protected], cars are learning to see pedestrians and road hazards; robots are becoming higher functioning; complex medical diagnostic devices are becoming more portable; and unmanned aircraft are learning to navigate autonomously. As a result, the computational requirements for these devices are increasing exponentially, while their size, weight, and power limits continue to decrease. Aimed at these and other embedded parallel computing applications, last week at the 2014 GPU Technology Conference NVIDIA announced an awesome new developer platform called Jetson TK1.
Jetson TK1 is a tiny but full-featured computer designed for development of embedded and mobile applications. Jetson TK1 is exciting because it incorporates Tegra K1, the first mobile processor to feature a CUDA-capable GPU. Jetson TK1 brings the capabilities of Tegra K1 to developers in a compact, low-power platform that makes development as simple as developing on a PC.
Jetson TK1 is aimed at two groups of people. The first are OEMs, including robotics, avionics, and medical device companies, who would like to develop new products that use Tegra K1 SoCs, and need a development platform that makes it easy to write software for these products. Once these companies are ready to move to production, they can work with one of our board partners to design the exact board that they need for their product. The second group is the large number of independent developers, researchers, makers, and hobbyists who would like a platform that will enable them to create amazing technology such as robots, security devices, or anything that needs substantial parallel computing or computer vision in a small, flexible and low-power platform. For this group, Jetson TK1 offers the size and adaptability of Raspberry Pi or Arduino, with the computational capability of a desktop computer. We’re excited to see what developers create with Jetson TK1!
Tegra K1
Tegra K1 is NVIDIA’s latest mobile processor. It features a Kepler GPU with 192 cores, an NVIDIA 4-plus-1 quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU, integrated video encoding and decoding support, image/signal processing, and many other system-level features. The Kepler GPU in Tegra K1 is built on the same high-performance, energy-efficient Kepler GPU architecture that is found in our high-end GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla GPUs for graphics and computing. That makes it the only mobile processor today that supports CUDA 6 for computing and full desktop OpenGL 4.4 and DirectX 11 for graphics.
Tegra K1 is a parallel processor capable of over 300 GFLOP/s of 32-bit floating point computation. Not only is that a huge achievement in a processor with such a low power footprint (Tegra K1 power consumption is in the range of 5 Watts for real workloads), but K1’s support for CUDA and desktop graphics APIs means that much of your existing compute and graphics software will compile and run largely as-is on this platform.
Jetson TK1 Features
Jetson TK1 is a 5″ wide by 5″ long PC board with a Tegra K1 processor, 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB 4.51 eMMC memory, and the following peripherals and ports.
1 Half mini-PCIE slot
1 Full size SD/MMC connector
1 Full-size HDMI port
1 USB 2.0 port, micro AB
1 USB 3.0 port, A
1 RS232 serial port
1 ALC5639 Realtek Audio codec with Mic in and Line out
1 RTL8111GS Realtek GigE LAN
1 SATA data port
SPI 4MByte boot flash
In addition the following signals are available through an expansion port: DP/LVDS, Touch SPI, 1×4 + 1×1 CSI-2, GPIOs, UART, HSIC, and i2c.
Camera Support
Jetson TK1 is capable of supporting multiple cameras through a variety of interfaces. A variety of of USB 3.0 and GigE cameras are becoming available, so these ports are useful for cameras as well as networking and other peripherals. An additional GigE port can also be added via the PCI-e x1 port. The CSI 1×4 and 1×1 buses can be used to feed camera images directly into the integrated signal processor (ISP) on Tegra K1 (bypassing memory), for direct image processing.
Software Platform
Jetson TK1 runs Linux For Tegra (L4T), a modified Ubuntu 13.04 Linux distribution provided by NVIDIA. NVIDIA provides the board support package and software stack which includes the CUDA Toolkit and OpenGL 4.4 drivers. You can get downloads for these as well as examples and documentation on the Jetson Support Page.
CUDA for Embedded Applications
Jetson TK1 supports the complete CUDA Toolkit version 6.0. Tegra K1 supports Unified Memory, however in contrast to current desktop / server GPUs, the memory on Tegra is physically unified. However, there are separate GPU and CPU caches. This just means that you need to use the cudaMallocManaged API to allocate memory on Tegra K1, just like you do on Tesla and GeForce; you have the same programming model across all GPUs.
Getting Started and Connecting to Jetson TK1
Getting started with Jetson TK1 is easy, thanks to all the software that comes pre-installed on the on-board flash memory. This means you can take your Jetson TK1 board out of the box, plug in the power supply, an HDMI display, and USB keyboard and mouse (you’ll either need a USB hub or a combined keyboard/mouse that uses a single USB port), power it on, and it is ready to run. Once you get it set up initially, you may want to remotely connect to Jetson TK1 instead of using it like a PC. You can connect to Jetson TK1 using a variety of methods, including the serial or USB ports, but the most common is to set it up on your LAN and SSH, or VNC to it.
Once you are up and running, you can download and install the CUDA Toolkit v6.0 and the VisionWorks SDK from the Jetson Support Page, and get started developing amazing software.
Order Jetson TK1 Now, just $192
Jetson TK1 is available to pre-order today for $192. In the United States, it is available from the NVIDIA website, as well as newegg.com and Micro Center. See the Jetson TK1 page for details on international orders.
Tegra® K1 CUDA® Vision Challenge
Do you have a great idea for a Tegra K1-based product or technology? If you are working on computer vision applications in Automotive or Autonomous Vehicles, Defense or Security, Robotics, Medical and Life Sciences or others, this is your opportunity to be among the first 50 developers to run your application on the world’s first embedded supercomputer. Simply submit a proposal of your work by April 30, 2014. Entries will be judged for innovation, impact on research or industry, public availability, and quality of work. The top 50 applicants will be awarded a Jetson TK1 DevKit and access to technical support documents and assets. Make your submission here.Price-conscious buyers of small cars may decide diesel is no longer worth paying more. If so, companies like Fiat Chrysler, Renault and Volkswagen would suffer most. Profits on small cars already are slim.
“The biggest challenge will be emissions treatment for small cars, simply because of the cost,” said Matthias Wissmann, a former German transport minister who is the president of the German Association of the Automotive Industry.
The changing diesel calculus is a potentially significant blow to carmakers in Europe. Because of fuel subsidies, diesels account for nearly half of all cars on European roads. Elsewhere, diesel’s overall market share ranges from zero to minuscule.
Diesels are also a crucial source of profits for automakers, particularly for luxury and sport utility vehicles that use more fuel. More than two-thirds of the cars sold by Audi and BMW in Europe are diesels.
Diesel’s market share in Europe has held steady since the Volkswagen scandal broke in September. But there are tentative signs that some Europeans are falling out of love with diesel.
Image Axel Friedrich in his car, a Fiat 500.
Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
The share of diesels sold in Germany by BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, including its Porsche and Audi units, fell 3 percent in the first four months of 2016 compared with the same period of 2015, according to figures compiled by Mr. Dudenhöffer. Germany is the largest market for diesel cars in the world, and its carmakers are particularly vulnerable to a slowdown.
In Europe, Volkswagen led the way in civilizing diesel for mass-market passenger cars in the 1990s. The company produced engines that were less noisy and less smelly than diesels of old, yet offered excellent acceleration and fuel economy.About
The Gearilla is a starting apparel and accessories company that is mainly focused on the gear-like stuff. The first project of Gearilla is the Gearilla bracelet. The bracelet which looks almost like a gear, but in a fun and stylish way. The Gearilla bracelet can be a great accessory to wear everyday and can look amazing with the clothes you like. The bracelet rotates if you turn it, so it adds this unique feeling and epicness. Gearilla bracelet will be an awesome thing to have if you're a skater, surfer, pop culture fan, rock fan or just an awesome person! The company needs your support in order to start it's very first production. Right now the bracelets have one same size which is a universal size and will fit most of the wrists, later there are going to be bigger sizes as well. Currently there are 6 available colors, later we are going to add more. Please support this idea if you like it and receive your rewards. My name is Konstantin and my partner's name is Robert. Thank you for being interested. Website coming soon.A military judge ruled Friday that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl would receive a dishonorable discharge but no prison time for deserting his post in Afghanistan and endangering the lives of his comrades.
The decision on Sergeant Bergdahl is a complete and total disgrace to our Country and to our Military. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2017
Army Col. Jeffery R. Nance made the sentence after Bergdahl pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy last month, charges that stemmed from the sergeant’s abandonment of his post in Afghanistan in 2009 before he was held captive by the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network for five years.
These charges carried the potential for life imprisonment as a punishment.
The sentence complied with requests from Berdgahl’s defense team during closing arguments, but also demotes Berdahl from Sergeant to E1. Focusing on the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Taliban, harsh criticism by President Trump, and diagnosed mental disorders, the defense argued that these factors should mitigate the severity of Bergdahl’s punishment.
The judge ultimately agreed.
Prosecutors argued that Berdahl should receive a 14-year sentence.
So the judge went easy on Bergdahl to go after Trump. He all but said so earlier in the week. That’s wrong. pic.twitter.com/dXDNMGPwDa — John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) November 3, 2017
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected] around the world enjoy the Lego-like digital world of MineCraft, but you may need to think twice before downloading the popular Minecraft game from the Google Play Store as thousands of fakes have been caught distributing malware.
Security researchers have warned that roughly three million Android users have downloaded and installed malicious Minecraft apps to their smartphone devices for the past few months.
Antivirus and security firm, ESET, researchers uncovered a troubling 33 phony “scareware” applications live in the Google Play Store, and have been active over the past nine months, posing as a Minecraft cheat and tip guides.
The firm revealed these malicious applications had been installed on roughly 660,000 to 2.8 million Android devices. Several individual applications had racked several hundreds of thousands of installs.
“All of the discovered apps were fake in that they did not contain any of the promised functionality and only displayed banners that tried to trick users into believing that their Android system is infected with a dangerous virus,” said Lukas Stefanko, an ESET security researcher in a blog post last Friday.
Stefanko said once the app is downloaded, the malicious MineCraft apps trick victims into believing their Android smartphone has been infected with a virus. The alert allows victims an option to remove the fictitious virus from the device, stating that if you insert your mobile number you can remove the virus for free, while simultaneously signing victims up to a premium-rate SMS subscription service that will run users around $5.27 per week, totaling to around $270 per year.
Once the virus infects the device, a text appearing to be an anti-virus activation code messages the device, giving a link and alleged code to scan your device from a reputable anti-virus vendor such as G-Data.
Researchers say victims who installed the malicious Minecraft app believed it was genuine since they were able to download and install it via the Google Play Store. Further aiding users belief that the application was real, as it eliminating the need to visit shady 3rd-party sites.
ESET identified all the thirty three scareware applications to be written by the same developer, but were published under different names and icons throughout the Google store. “They were uploaded to the Play store by different developer accounts, but we assume that these were all created by one person,” Stefanko said speaking on the apps.
ESET has since reported the malicious Minecraft apps to Google Play and the company have since removed the faulty apps from the market. However, researchers believe you can protect yourself from falling victim to similar attacks in the future by running a trusted anti-virus software on your smartphone and by not installing applications from unknown sources, not that this would have applied in this recent case.
This is not the first, and presumably not the last time Google Play Store has been caught distributing malware-laden applications. Google’s Android market has had a long history of fake and malicious applications, including the longstanding #1 anti-virus app charging $4.99 to do absolutely nothing.
However, the internet giant has been working to mitigate the issue and enhance the quality of apps in the Google Play Store by making use of a bot to automatically scan apps and accurately identify malware. Google’s scanner has shown a significant improvements in detections, catching up to 40 percent of apps since 2011. Though, Google has since mitigated the issue entirely, pushing all apps to be manually reviewed by Play Store staffers through an app submission portal.
[Photo via DS.FR/Flickr [CC BY 2.0]]One hundred million people can’t be wrong about marketing with Pinterest. Or we all have major addictions.
People are visual by nature.
Proof of that is watching Pinterest’s audience and users reach sky high numbers year after year. Pinterest is the 2nd largest search engine not owned by Google!
*this post contains affiliate links, please read my disclosure for more information
When we see information along with something that is visually appealing, it sticks in our brains better. Get creative, make some engaging images with information that helps your visitors or clients and then start pinning to make your business thrive. Learn the strategies that will help to increase your traffic and sales by marketing with Pinterest.
And the 10 easy steps:
Create infographics and pin them. Comment on pins. You can comment if you want too. However, it is stated more and more often that Pinterest is a search engine, not a social media platform. If you want to commen and communicate as a way of marketing with Pinterest, you can. Just know that it’s not the most effective use of your time. Don’t post affiliate links. It’s a no-no. This is no longer off limits. Just be sure to check the rules and stipulations for the affiliate program you are using. If you want to drive traffic to your affiliate link, then blog about it. Pin something that takes traffic to that blog post (this is still a great way to generate affiliate income because you are establishing trust!). Create blog posts that have images that appeal to your audience. Pin those. Pin things about your business, but be a human behind that business. Add keywords to your boards and pins. Be consistent with it. Using Pinterest is a way of marketing and SEO matters. Diversify your boards. That’s part of being human too. Show your personal interests. Be active. Share others pins. Don’t just focus on your business pins. Don’t be boring. Or a pusher. Be yourself…because that is interesting. Try making your pins interactive. Ask a question. Create a poll. Do something that engages your audience.
There you have it. See! Easy peasy steps to marketing with Pinterest. You might as well…you know you are one of those 100 million that are addicted to it anyway. I know I am!
Maybe Pinterest isn’t really your thing, or it’s overwhelming to think about adding something new to your already long “to-do” list. Start with the basics and learn as you go.
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3 Ways a Pinterest Virtual Assistant Can Help Grow Your BusinessRepublican presidential candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, left, and Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., look to the crowd at a break during the Fox Business Network Republican presidential debate at the North Charleston Coliseum, Thursday, Jan. 14, 2016, in North Charleston, S.C. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)[/caption]
We reported earlier in the week on how John Kasich’s epic incompetence resulted in him not getting enough real signatures of actual humans to qualify for the Pennsylvania ballot. A Rubio supporter filed a lawsuit. Last Thursday, Kasich’s campaign stipulated in court that it didn’t have enough signatures but tried to convince the judge that he should consider the end of the day as 5pm rather than midnight and, therefore, the lawsuit was filed too late.
Sensing that was not a great legal strategy, what with the length of the day being established, Kasich has fallen back on Plan B: begging:
John Kasich’s presidential campaign called on Marco Rubio to tell his supporters in Pennsylvania to drop a lawsuit that could keep the Ohio governor off the ballot for the state’s April 26 primary. Nathaniel Rome, chairman of Pennsylvania Students for Rubio, filed a petition in Pennsylvania court to keep Kasich off the ballot, since he failed to garner the requisite number of signatures to be added. Rome’s lawyer is John Bravacos, the brother of Chris Bravacos, who is chairman of Rubio’s Pennsylvania campaign. “Senator Rubio should tell his people to drop this suit and to have his super-PAC quit attacking John Kasich in Florida,” Kasich campaign spokesman Rob Nichols told Bloomberg Politics.
Mind you, this comes only a couple of days after Kasich told Rubio to FOAD when offered help in Ohio
Kasich spox Rob Nichols on Rubio news: "We were going to win in OH without his help, just as he's going to lose in FL w/o ours" — Kathleen Ronayne (@kronayne) March 11, 2016
Or, more succinctly:
Kasich to Rubio: "screw off. And also can you help me out?"https://t.co/vAnCI20x6t https://t.co/p4gBmA7SM9 — Brian Faughnan (@BrianFaughnan) March 13, 2016
If Rubio cares about the GOP he should not pressure his supporters to drop their lawsuit. Rubio is going to be out of the race this coming week, either de facto or in all but name. Kasich’s only value to the GOP this cycle is a) winning Ohio on Tuesday and b) carrying Ohio for the GOP nominee in November. Blocking him from Pennsylvania will hasten his withdrawal and make this a two man race very quickly. And that is what we need.Buy Photo An Amtrak passenger train is parked on the platform at Union Station on Jan. 7, 2014, after it was stopped en route from Cincinnati to Chicago. Indiana officials announced that they couldn’t reach an agreement with Amtrak to save the Hoosier State line, which will end in April 2015. (Photo: Joe Vitti/The Star 2014 file photo)Buy Photo Story Highlights INDOT blames federal rules for making train too expensive to operate.
The financially troubled and passenger-starved Amtrak Hoosier State line is being shut down.
The Indiana Department of Transportation said it failed to reach an agreement with Amtrak and Iowa Pacific Holdings that would keep the train running. The last day for the Hoosier State line will be April 1.
INDOT blamed the Federal Railroad Administration for burdensome regulations that require states with routes of less than 750 miles to effectively act as rail carriers.
"Requiring a redundant layer of bureaucracy would not create improvements in passenger rail service or safety, it would only increase taxpayer costs," said INDOT Commissioner Karl Browning in a prepared statement. "Passenger rail providers and the host railroads are already required to comply with FRA rules."
In 2008, Congress voted to end funding for Amtrak routes of less than 750 miles.
The Hoosier State runs from Indianapolis to Chicago with four stops in between four days a week. For the last year, INDOT has split the cost of operations with the Indiana cities it serves: Indianapolis, Crawfordsville, Lafayette, Rensselaer and Dyer.
Amtrak's Cardinal line from Chicago to New York City will trace the same route southward three days a week and will still make stops in Indianapolis before heading east.
INDOT was in talks with Amtrak to operate the trains and Iowa Pacific to supply the cars.
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But Browning said federal rules imposed on Indiana would have been too costly to keep the train running.
They include:
Liability of up to $200 million for injury, death or property damage on the railroad.
Hiring staff to monitor plans and programs to comply with federal rules.
Making state employees rail workers subject to expensive retirement and employer liability rules and limits.
Call Star reporter John Tuohy at (317)-444-6418 and follow on Twitter @john Tuohy.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1BP8kXoAs the weather gets colder, your lip color should be getting darker, giving you the mysterious brooding look of a woman who doesn’t tolerate any shit from her goblin minions. Whether you’re looking to command attention in the office or turn heads at the bar, these deep lipstick shades will have people saying, “Wow, that woman looks like a total sorceress who’s had it with goblins.”
‘Oxblood’ Lip Velvet Lipstick (Burberry, $34)
This deep burgundy lipstick is luxurious and long-lasting to give you a dark, matte lip that’ll have people cowering when you get near. When you tell your girlfriends the shade of the lip color is “oxblood,” anyone who overhears will think you’re talking about ingredients for a spell. You actually came to this bar to blow off steam since Stephen ghosted you, but swipe this lipstick on and you’ll suddenly look like a sorceress who is more than powerful—she’s also fed up with foolish goblins.
‘Damned’ Liquid Lipstick (Kat Von D, $20)
This ominously titled lip color is a creamy black cherry color that makes you look like a powerful witch who can do magic and fantasy mischief. Pull this lipstick out when you need the foolish goblins and ghouls in your life to get the fuck out of your way. Sure, those are just the dolts from accounting who crowd around the toaster oven when you have a bagel that needs crisping, but they’re goblins to you. Strut into the office kitchen and watch them shrink away and flee.
‘Liv’ Audacious Lipstick (NARS, $32)
This deep aubergine lipstick is super saturated to strike fear into any remaining goblins who think you might take shit today. One layer of this color and you’ll go from girl-next-door to witch-who-looks-like-she’s-touched-toads. This is the exact color to wear when you’re going over to your man’s house and don’t want to leave without a promise of exclusivity in the relationship. He’ll take one look at your dark, witchy lips and think, “Damn, that bitch knows sorcery and I’m a foolish hobgoblin.”
‘Plum Role’ Be Legendary Lipstick (Smashbox, $21)
Ready to cast ugly, elfish dullards from your life? Then you better put on this deep plum lip shade and before you know it, the world will know that you’re sick of the goblins who get in your way. Pair this with an equally dark lip liner and you’ll look like a sorceress who eats goblins and dicks for breakfast. Anyone who gets in your way better beware! Yes, even your creepy landlord!
A dark lip color is more than just a style choice; it’s a message to the world that you’re not going to take any shit. Put on any of these four dark shades and get ready for people to look at you in a whole new light—the light of a supernatural woman who is tired of meddling goblins.The practice of withholding drugs was widespread in the United States and other countries from the 1940's until at least the late 1970's. In one survey of medical literature, 77 percent of all the newborns who underwent surgery throughout the world between 1954 and 1983 to repair a serious blood vessel defect called patent ductus arteriosus received only muscle relaxants or relaxants plus intermittent nitrous oxide.
The picture is changing rapidly. Most American hospitals are now believed to give anesthesia for major surgery. But some anesthesiologists are said to persist in the old ways, and many hospitals still decline to give even a local anesthetic for minor procedures such as circumcision.
The failure to relieve pain was a ''barbarous'' and ''nasty business'', according of Dr. John W. Scanlon, director of neonatology at the Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington.
Few other experts would put it so harshly. But a joint policy statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics in September and approved by the American Society of Anesthesiologists the following month cited ''an increasing body of evidence |
think this kit is great for beginners, or those that do not want to fuss with putting together their own kit. It could be used for a variety of applications, not only just crevasse rescue. I found that it was simple to use and set up and I'll definitely be using this on a variety of alpine climbs this year.Update: Largely along party lines, a move that would have derailed the bill was defeated by a vote of 247 to 187.
House Republicans are making one last effort to block the Democrats’ health care legislation. The chamber is packed, with staff members lining the inside walls.
The Republican whip, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, has said the magic words: “I have a motion to recommit at the desk.”
The speaker pro tempore, Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, has just confirmed that Mr. Cantor opposes the legislation, which is prerequisite for seeking to recommit a bill.
“Any physician in America will tell you that the simplest way to reduce health care costs is to enact real medical liability reform,” Mr. Cantor said.
A motion to recommit essentially seeks to block a vote on a bill by sending it back for changes. But its real purpose is to stall, if not kill, a measure. Motions to recommit are often politically devious, carefully designed to bait members of the majority to vote in favor of it.
Often a vote against a motion to recommit can be construed in ways that would benefit political opponents.
House Republicans are describing their motion as seeking limits to medical malpractice lawsuits and as protecting elderly Americans from cuts in Medicare spending.
Although they may later be accused of supporting trial lawyers by blocking medical malpractice reform and of voting against senior citizens by supporting spending cuts in Medicare, the Democrats are unlikely to take the bait.
A vote is imminent.
But already Democrats are hitting back. Representative Bruce L. Braley, Democrat of Iowa, is accusing the Republicans of not standing up for patients’ rights.
A Republican alternative bill was rejected 258 to 175. Representative Timothy Johnson of Illinois was the only Republican to vote against his party’s plan. Here’s the vote breakdown.Members of the U.S. military lead the New England Patriots onto the field ahead of the start of the NFL Super Bowl XLIX football game against the Seattle Seahawks in Glendale, Arizona February 1, 2015. Reuters The NFL reportedly accepted millions of dollars from the defense department over the course of three years in exchange for honoring troops and veterans before games, the New Jersey Star Ledger reports.
The Pentagon reportedly signed contracts with 14 NFL teams — including the New York Jets, the Indianapolis Colts and the Baltimore Ravens — between 2011-2012 stipulating that teams would be paid sums ranging from $60,000-$1 million each (in federal taxpayer money) to pause before the start of games and salute the city's "hometown heroes," according to nj.com.
Agreements also include advertising on stadium screens and sideline 'Coaches Club' seats for soldiers.
Congress and the President recently imposed strict caps on military spending as part of an austere new budget.
The military has defended the funding it provides to the NFL, stating that it is an effective recruitment tool for soldiers.
"Promoting and increasing the public's understanding and appreciation of military service in the New Jersey Army National Guard increases the propensity for service in our ranks," National Guard spokesman Patrick Daugherty told nj.com, referring to the $377,000 the Jets received from the Jersey Guard between 2011-2014.
Members of the Seattle Seahawks run onto the field during ceremonies honoring veterans prior to the game against the New York Jets at CenturyLink Field on November 11, 2012 in Seattle, Washington. Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images Other teams that received taxpayer funds include the Cincinnati Bengals ($138,960) Cleveland Browns ($22,500), the Green Bay Packers ($600,000), Pittsburgh Steelers, ($36,000) Minnesota Vikings ($605,000), Atlanta Falcons ($1,049,500), Buffalo Bills ($679,000), Dallas Cowboys ($62,500), Miami Dolphins ($20,000), and St. Louis Rams ($60,000), according to a nj.com breakdown.
New Jersey senator Joe Pennachhio has since called for the teams to donate the money to charity.
"If these teams want to really honor our veterans and service members they should be making these patriotic overtures out of gratitude for free," Pennachhio told nj.com. "And the millions of dollars that have already been billed to taxpayers should be donated to veterans' organizations."
The payments are being criticized by some who say that the practice is not only unethical, but also hypocritical — citing a renewed focus on integrity and transparency, the NFL fined the New England Patriots $1 million and suspended Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for the team's alleged role in deflating footballs before games.
Many fans are aware that the NFL is a leading recruitment tool for the military — the National Guard advertisements displayed on stadium screens are clearly sponsored content.
But few fans know that the defense department is funneling taxpayer money into the NFL in exchange for veteran tributes.
"The public believes they're doing it as a public service or a sense of patriotism," U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) told the Star Ledger. "It leaves a bad taste in your mouth."Arnold Schwarzenegger has added climate change advocate to his resume.
The actor and former California governor has been selected by the French government to join Nobel Peace Prize winners, U.N. secretary generals and Pope Francis to advocate on behalf of the environment ahead of the U.N. climate change meeting in Paris in December.
“I’ve starred in a lot of science fiction movies and, let me tell you something, climate change is not science fiction, this is a battle in the real world, it is impacting us right now,” Schwarzenegger said on Tuesday at the first “summit of conscience for the climate.”
Schwarzenegger addressed an audience that included spiritual leaders from many religions, as well as climate change experts.
“I believe the science is in. The debate is over and the time for action is now,” Schwarzenegger continued. “This is bigger than any movie, this is the challenge of our time. And it is our responsibility to leave this world a better place than we found it, but right now we are failing future generations.”
Write to Tanya Basu at [email protected] Idiots at HIP December 2, 2008
New York, N.Y.
Because I'm self-employed, I pay for my own health insurance and I get it through an HMO called HIP, also known as HIP Health Plan of New York, an EmblemHealth company. My current monthly premium is $568.55, which I understand from my self-employed friends is not too bad.
But yesterday evening I opened a letter from Charles Mellia, Managing Director of Customer Service, informing me that my new monthly rate effective January 1, 2009 will be (deep breath) $1,453.04, representing an increase of over 150%.
Naturally this threw me into a state of total anguish. I quickly calculated that next year I would have to come up with more than $10,000 of additional income to pay for this rate increase. No, no! More than that! Because I'm not an incorporated business, I can't deduct my health insurance from my federal, state, and city income tax calculations, so the additional income I'll need is actually closer to $15,000.
And with this anguish came more anguish: Anguish over my plummetting income, anguish over book sales that plateau at 4,000 copies, anguish over my inability to get a decent book contract, anguish over my inability to get other work, etc, etc. Everything just piled up on top of everything else.
It wasn't a pleasant evening. Deirdre was at a class, and I couldn't talk to anybody at HIP because it was after hours and nobody was there.
Eventually I calmed down. I knew from past experience that the people at HIP are not too good with numbers, and they've done idiotic things in the past. A few years ago I changed my premium billing from semi-annually to monthly, and of course they screwed that up, and I had to spend some time on the phone walking them through the calculation.
Moreover, my years working at New York Life Insurance Company, mostly in Individual Health Insurance product development, resulted in my becoming very familiar with the New York State Insurance Department. I even took a business trip to the department in Albany one year. I knew they would never approve a rate increase of 150%.
I also did some Google searches for people expressing outrage that HIP had increased their premiums 150%, and I couldn't find anything. I became more convinced than ever this letter was just some typical stupid idiotic mistake.
This morning I called HIP again, and I was promptly connected to a "representative," and when I expressed my surprise at getting a rate increase of 150% I was assured that it was indeed correct and the increase was necessary because "we're in a recession." (Interesting that the letters were sent out before the official pronouncement of the recession.)
By this time, however, I was so convinced the letter was wrong, I wondered if my "representative" really understood what 150% meant. Lots of people — not just HIP employees — don't understand percentages, so I started quoting the actual numbers: $568.55 this year and up to $1,453.04 next year. "That's almost $900 more per month," I said, and finally he excused himself and I was on hold for ten minutes.
When he returned, he acknowledged that "those letters had gone out by mistake." My actual monthly premium next year would be $653.83, an increase of only 15%.
The idiots at HIP are supposed to be in the health care business, but how is receiving a notice of a premium increase of 150% good for my health? I lost several hours of my life in anguish over this thing, more time this morning on the telephone, and more time writing this blog entry to get the whole thing out of my system.
I emerged comparatively unscathed but I can easily imagine people reading such a letter from Charles Mellia, Managing Director of Customer Service, and keeling over on the spot.
Their death certificates would probably indicate "heart attack" but that wouldn't be the real cause of death, would it?A probably unpopular take on the return of the female redhead who challenges our parliament and how we see ourselves as Australians.
Ms Hanson would have got in anyway. The changes to the senate rules didn’t make her return any more likely. What made it inevitable was the failed economic and social policies of state and federal governments that led the same anti-modern voters who elected Ms Hanson 20 years ago to come full circle.
Brief History
After Ms Hanson was ‘betrayed’ by her own party apparatchiks, these voters tried minor parties. They muddled about trying to find a voice that reflected their own thoughts. Suddenly Tony Abbott gave them true hope that Australia would return to the halcyon and mythical days of the 1950’s, when men were Men… and White. Then he got the sack, and was replaced with an urbane do-nothing who was completely clueless about what was going on below the executive floor, let alone at the bar in the country pub.
The last few months under Turnbull gave voters time to think. Time to realise that maybe they’d been conned. For years, many of these voters have bought the ‘aspirational’ market-will-provide line trotted out by the LNP… It’s only recently that people are actually figuring out that trickle-down doesn’t work; but don’t yet understand what happened. People voted to stop the boats, and then lost the farm.
This time, just as last time, Pauline Hanson has attracted groups with an axe to grind. The Socialist Alliance, Animal Justice Party, and other groups on the Left are just as guilty of this sin. It should not call into question the legitimacy of Ms Hanson as a representative, or the legitimacy of those who voted for her.
E-con 101
We are in the midst of another labour-force revolution, coupled with major shifts in social identity. Types and terms of employment are in flux; and so far, no one has any clear answers on how we can transition from where we are into the future. That scares most people. For people who have missed out on a promised life of stability; and who feel marginalised and under siege by changing labour, cultural and social norms, it is terrifying.
Hanson appeals to people who cannot cope with contemporary life, let alone the future; different cultures or skin colour are not really the issue. When pressed only the true believers have problems with race and sexuality. For the majority, those things are an obvious symptom that they can use to define their position. The real problems come from change, from different ways of thinking, the rise of technology and change in labour, the shifting sands of meaning, being unable to trust the local newspaper (if you still have one).
If you read the One Nation website, it is an almost incoherent rant. It is filled with the confused and bitter ramblings of everyday people, who have no comprehension of the policy and economics that have led to their current condition. This is a group of people who have no particular political, economic or social ideology. They thought our society was still based on the True-Blue, Fair-Go, rustic simplicity represented by the 1950s. Now they have awoken post GFC to discover that the new century is a complex and frightening place, and they want someone to blame.
We need to accept, despite how they express their concerns; people do have valid reasons to be concerned. In the last 20 years Australia has become one of the least protected markets in the world. However, the prosperity promised as result of these changes never arrived. Instead services and businesses have shrunk and vanished. Lives have been whittled away by neo-liberal economics and globalisation from the Right; and shifts in worldview and social justice from the Left. This is a group of people who are no longer at the centre of Australia’s life, and they have been left to fend for themselves without any help to transition or understand the change. They feel justifiably marginalised…
…as an intermission, I suggest you all take a moment to watch THIS and then come back.
Peoples is People
Supporters of Ms Hanson don’t see themselves as racist or homophobic; just as their mirrors on the Left probably don’t see themselves as social fascists. They are just humans who are uncomfortable with diversity, and don’t know how to express themselves. The intellectual Left has had decades sitting in ivory towers to reform language to accommodate diversity. For most in regional Australia or outer city suburbs, casual sexism and racism is a way of demonstrating affection. Labelling a person as racist, sexist or homophobic doesn’t make them so, it only shames… and then angers them. But, again, they do not know how to express their confusion. Pauline Hanson gives them voice. She is representative of the views of thousands of Australians. The difference is that she is happy to take money from David Koch to air these grievances in public, rather than just bitching into a pot of Four X.
These Australians (and they exist on the Left as well) don’t care about facts, they just know how they feel. They don’t want to think about consequences, or geopolitics, or climate change, or complexity; they want things to be simple, and they don’t want to have to change. They don’t want to think about policy, they just want government to take care of them; and they will give their vote to anyone who promises to do that. Last election it was Tony, this time it’s Pauline.
The saddest thing about all this reaction to Ms Hanson, is that it didn’t have to be this way. Pro-environment sentiment in the bush is at an all-time high. The Greens candidate Jeremy Buckingham has large support for his pro-farm stance. The Greens and ALP could have gone into the regions and actually spoken to these people.
If they had heard their grievances, and took them seriously enough to have the lengthy conversations needed to bring understanding, then the past two elections would have been very different.
A classic example of this is renewable energy. Regional and outer suburban manufacturing is collapsing. Ironically, if a ‘jobs and growth’ argument for renewable energy and action on climate change had been prosecuted more effectively, it’s likely we would be a lot further along to reaching our emissions target. Instead we are facing the prospect of a Royal Commission into climate science. All because no one bothered to address the dog-whistling from the Liberals, and actually explain the issues and opportunities.
The shrill and uncompromising front presented by angry voters is just that; a front. However, while anti-corporate ranting is accepted without question; too often intellectual and urbane progressives have not bothered to engage with the people Ms Hanson represents, purely because of their views on social policy.
Which is unfortunate, as those views are rarely concrete, and more often simple, easy targets for confusion and anger: It’s a lot easier to blame an immigrant (or a corporation) than unravel the economic and policy choices responsible for ones current state. If anyone took the time to talk, they’d find reasonable, if uninformed people who are willing to give up acting on social prejudice for better work opportunities and better services.
As seen by the non-partisan cooperation between progressive greens groups and conservative farmers in the Liverpool plains or The Great Barrier Reef, on many levels Ms Hanson’s supporters are natural allies against the destructive aspects of corporate neo-liberalism. If the socially and economically just future we all claim to wish for is to become a reality, complaining about Pauline Hanson isn’t going to help.
If the elections of 2010 and 2013 should have taught us anything, it is that mud-slinging and ignoring citizens only further fractures our society; with serious deleterious effects on our economy, civil society and democracy. If progressive, intellectual, inclusive citizens are truly concerned about what’s happening in regional Australia; then they need to stop criticising and start having conversations.
Will you have to swallow your own prejudices? Yes.
Will you have to work with people you do not like? Yes.
Will it be hard work?
Yes, democracy is hard work; anyone who tells you different is selling something.
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MoreIn the course of researching an article about Albert Pujols, I looked at measuring a hitter’s “decision-making” skills at the plate. Some great work on the topic was done years ago by the great Russell “Pizza Cutter” Carleton (who now writes at Baseball Prospectus), and I’m not adding to the research except by updating it. (The Hardball Times’ Derek Carty also wrote on this topic many years ago.)
Basically, Russell’s idea was to apply signal-detection theory to baseball by measuring a hitter’s ability to discern balls and strikes compared to pitch-tracking systems such as PITCHf/x. If the PITCHf/x strike zone says a pitch was a ball, but the player swung at it, that’s akin to a “false positive” — the player thought the pitch was in the strike zone when it wasn’t. If PITCHf/x says a ball was in the zone, but the batter didn’t swing, that’s a “false negative” — a hittable ball disregarded by the player. (Of course, swinging at a ball in the zone, or taking a pitch outside the zone, would be coded as correct decisions by the batter.)
This is all theoretical and a gross oversimplification of baseball in general. For instance, sometimes players have a good reason to lay off a pitch in the zone, and, conversely, sometimes they have to expand their strike zone because of the situation. Even so, it’s a fun application of the “Plate Discipline” section of stats at FanGraphs, which lists the percentages of pitches that were in the strike zone for each player, as well as the proportion of pitches swung at inside and outside the strike zone (as determined by Baseball Info Solutions‘ pitch-charting data, which goes back to 2002).
The best decision-making season in the data set belongs to Moises Alou in 2002. Alou faced 1,785 pitches, 54.5 percent of which were in the strike zone. Of those pitches in the zone, he swung at 80.1 percent, while he let all but 14.8 percent of balls outside the zone go by without a swing. As a percentage of his total pitches faced, then, Alou made the “correct” decision 82.4 percent of the time — the tops of any season in the FanGraphs data.
(I, too, was surprised that Vladimir Guerrero would should up as a positive example of plate discipline.)
Meanwhile, the worst decision-making season happened last year; A.J. Pierzynski spent the season swinging. Pierzynski correctly swung at 76.7 percent of pitches inside the zone (the Major League Baseball average was 65.5 percent), but he was undone by his hacking of 49.6 percent of balls outside the strike zone — about 1.6 times the rate of the average hitter. That gave him a “good decision” rate of just 61.1 percent. (For what it’s worth, no qualified season in the FanGraphs data saw a hitter swing more at pitches outside the zone than inside.)
Among active players, the best decision-maker by this metric (since 2012) is Dexter Fowler of the Houston Astros. Over the past three seasons, Fowler has made the correct decision 74.2 percent of the time, swinging at 71.9 percent of balls in the strike zone and laying off 75.9 percent of pitches outside the zone.
And the worst? Martin Prado of the Arizona Diamondbacks made the correct call on only 62 percent of the pitches he faced. But unlike Pierzynski, who had the worst decision-making season of anyone since 2002 because he hacked too much at pitches outside the zone, Prado comes in last among active players because he wasn’t aggressive enough on pitches inside the zone. The average MLB player offers at about 66 percent of pitches inside the strike zone, but Prado has only swung at 50.8 percent of balls in the zone over the past three seasons. Prado does a good job at avoiding swings on balls outside the zone, but he can’t seem to tell when a hittable ball is coming in over the plate, often committing what statisticians would call false negatives, or Type II errors.
Again, this metric is by no means a perfect gauge of plate discipline. There are many situations in which it would be a suboptimal strategy to strictly follow the “good” or “bad” decision algorithm measured by the charts above. But it’s illuminating to begin to measure which players appear to have the best and worst conceptions of the strike zone as determined by an objective standard.A new law that protects South Dakotans from Iowa traffic camera tickets is raising the ire of law enforcement officials in Sioux City and questions in Des Moines.
Tracking the News
WHAT WE KNEW: South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard in March signed into law a bill prohibiting his state from enforcing camera-generated traffic fines from other states. Some South Dakota vehicle owners have received tickets generated by unmanned cameras in Sioux City.
WHAT'S NEW: South Dakota Sen. Dan Lederman said Iowa officials are wrong to criticize the law, which has drawn national attention, and that other states should pass laws restricting the cameras.
WHAT'S NEXT: The law takes effect July 1. Meanwhile, the city of Sioux City is compiling information to comply with new Iowa Department of Transportation rules governing placement of traffic cameras by May 1, while waiting for a court decision on its petition to have the rules thrown out.SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Hot on the heels of the Rogue One trailer premiere, we sent one of our most trusted spies to infiltrate the production team at Lucasfilm. Our source was able to share some key details regarding the Star Wars Story that connect the first anthology film to not only A New Hope and the original trilogy, but also The Force Awakens and the sequel trilogy. Read on for more but beware the spoilers!
We are getting Vader and a small scene of hologram Palps, Ian McDiarmid signed on.
Mads Mikkelsen is Commander San Tekka.
Ben Mendelsohn is Fleet Admiral Snoke.
San Tekka goes off deep end becomes Force religious fanatic as Snoke delves deeper into dark side discovering he has that power.
They’re on the same side but San Tekka leaves Snoke for dead in final scene as their ship goes down as he thinks Snoke is too evil to continue living.
San Tekka changes sides as he sees the Empire is evil and dedicates himself to the the Church of the Force and the Rebels, awaiting the return of the Jedi to the galaxy.
Snoke is scarred and comatose. He is put into medical capsule by Vader and kept on ice. He awakens years later when the Emperor dies and is possessed by his spirit.
Jyn ends up with Luke after ROTJ and gives birth to Rey.
San Tekka kept eye on Rey from afar on Jakku, after Luke puts her there for safety after Ben Solo falls to Snoke.
Take this with a grain of salt folks as we enter true spoiler season for Rogue One as we get ever so closer to the release date in December. Let us know what you think the comments below or in our message board.
-William “Willybobo” Bobo
Please follow and like Faking Star Wars:The Illuminati and COMMUNISM!
by Ray Novosel
THE ILLUMINATI
History records that on May 1, 1776, Dr. Adam Weishaupt founded the Bavarian Order of the ILLUMINATI. Weishaupt was a Professor of Jewish Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, Germany. He was born to Jewish parents and later “converted” or more correctly, “infiltrated” Roman Catholicism. He became a high-ranking member of The Order Of The Jesuits, whom he subsequently left to form his very own organization at the clear behest of the newly formed “House Of Rothschild.”
It was the Jewish Weishaupt's belief that only a chosen few could qualify for enough "illumination" to guide and rule the world. The problem was, where could he find enough intellectual “light bearers” to start the ball rolling? He subsequently found them in various lodges and orders of the day, such as the various Masonic lodges, the Rosicrucian Order and other legitimate and sincere orders of antiquity. This is confirmed yet again by Edith Starr-Miller in her classic, “Occult Theocracy:” “As the organization of the Illuminati developed, so did its ambitions, which ended in a plot to subvert Freemasonry to its aim of world domination by any and all means ……. After obtaining control of certain Masonic Lodges, Weishaupt and his associates recklessly vaunted their growing power.”
But all this didn't happen without reprisal. Many members of the lodges and various orders, realising that they and their harmless societies and organizations had been duly infiltrated, warned Weishaupt to discontinue his activities. Fortunately for Weishaupt, Thomas Jefferson, in 1784, had recently been named the United States Ambassador to France. Jefferson, an avowed Mason, favoured Weishaupt's “New Order” and became sympathetic to his cause. This “New Order” was now guaranteed to continue, where it eventually dominated all others and became known as the “Order of the Illuminati.”
While casually flicking through Edith Starr-Miller’s classic “Occult Theocracy” recently, I noticed that the author clearly reveals an interesting Jesuit/Jewish link - where the third General of the Jesuits, after its Spanish founder Inigo de Loyala, was that of a Belgian Jew named Eberhard Mercurian. He held the title for 7 years between 1573 to 1580 and would no doubt have had a significant and consequential Judaising influence on the Jesuit order, and hence upon the Roman Catholic Church. On P313 she writes: “From the Jesuit College at Ingolstadt in 1776 is said to have issued the sect known as ‘The Illuminati of Bavaria’ founded by Adam Weishaupt, its nominal founder.” In fact, some of the most influential Jesuits in history, such as Francisco Ribera and Emanuel Lacunza were Jews. Seeing that many of the Jesuit doctrines are similar to those found in the Babylonian Talmud, is it possible that the RCC is simply another “Agent Provocateur” that the Pharisaic serpents have used yet again to Paganise and destroy true Christianity through the vain ‘traditions of men?”
The Illuminati, under the renegade Weishaupt, gradually became an openly destructive Luciferic society, with everything in its doctrines and rituals the exact antithesis of Christianity. It begins by enticing its victim into the first few initial degrees by the most beautiful altruistic and fraternal ideals and noble aspirations possible. However it gradually and almost imperceptively weaves a net of murderous Satanism as it descends into the higher degrees.
Weishaupt wanted a deistic republic of truly global dimensions, even if it brought about violent worldwide revolution and rivers of blood. His “benevolent dictatorship” had six main points dealing with the abolition of:
1. Ordered or nationalistic governments in the form of monarchies.
2. Private property.
3. Inheritance rights.
4. Patriotism to nationalist causes.
5. Social order in families, sexual prohibition laws and all moral codes.
6. All religious disciplines based on faith in a living God, as opposed to faith in nature, man and reason.
(It’s interesting that this is almost word-for-word from Karl Marx’s THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO and that these six points are also perfectly consistent with the Protocols in general, once again proving their legitimacy).
Karl Marx, the Jewish radical who inspired Lenin and Trotsky with his communist theories, was secretly a High Priest of Satan (see Richard Wurmbrand's book, Marx and Satan ). Shown here in his official portrait, Marx is giving an enigmatic Masonic hand sign (see Richardson's Monitor of Freemasonry
ILLUMINISTS MARX AND FREUD
History records that "Karl" Moses Mordecai Marx Levy (1818-1883) was born on May 5, 1818, in the city of Trier in the Rhine Province of Prussia (now Germany). His mother, Herietta Pressburg, was from Holland and like Karl's father, was Jewish and also a descendent of a long line of rabbi's. Marxists view the family as the primary obstacle to dismantling nation-states and thus establishing a collectivist Utopia. The social and political health of a nation-state is inversely proportional to the degree of racial, lingual, and religious diversity within it. In other words, the greater the “diversity” in a nation-state the less stable and enduring it is - a principle well understood by Communists everywhere. Marxism is less an economic theory, than it is a state of mind from which certain theories and practices have evolved. This state of mind is maternal and group-centered, and includes the view that Man's natural state is collectivist, or communal. Individual needs and wants must be subjugated to the needs of the community or state - to the needs of a borderless world or “Global Village.”
In 1841, Moses Hess, brought Marx into a society called the League of the Just, and taught him collectivist ideologies. Hess wrote: “Dr. Marx, that is the name of my idol, is still a very young man who will give medieval religion and politics their death blow....” [The portable Karl Marx, page 22] George Jung, another friend of Marx, wrote in the same year: “Marx will surely chase God from His heaven, and will even sue Him.” [Mystery 666, page 144]
Bukharin, one of Marx's associates in the First International, was an anarchist and by all accounts, an ardent Satanist. He wrote: “Satan is the first free thinker and saviour of the world. He frees Adam and impresses the seal of humanity and liberty on his forehead, by making him disobedient.” Thus in 1917, when the second revolution took place and the Bolshevik government came to power in Russia, the hand that led the people may have been the hand of Lenin, with the words of Karl Marx, but the voice was unmistakably that of Satan.
In Marxism, society's past needs to be repaired. In the psychobabble nonsense of Freudianism, individual pasts need to be repaired. In both worlds, these god-like Jewish thinkers believed that their deity hides things necessary for human perfection from all men from the beginning of time and that only through “extrication” of society (Marx) and of the unconscious mind (Freud) could the reality of the forbidden fruit of “perfection” be achieved. Thus, both philosophers failed to extricate themselves from their own kin’s perversion of history in forging their ideas. So, instead of creating new sciences of economics and psychology based on a confirmed reality, Marx and Freud simply believed in their own vanities and mixed in some excerpts of the Talmudic World View they grew up with, blending them with subjective observations of a fabricated history to produce a “New Eden” for their gullible and largely neurotic clients.
By applying their Jewish religious learning into Talmudic ways of thinking, Marx and Freud cleverly destroyed the objective principles of Christianity into which the world had been gradually evolving for centuries. Caught between the primary conflict of a finite Christian morality together with common-sense Biblical ethics - versus the Judeo acceptance and promotion of deviation in all areas of life, both Marx and Freud committed the world to violent upheaval and dangerous hazards, the results of which have been utterly catastrophic with their full consequences yet to be revealed. Conflicts which from the creation of Adam until today, have been the result of man’s ambition to make himself equal with God, or like Nietzsche, to create God in his own image, or to proclaim, like Marx and Ben-Gurion, that there is no God and therefore man has no further need for moral laws.
Man thus demonstrates his disdain by propagating ideas of complete freedom from conscience, and to think and act in absolute disregard and opposition to all the well established and necessary/commonsense laws required for the maintenance of decent civil, moral and natural order. This has resulted in the environmental catastrophe, and global chaos we see all around us. Rebellious, self-glorifying ideas, which invariably lead to the mass worship of devilish leaders who advocate these insane theories and who, unfortunately, are keenly followed by the unthinking masses who are either stupid, shy or too proud to announce that the king really does have no clothes.
PSYCHIATRY AS RELIGION
The religion of psychiatry is mainly defined as related to human behavior and the brain, thus excluding the spirit or soul of man, even though “psych” means soul. Through this denial of the soul, psychiatry and all its associated evils, such as “psycho-therapy” are destroying the spirit of man and has become a powerful and respectable cult. With this failure to address the soul, psychiatry has no alternative but to view human beings as merely animals that can be trained. As a result, psychiatry has developed methods that can only be interpreted as a subtle form of brainwashing. This indoctrination has been so sweetly packaged that we barely notice psychiatry's true nature. Neither do most of us see how contrived words such as dyslexia and ADD, have been infused into our societal thought patterns so strongly that we've come to accept these as true "diseases." Psychiatry took over our society, first by infiltrating our schools and churches under the disguise of counseling. Since most people had problems and because both churches and schools deal with people’s problems, it was easy to convince church and school leaders that they had another tool to handle difficult situations. Leaders accepted the "free" tool paid for with our tax dollars. As a result psychiatry easily manipulated and penetrated all our institutions of learning.
The dangers of psychiatry have even been recognized by some within it's own ranks such as psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Szasz, who long ago wrote: “The Myth of Mental Illness” and again in the 80's by William R. Coulson, Ph.D., from USIU (United States International University) School of Human Behaviour. Dr. Coulson addressed school boards throughout the country presenting the ominous message about drug education, values clarification and sex education programs he helped design for public schools along with Dr. Carl Rogers and Dr. Abraham Maslow. Dr. Coulson said that controlled studies had now proven that drug and sex education programs that he helped create, had the exact opposite effect. He said that values clarification programs surreptitiously placed in America's schools through the years - rather than teaching values, actually eroded and destroyed them.
There is another danger imposed by psychiatry that should concern everyone. It is the application of questionable psychiatric techniques and the availability of government psychiatrists that allows agencies such as the CIA and FBI to develop "psychological operations" (psy ops) programs. Some of these dangerous programs that were under the power of this psychic mumbo-jumbo included the infamous LSD experiments, the current MK ULTRA Mind Control program and the CIA's STARGATE program. These experiments could be considered unethical, illegal, unconstitutional and damaging to one's mental health, and is why psychiatry needs to be eradicated. It is destroying our society! It is an established cult that has mesmerized our nation in such a way, that to disagree with its techniques, outcomes, and programs is to be falsely accused of mental illness; as were tens of thousands of anti-government protestors and political dissidents that received virtual death sentences in the many Jewish run gulags of the “formerly communist” Soviet Union.
"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. "The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. "Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain." Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado Director of Neuropsychiatry Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974
Copernicanism AND The Cataclysmic Impact On Every Field Of Modern Man’s Knowledge
The Christian Bible (and the Koran) both declare the earth to be motionless. The |
countries and for UK born women in 2007. Similar groupings can be seen as for 2011, though Pakistan is significantly higher than all of the other countries, and Bangladesh is closer to the GFR for Nigeria, and significantly different from both India and Poland, unlike in 2011. The GFR for UK born women in 2007 was numerically very similar to its 2011 level, and remains significantly different from all of the top five non-UK countries of birth shown. Women born in Pakistan had the highest GFR at nearly 180, roughly three times the UK born GFR. For 2007 the GFR for all non-UK born women was 94, compared with a GFR of 119 for these top five combined. Table 9 shows which of these differences are significant at the 95 per cent confidence level. While the levels do fluctuate over time, the top five countries do appear to have sustained differences in their GFRs (when compared against each other) [2]. Figure 11: General fertility rates (GFRs) for the top five non-UK maternal countries of birth and for UK born women, UK, 2007 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: For more details on the calculation of fertility rates see section on Notes and Definitions. This chart uses general fertility rates (GFRs) calculated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) using birth registration data from ONS, National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Populations are estimated from the Annual Population Survey (APS), ONS. Download chart XLS format
(18 Kb) Table 9: Statistically significant difference matrix, UK, 2007 2007 Significant differences matrix Pakistan Nigeria Bangladesh India Poland UK Pakistan n/a Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Nigeria : n/a No Yes Yes Yes Bangladesh : : n/a Yes Yes Yes India : : : n/a No Yes Poland : : : : n/a Yes UK : : : : : n/a Table notes: Significance level is 95 per cent. Source: Office for National Statistics (ONS). Download table XLS format
(25.5 Kb) The changes in GFR over time between 2007 and 2011 were not significant, with the exception of Pakistan born women and UK born women, both of which had a significant change between 2007 and 2011 (an increase for UK born and a decrease for Pakistan born). Such a change could be caused by changes in the age structure of the population, changes in fertility behaviour, or a combination of both. Section 4.3 looks at the likely impact of changing age structures on the GFRs for non-UK born women. Notes for How does fertility vary between women born in different countries? Table 8 should be considered in conjunction with Figure 10. Analysis of intervening years was carried out, but is not included in this report. Similar differences and groupings are observed in each year between 2007 and 2011.
Age structures of the non-UK born populations of childbearing age Because the general fertility rate (GFR) is not standardised by age, examination of the age structures of the different maternal countries of birth can assist our understanding of the fertility differences between them. A higher proportion of women in the key childbearing ages (25 to 34) would lead to a higher GFR assuming that age-specific childbearing patterns were similar across all populations. The differences in the age profiles (in 2011) of women from the top five non-UK maternal countries of birth and for the UK born are shown in Figure 12 [1]. Most migrants to the UK migrate here from age 20 onwards; the proportion of non-UK born women aged under 20 is therefore much lower than for UK born women. Consequently for foreign born women the proportions in the older age groups tend to be higher. The dip in the number of UK born women in their early 30s, who were born in the late 1970s, has also exacerbated this different pattern (Figure 6). Figure 12: Proportions of women in five year age groups of childbearing age, for women born in selected countries and living in the UK, 2011 Source: Annual Population Survey (APS) - Office for National Statistics Download chart XLS format
(27 Kb) With the exception of Poland, the overseas maternal countries of birth show similar age distributions with no substantial differences being apparent. The age distribution of women of childbearing age born in Poland is distinctly different to that of the other countries of birth (Figure 12). Women born in Poland but living in the UK are noticeably more concentrated in the 25 to 29 age group, with much smaller proportions in the oldest two age groups. This reflects the recent (post 2004) migration of Polish people of working age to seek employment in the UK following EU enlargement [2]. Figure 13 shows that this high peak of Polish born women aged 25 to 29 has developed since 2007, with the population in this age group doubling from 48,000 in 2007 to 96,000 by 2011. This age group now represents approximately 38 per cent of the female population of childbearing age who were born in Poland. A significant rise of nearly two thirds has also been seen in the number of women born in Poland, aged 30 to 34 and living in the UK over this period. Figure 13: Women born in Poland of childbearing age living in the UK, by age group, 2007 to 2011 Source: Annual Population Survey (APS) - Office for National Statistics Download chart XLS format
(25.5 Kb) The GFR for women born in Poland rose from 93 births per 1000 women in 2007 to 106 births per 1000 women in 2010, but then declined back to 93 in 2011 because of a large increase in the female population of childbearing age who were born in Poland. The recent changes in the age profile of these women (Figure 13) suggest that their changing GFR may be more the result of changes in the size of different age groups, rather than these women bearing more or fewer children on average. Notes for Age structures of the non-UK born populations of childbearing age While the populations of non-UK born women born in specific countries are not robust enough at the five year age group to calculate age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) and thus total fertility rates (TFRs), it is possible to show age distributions within populations. This is because it can be assumed for the purposes of these charts that the uncertainty is around the total size of that population, not the age distribution within it. More detail can be found in appendix 2. Trevena P, (2009) 'New' Polish migration to the UK: a synthesis of existing evidence CPC Working Paper 3’, ESRC Centre for Population Change, UK.
Summary Poland, Pakistan and India have been the most common countries of birth for non-UK born mothers in the UK during the period 2007 to 2011. General fertility rates (GFRs) for women born in these three countries show that the fertility of women born in Pakistan was significantly higher in both 2007 and 2011 than the fertility of women born in India or Poland. All three countries had higher fertility using this measure than UK born women. The GFR is more robust than the total fertility rate (TFR) when analysing individual country of birth data but has limitations as it is affected by differences in age structures between populations. This is illustrated in the case of women born in Poland whose high GFR relative to UK born women may reflect the high proportion of Polish-born women living in the UK who are aged 25-29, rather than a genuine difference in fertility.
Comparing childbearing patterns among UK-born and non-UK born women in different areas of the UK Total fertility rates (TFRs) (for UK born and non-UK born women combined) differ between the four constituent countries of the UK. For example in 2010 the highest was recorded in Northern Ireland (2.06) and the lowest in Scotland (1.75) [1]. In this report the fertility of UK born and non-UK born women is analysed at sub-national level, by dividing the UK into five areas: ‘England excluding London’, London, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. London has been identified as a distinctive area, because it displays different demographic trends from the rest of England [2] and the other countries of the UK.
How are live births to native and foreign born mothers distributed throughout the UK? In 2011, the majority (56 per cent) of all births within the UK were to UK born mothers whose usual residence was ‘England excluding London’ (Figure 14). Births to UK born mothers in London accounted for 7 per cent of all births, and births to UK born mothers in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (taken together) accounted for a further 13 per cent of all births. Births to foreign born women, in all areas of the UK, accounted for the remaining 24 per cent.
The smaller pie chart in Figure 14 shows how the births to foreign born women were distributed throughout the UK. In 2011, 5 in 10 births to foreign mothers in the UK occurred in ‘England excluding London’, and 4 in 10 in London, with 1 in 10 occurring in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined.
For just UK born women the corresponding figures are 7.5 in 10 births to UK born women occurring in ‘England excluding London’, 1 in 10 in London, and 1.5 in 10 occurring in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined.Between 2007 and 2011, there was an increase in the overall number of live births in each of the five areas of the UK (Table 10). This was due to increases in the numbers of births to both UK born and non-UK born mothers, apart from in London and Scotland where the rise was solely due to births to mothers born outside the UK. Table 10: Number of live births in the five regions of the UK, to UK born and non-UK born mothers, 2007 and 2011 Thousands UK born Non-UK born All mothers 2007 2011 Percentage change 2007 2011 Percentage change 2007 2011 Percentage change 'England excluding London' 441 450 2.2 89 105 17.7 530 555 4.8 London 58 57 -0.7 68 75 11.4 126 133 5.8 Wales 31 32 1.9 3 4 18.3 34 36 3.4 Scotland 51 50 -2.3 6 8 31.4 58 59 1.4 Northern Ireland 22 22 1.5 3 3 18.7 24 25 3.4 UK 603 612 1.5 169 196 15.8 772 808 4.6 Table notes: Non-UK born mothers include those whose country of birth is not stated. Percentage changes are on unrounded data. Because there are relatively few births to non-UK women in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, small changes in their numbers may represent large percentage changes. Numbers may not sum exactly to totals due to rounding. Sources: Birth registrations from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download table XLS format
(28 Kb) In each area of the UK, the proportion of births to women born outside the UK has risen between 2007 and 2011 (Figure 15). London is the only region where the number of births to foreign born mothers was higher than those to UK born mothers in 2007 and 2011. In 2011, more than half of all births in London (57 per cent) occurred to non-UK mothers, compared with 19 percent in ‘England excluding London’ and between 11 and 14 per cent in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Figure 15: Percentage of live births to non-UK born mothers in the UK by area of usual residence of mother, 2007 and 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Non-UK born mothers include those whose country of birth is not stated. Birth registrations from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download chart XLS format
(18.5 Kb) Figures 16 and 17 show the proportion of births in each age group for UK and non-UK born women by area of usual residence of mother. The proportions of births in each age group for the UK as a whole are shown as a benchmark. Figure 16: Percentage of live births in each age group for UK born women, in the UK by area of usual residence of mother, 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Births to women older than 44 are included in the 40-44 age group. Birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download chart XLS format
(26.5 Kb) Births to UK born mothers are most concentrated in the 30 to 34 age group (Figure 16). This pattern is particularly marked in London and Northern Ireland, with London also having a comparatively high percentage of births to women aged 35 or over. In Wales and ‘England excluding London’ the highest proportion of births occurred to women aged 25 to 29, with both Wales and ‘England excluding London’ having higher proportions of births to younger mothers than the UK as a whole. The pattern in Scotland generally reflects the UK proportions in different age groups, although it has relatively fewer births among the 20 to 24 age group. Figure 17: Percentage of live births in each age group for non-UK born women, in the UK by area of usual residence of mother, 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Non-UK born mothers include those whose country of birth is not stated. Births to women older than 44 are included in the 40-44 age group. Birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download chart XLS format
(27 Kb) Live births to non-UK born women in the five areas follow the pattern for non-UK born women in the whole of the UK in 2011. They are concentrated in the 25 to 34 age groups, with considerably smaller numbers of births at the younger and older ages (Figure 17). London stands out with a higher proportion of births to women aged 30 and over, particularly for women aged 35-39. If births to UK and non-UK born women are combined, there are also clear differences by area in the age profiles in 2011 (Figure 18). In ‘England excluding London’ and Wales a greater proportion of births occur to women aged under 30 than to those aged 30 or over. In London the opposite is true, with a particularly small proportion of births to the under 25 year olds and the majority of births occurring to mothers in their thirties and forties. The order of the five areas according to the proportion of births to under 30 year olds remains identical when considering births to UK born women or births to women born outside the UK. However, the proportion of births to under 30 year olds was higher for UK born women than non-UK born women with the exception of London, where the proportions were the same. Figure 18: Percentage all live births that are to women under 30, by age group, by area of usual residence of the mother, 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download chart XLS format
(26.5 Kb) The percentage changes in births in each age group between 2007 and 2011 by area are shown in Figures 19 and 20. For UK born women, all five areas have seen a falling numbers of births to women under 20 and those aged 35 to 39 years, and the majority have seen an increase at other ages (Figure 19). Compared with other areas, London and Scotland both show smaller percentage increases in births to 25 to 29 year olds, as well as drops in births to 20 to 24 year olds. Together these trends resulted in a decline in births to UK born women in London and Scotland between 2007 and 2011. For births to non-UK born women, most areas saw a decline in the number of births to women aged under 25 and increases above this age (Figure 20). Figure 19: Percentage changes in live births to UK born mothers by area of usual residence in the UK and by age group, 2007 to 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Percentage changes are on unrounded data. Birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download chart XLS format
(27 Kb) Figure 20: Percentage changes in live births to non-UK born mothers by area of usual residence in the UK and by age group, 2007 to 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Non-UK born mothers include those whose country of birth is not stated. Percentage changes are on unrounded data. Because there are relatively few births to non-UK women in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, small changes in their numbers may represent large percentage changes. Birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download chart XLS format
(26.5 Kb) In summary, between 2007 and 2011 there were increases in births to UK and also non-UK born mothers in ‘England excluding London’, Wales and Northern Ireland (See table 10). In London and Scotland there were overall rises in the numbers of births, but this was solely due to a rise in births to foreign born women and despite the decreasing number of births to UK born women in their twenties. All areas saw their proportion of births to non-UK women rise between 2007 and 2011. In London births are more likely to be to older women than in other parts of the UK, regardless of origin of the mother. In contrast, in Wales and ‘England excluding London’, UK born mothers giving birth are more likely to be younger than their non-UK born counterparts.
How are the populations of UK and non-UK born women of childbearing age dispersed across the UK and have they changed since 2007? In 2011, there were 12.4 million women aged 15 to 44 living in the UK, of which 60 per cent (7.4 million) had been born in the UK and lived in ‘England excluding London’ (Figure 21). With just under 1 million UK born women of childbearing age, London had a slightly larger UK born population than Scotland (0.9 million), was twice the size of Wales (0.5 million) and three times the size of Northern Ireland (0.3 million) [1]. Non-UK born women living throughout the UK account for 18 per cent of the female population of childbearing age (2.2 million). For every 12 non-UK born women in the UK, 6 would live in ‘England excluding London’, 5 in London and 1 in either Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. Figure 21: Female population aged 15 to 44, living in the UK, by area and whether UK or non-UK born, 2011 Source: Annual Population Survey (APS) - Office for National Statistics Notes: Non-UK born mothers include those whose country of birth is not stated. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are combined to produce 'Other areas of the UK' for non-UK born. Together, unrounded percentages for UK born and non-UK born equal 100 percent. Download chart XLS format
(26 Kb) Between 2007 and 2011 the five areas of the UK have followed the national trends in population change for childbearing-age women (Figure 22). In every area there has been a reduction in the size of the UK born female population aged 15 to 44 and an increase in the size of the corresponding population born abroad (Figures 22 and 23). Reasons for these changes were given in section 3.2. Figure 22: Number of women of childbearing age who were born in the UK, by area of residence in the UK, 2007 and 2011 Source: Annual Population Survey (APS) - Office for National Statistics Download chart XLS format
(30 Kb) Figure 23: Number of women of childbearing age who were born outside the UK, by area of usual residence in the UK, 2007 and 2011 Source: Annual Population Survey (APS) - Office for National Statistics Notes: Women born outside of the UK includes those whose country of birth is not stated. Numbers may not sum exactly to totals due to rounding. Download chart XLS format
(30 Kb) In 2011 there were 101,000 more non-UK born 15 to 44 year old women living in London than there were in 2007. Three-quarters of this increase was seen in the age groups 30 or over. This is higher than for ‘England excluding London’ where 56 per cent of the rise in the childbearing population (141,000 ) over the period 2007-11 was amoung those aged 30 or over, and in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (combined) where this age group accounted for 59 per cent of the (24,000) increase. To summarise, the majority of the population of childbearing age, living in the UK, were born in the UK and are living in ‘England excluding London’. A much larger proportion of the non-UK born childbearing population are living in London compared with the UK born childbearing population. Between 2007 and 2011 the UK born female population aged 15 to 44 decreased in size while the non-UK born population increased in size and there was a larger relative growth in women aged 30 and over in London compared with the rest of the UK. Notes for How are the populations of UK and non-UK born women of childbearing age dispersed across the UK and have they changed since 2007? Data from the Annual Population Survey (APS) are used to estimate the population by country of birth. The APS data used in this report is weighted to population estimates published in 2011 and does not reflect recent rebasing of population estimates following results from the 2011 Census. See section 2 for further information on the APS. Source: Office for National Statistics (ONS).
How do fertility rates of UK and non-UK born women differ within the UK and have they changed since 2007? Figure 24 shows the estimated total fertility rates (TFRs) for UK born and non-UK born women, both in the UK and sub-nationally for 2011 [1]. The TFRs for non-UK born mothers are, in all areas, higher than for UK born mothers, although in Scotland the difference between the two is not statistically significant. At 1.73 children per woman, both Scotland and London have the lowest TFRs for UK born women, with Northern Ireland the highest (2.00). Scotland also has the lowest non-UK born TFR (1.93), which is consistent with the overall low TFR in Scotland (1.75 in 2010). TFRs for non-UK born women are similar in the other areas of the UK, ranging from 2.24 in Wales to 2.32 children per woman in ‘England excluding London’. The exception is Northern Ireland, which has the highest TFR, but the large confidence interval around it makes it less robust. Figure 24: Total fertility rates (TFRs) (with 95 per cent confidence intervals) for UK born, non-UK born and all women living in the UK, by area of usual residence, 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Non-UK born mothers include those whose country of birth is not stated. Black bars denote 95 per cent confidence intervals. For more details see Appendix 2. Total fertility rates (TFRs) calculated by ONS. For more details on the calculation of fertility rates see section on Notes and Definitions. This chart uses birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Populations are estimated from the Annual Population Survey (APS), ONS. Download chart XLS format
(24 Kb) Table 11: Impact of the fertility of non-UK born women on the total fertility rate, by area of usual residence in the UK, 2011 Area Extra children per woman UK 0.08 ‘England excluding London’ 0.07 London 0.25 Wales 0.04 Scotland 0.02 Northern Ireland 0.05 Table notes: Non-UK born women include those whose country of birth is not stated. Total fertility rates (TFRs) calculated by ONS. Impact is calculated by subtracting the unrounded TFR for UK born women away from the unrounded TFR for all women. For more details on the calculation of fertility rates see section on Notes and Definitions. Sources: Birth registrations from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Populations are estimated from the Annual Population Survey (APS), ONS. Download table XLS format
(25.5 Kb) The impact of the fertility of women born abroad on the total fertility rate (TFR for UK born and non-UK born combined) is at its greatest in London, where fertility was 0.25 of a child higher per woman in 2011 because of the presence of women born outside the UK (Table 11). This is because in London a much larger proportion of the childbearing age population (nearly half) was born abroad compared with the rest of the UK (see Figure 21). The fertility of non-UK born women in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland has very little impact on their overall TFRs because of the very small proportion of non-UK born women in these areas. Further differences in fertility between UK areas are evident when comparing age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) for 2011. Among UK born women aged under 30, ASFRs in Wales and ‘England excluding London’ are higher than the UK benchmark, but ASFRs are lower in Scotland, and considerably lower in London (Figure 25). As expected the ASFRs for non-UK born women [2] are generally higher than for the UK born across all of the areas (Figure 26). The chart for non-UK born women shows a flatter peak because, with the exception of Scotland, the fertility rates for 25 to 29 and 30 to 34 year olds are broadly similar, so the peak is across two age groups. This contrasts with the fertility of women born in the UK which peaks at age 30 to 34 in most areas, excluding Wales where the peak occurs in the 25 to 29 group. London shows a different profile of ASFRs for UK born women compared with the other areas of the UK, with lower fertility rates among women in their twenties and higher for women aged 35 or over. Although London has a similar proportion of women of childbearing age who are in their twenties, it has fewer births to women in these age groups. This may relate to the high proportion of women in their twenties in London who are students, or have moved to the capital for career opportunities and perhaps chosen to postpone childbearing until they are older [3] [4]. For non-UK born women living in London, the ASFRs for 20 to 24 and 25 to 29 year olds are more in line with the corresponding rates for other areas. Overall, the non-UK born ASFR profile for London is closer to that observed for the other areas of the UK than the UK born profile was, because all areas are seeing higher levels of fertility in older foreign born women than older UK born women. In contrast, Scotland (which has the same TFR of 1.73 children per UK born woman as London) follows the profile for the UK but at a lower level, because at every age group it has fewer births relative to the size of its UK born population. This is also the case for non-UK born women in their twenties in Scotland who have relatively low fertility rates; however for non-UK born women aged 30 and over, the age profile follows the national pattern. Wales shows a younger age pattern of fertility for both UK and non-UK born women. Women living in Wales had the highest fertility rates for UK born 15 to 29 year olds of all UK areas, and equal highest for non-UK born women aged 25 to 29. Wales also has the lowest fertility rates for both groups aged 35 and over. Figure 25: Age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) for UK born women living in the UK, by area of usual residence in the UK, 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: The age-specific fertility rates (ASFR) are calculated by ONS. The 40-44 age group uses births to women aged 40 plus and population estimates for women aged 40-44 (from the Annual Population Survey (APS)). For more details on the calculation of fertility rates see section on Notes and Definitions. This chart uses birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download chart XLS format
(32.5 Kb) Figure 26: Age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) for non-UK born women living in the UK, by area of usual residence in the UK, 2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Non-UK born women include those whose country of birth is not stated. The age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) for Northern Ireland are not robust, because of the small sizes of the population samples used in the calculation of the fertility rates. The age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) are calculated by ONS. The 40-44 age group uses births to women aged 40 plus and population estimates for women aged 40-44 (from the Annual Population Survey (APS)). For more details on the calculation of fertility rates see section on Notes and Definitions. This chart uses birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Download chart XLS format
(20 Kb) Between 2007 and 2011, London and ‘England excluding London’ both saw statistically significant rises in the total fertility rate (TFR) for UK born women, consistent with the increase in the UK as a whole (Figure 27). Throughout this period the area with the highest fertility rate was Northern Ireland, which along with Wales and ‘England excluding London’ had higher fertility among the UK born than the UK as a whole. On average for the years 2007 to 2011, the fertility rate in Northern Ireland was 0.18 above that for the UK, with Wales 0.07 above. The TFR for UK born women in London was the lowest in 2007 but showed a year on year increase from 1.54 children per woman in 2007 to equalling the rate for Scotland (1.73) by 2011, though remaining 0.16 below the UK fertility rate. Figure 27: Total fertility rates (TFRs) for UK born women living in the UK, by area of usual residence in the UK, 2007-2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Total fertility rates (TFRs) calculated by ONS. For more details on the calculation of fertility rates see section on Notes and Definitions. This chart uses birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Populations are estimated from the Annual Population Survey (APS), ONS. Download chart XLS format
(26 Kb) Conversely, non-UK born women living in ‘England excluding London’ and London both saw statistically significant decreases in their TFRs between 2007 and 2011 (Figure 28). For example, the TFR for non-UK born women for ‘England excluding London’ dropped from 2.59 in 2007 to 2.32 in 2011, while for London it dropped from 2.50 to 2.28 children per woman. Since 2009 the fertility rate for London has been identical to that of the UK, with the fertility rate for ‘England excluding London’ consistently above both of them, and the rate for Scotland consistently below. Changes can also be seen in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, but the small sample sizes for these populations means that the changes lie within the 95 per cent confidence intervals and therefore could result from sampling error rather than a true change in the fertility rate. In particular the TFRs for non-UK born women living in these three areas fluctuate suggesting they are less robust than those for London or ‘England excluding London’. Figure 28: Total fertility rates (TFRs) for non- UK born women living in the UK, by area of usual residence in the UK, 2007-2011 Source: Office for National Statistics, National Records of Scotland, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency Notes: Non-UK born women include those whose country of birth is not stated. Total fertility rates (TFRs) calculated by ONS. For more details on the calculation of fertility rates see section on Notes and Definitions. This chart uses birth registration data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), National Records of Scotland (NRS) and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). Populations are estimated from the Annual Population Survey (APS), ONS. Download chart XLS format
(20.5 Kb) Notes for How do fertility rates of UK and non-UK born women differ within the UK and have they changed since 2007? The uncertainty of the fertility rates is particularly evident for the rates for Northern Ireland and the non-UK born rates in Wales and Scotland. The age-specific fertility rates (ASFRs) for the non-UK born women show greater variation across the areas, partly because of the use of smaller samples of population in the calculation of the fertility rates. This is particularly the case for Northern Ireland, whose ASFRs should be treated with caution. Tromans N, Natamba E, Jefferies J and Norman P (2008), ‘Have national trends in fertility between 1986 and 2006 occurred evenly across England and Wales?’, Population Trends 133, pp 7–19, autumn 2008. Tromans N, Natamba E, Jefferies J (2009) ‘Have women born outside the UK driven the rise in births since 2001?’ Population Trends 136, pp28-42, summer 2009.
Summary There are large differences in 2011 in the percentage of births to women born outside the UK between the five UK areas considered in this report. These are not just a result of some areas having a larger proportion of their female population of childbearing age born abroad than other areas, although that is clearly an important factor. The estimated fertility rates presented here show that the fertility of non-UK born women is significantly higher than for UK born women in all areas except Scotland. They also show that known geographical differentials in fertility may be evident among both UK born and non-UK born women. This suggests that there could be differences in the fertility behaviour of women living in different areas irrespective of whether they were born within or outside the UK. However the caveat remains that fertility rates may be distorted by timing of births rather than simply reflecting real differences in completed family size between groups. Non-UK born women are not a homogenous group in terms of childbearing behaviour or migration history. Therefore variations in fertility between UK areas could result from differences in the make up of the non-UK born population living in different areas, in terms of country of birth or year of arrival in the UK. The final section of this report investigates subnational differences within the non-UK born group in more detail.
Subnational variation in childbearing among non-UK born women born in specific countries This section explores further the themes from the previous two sections, by investigating both the childbearing patterns of the top five non-UK countries of birth (section 4) and whether there are any differences between the five areas of the UK (section 5). The top five non-UK countries of birth used here are the top five for the whole UK. Specific areas have different top five compositions (for example, the Republic of Ireland is the second most common non-UK country of birth in Northern Ireland, but doesn’t feature in the top five for the other areas), but for ease of comparison we have used the same top five for all areas [1]. While there are other patterns that could be examined in greater detail, due to space and data constraints only a few key ones are presented to illustrate the variation that occurs between areas when looking at the fertility of women born in different countries. Notes for Subnational variation in childbearing among non-UK born women born in specific countries Appendix 1 (Table 3) provides the top 5 non-UK countries of birth for each of the five areas of usual residence of non-UK born mothers.
How does the distribution of live births vary by mothers' country of birth? Figure 29 shows where in the UK births to women born in the top five non-UK countries took place in 2011. The number of births in London is fairly similar for women born in each of the top five countries, but the number of births occurring in ‘England excluding London |
Turkey denies claims on disclosure of Israeli spies, intelligence chief
ISTANBUL
Ignatius said that Hakan Fidan(above), the head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT), was considered by Israeli authorities to be suspect due to his close ties to Tehran. Hürriyet Photo
Turkish government officials were quick to deny claims reported by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that Ankara blew the cover on a group of Israeli spies, disclosing their names to Iranian intelligence.“Various campaigns both at international and national level are recently underway,” Foreign Minister Davutoğlu said from his hometown of Konya on Oct. 17, blaming those campaigns for trying to discredit the government’s “mission” and Ankara’s goal to raise Turkey’s global profile.Ignatius had claimed in his Washington Post column that during a bitter period in bilateral relations, Turkey gave up the identities of around 10 Israelis to Tehran, who had been working with Israeli intelligence, in “an effort to slap the Israelis,” according to sources that Ignatius described as “knowledgeable.”Also referring to another article published in the Wall Street Journal last week about the preponderance of Turkish Intelligence Chief Hakan Fidan in Ankara’s Syria stance, Davutoğlu argued that the timing of both publications was “important.” Ignatius' article also mentions Fidan, claiming that he was considered by Israeli authorities to be suspect due to his close ties to Tehran.“The claims on Hakan Fidan are not only unfounded but also an example of a very poor black propaganda,” Davutoğlu said.Mustafa Varank, one of the prime minister’s advisers, also responded to Ignatius’ article, describing the report as “incoherent” via Twitter. Varank argued that Ignatius’ story clashed with the reality of intelligence agencies.“Ignatius’ article is so incoherent. The intelligence world operates according to agreements,” he tweeted.“The fall was going to get heated, wasn’t it?” he said in reference to predictions that the Gezi protests would restart after the summer. “Their predictions have not panned out, and for that reason, they have started a campaign against the reputation of the [Turkish] government and intelligence.”Varank also said it was inevitable that some powers would launch psychological warfare against the government and its intelligence service with the upcoming elections.Ignatius said in his column that Israeli intelligence had run part of its Iranian spy network through Turkey, due to the fact that “it had a relatively easy movement back and forth across its border with Iran.”Ignatius further claimed that the spy ring conflict may have been the reason behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to apologize following the Gaza flotilla incident, in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli forces.Netanyahu maintained harsh rhetoric for months after the incident before finally apologizing to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a phone call in March.The apology, however, failed to truly improve ties, Ignatius said.The report contains further accusations against Fidan, some of which cite previous Washington Post stories, claiming the MİT chief passed Israeli and U.S. intelligence to Iranian recipients.Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) is currently deploying 4x4 MIMO (multiple input and multiple output) technology, involving 4 transmitters and 4 receivers, which the carrier said should enhance both its coverage and improve its LTE network performance. Mike Haberman, Verizon's VP of network support, also said the operator is actively deploying carrier aggregation technology in its 20x20 MHz spectrum channels and expects the effort will allow it to offer spectrum channels wider than a 20x20 MHz configuration in the future, which Haberman said would allow Verizon to offer faster peak wireless download speeds in the future.
Haberman made his comments at the Wells Fargo Telecom Symposium. Wells Fargo analyst Jennifer Fritzsche issued a short report on Haberman's comments. Verizon Wireless representatives declined to offer any details beyond Haberman's comments, and Fritzsche did not immediately respond to FierceWireless questions for details.
According to Fritzsche's report on Haberman's statements, Verizon is working to improve its LTE network with a variety of technologies and strategies, from deploying MIMO and carrier aggregation to building out new small cells, Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) and macro cell sites. By deploying 4x4 MIMO, Verizon can create a diversity gain that could lead to higher uplink performance. Via carrier aggregation, Verizon can tie together disparate spectrum bands to create wider spectrum channels, thereby quickening download speeds for users.
According to Fritzsche, Haberman said that Verizon now has 20x20 MHz channels supporting its AWS-1 spectrum in most if its major markets. Verizon has branded its AWS-1 LTE buildout as XLTE.
Interestingly, Haberman said that most Verizon cell sites are connected with fiber, but he said Verizon is in the early stages of connecting its cell towers to dark fiber for fronthaul and backhaul. He said dark fiber fronthaul could allow Verizon to deploy a Cloud-RAN (C-RAN) system. C-RAN technology leverages distributed base station architecture to enable a host of benefits, such as capex and opex savings, increased asset utilization and savings on energy.
Verizon isn't the only carrier deploying improved MIMO technology. For example, Sprint (NYSE: S) in Chicago is rolling out 8T8R (8 Transmitters 8 Receivers), multi-layer MIMO and multiple-channel carrier aggregation.
Verizon has made no secret of its efforts to improve its network. For example, during the carrier's recent quarterly conference call with investors, CFO Fran Shammo said that "we are just beginning to refarm 1900 PCS spectrum from 3G to 4G LTE in select markets representing the next phase of spectrum to be deployed to serve our growing LTE usage," he said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the event. "Our network densification plans, which includes small cells, DAS nodes and in-building solutions are on schedule. In New York City we are well into our deployment and continue to scale and develop a healthy pipeline. Downtown Chicago is another large urban market with small cell densification plans well underway."
However, despite Verizon's network efforts, some analysts believe wireless subscribers' increasing demands for data will create problems for Verizon in the coming years. In a research report, analysts at New Street Research said that based on management comments, they estimate that if data growth continues at the current pace, Verizon will run out of capacity in the next two to three years, even if it refarms all 2G and 3G spectrum. "Densification may delay the crunch by a year or two, but sooner or later the company will need more spectrum," said analysts Jonathan Chaplin, Spencer Kurn and Vivek Stalam.
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Arriving at Anubhava Mantapa: Mahadevi visits Allama Prabhu at his courtyard for devotees
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
HINDU SAINTS
Akka Mahadevi’s Complete Surrender
______________________
The poems of Karnataka’s Virasaiva saints embody the deepest devotion to Siva and point us to the highest reaches of spiritual attainment
______________________
B Y M ANJUSHREE H EGDE, B ENGALURU
I LIE AWAKE IN THE THINLY LIT HOURS, of the morning absorbed in the poetry of the 12th-century Virasaivas of Karnataka. The vachanas (poems) of Akka Mahadevi, a young saint of the 12th-century reformist Virasaiva movement, are particularly compelling. I am arrested by her words, her raw, passionate, slow arrows of beauty, her timeless appeal.
Born in the 1100s in the small hamlet of Uduthadi, Karnataka, Mahadevi was initiated into the worship of the Sivalinga at the age of ten and considered herself betrothed to Lord Siva. She spent her adolescence in His worship and composed vachanas that spilled over with fervent longings for her Beloved, whom she called, “Chenna Mallikarjuna” or “Lord, White as Jasmine,” the name of Siva in her home town temple.
I am in love with the one
Who knows no death, no evil, no form.
I am in love with the one
Who knows no place, no space,
no beginning, no end.
I am in love with the one
Who knows no fears nor the snares
of this world,
the Boundless One who knows no bounds.
More and more I am in love
with my husband
known by the name of Chennamallikarjuna.
Take these husbands who die and decay,
and feed them to your kitchen fires!
Vachanas hold a unique place in the long history of Kannada literature. Simple in diction, these are the rich, spontaneous outpourings of the medieval socio-religious Virasaiva reformers of Karnataka. They opened the doors for the common man to participate in the personal experience and worship of Lord Siva through the vernacular language of the day, at a time when Sanskrit was reserved only for the upper castes..
Vachanas combine the lucidity of prose with the rhythm of poetry, marked by certain internal rhymes and syntactic parallelisms. More than 20,000 vachanas have been composed by over 300 prominent Virasaivas. Some 300 of these are credited to Akka Mahadevi, and hers are considered among the most poetic. Her brief but deeply intense verses sparkle with the magic and music of words, conveying the core spiritual philosopy in a poignant tone of one intoxicated with divine love:
I look at the road for His coming.
If He isn’t coming, I pine and waste away.
If He is late, I grow lean.
O mother, if He is away for a night,
I’m like the lovebird with
nothing in her embrace.
A Damsel Spurns Royal Marriage
Through Mahadevi’s vachanas we can trace the contours of her life on her journey towards moksha, ultimate liberation. We gather that she was a stunning young beauty. King Kaushika, the ruler of the land, fell passionately in love with her the moment he saw her. But she spurned his request for marrage, “But for my Chennamallikarjuna, all men are mere dolls!” she chided the king:
Fie on this body!
Why do you damn yourself
in love for it—
this pot of excrement,
this vessel of urine,
this frame of bones,
this stench of purulence!
Think of the Lord, Chennamallikarjuna!
A persistent Kaushika threatened her family with grave consequences until she relented and agreed to marry him on the condition that he would not force himself on her without her consent. When he later failed to keep his promise, Mahadevi walked out on him. As she departed the palace, a wrathful Kaushika demanded the return of all the jewels and extravagant clothes he had presented his wife. Defiant, Mahadevi stripped herself bare and stepped out onto the streets as a digambara —a naked saint.
The last thread of clothing
can be stripped away,
But who can peel off Emptiness,
that nakedness covering all?
Fools—while I dress in the Jasmine Lord’s morning light, I cannot be shamed;
what would you have me hide under, silk and the glitter of jewels?
Joining the Assembly of Devotees
She walked on foot to Anubhava Mantapa or “Abode of Experience,” a center for philosophical/spiritual discussions in Kalyani presided over by Allama Prabhu where Virasaivas like Basavanna and Chennabasavanna congregated. When Mahadevi, wandering naked, arrived at Anubhava Mantapa, she was greeted with much skepticism. Allama Prabhu, uncertain of her spiritual competence, challenged, “Why come you hither, O woman in the budding blossom of youth? If you can tell your husband’s identity, come, sit. Else, pray, be gone!” Mahadevi answered,
All of mankind are my parents. It is they
who made this matchless match of mine
with Chenna Mallikarjuna.
While all the stars and planets looked on,
my guru gave my hand into His;
the Linga became the groom,
And I the bride.
Therefore is Chenna Mallikarjuna
my husband
And I have no truck with
any other of this world.
Allama Prabhu interrogated her for a long time, and at the end of it, all the Virasaivas recognized Mahadevi’s worth. Allama Prabhu acknowledged: “Your body is female in appearance, but your mind is merged with God!” Thus, Mahadevi came to be accepted in their inner circles, and out of respect and affection, she came to be called Akka or elder sister.
Akka Mahadevi continued her tapas in Kalyani under the guidance of Allama Prabhu, and the vachanas composed at this stage reflect her progress.
The leaves on the apple tree,
in shapes as countless as their number,
show many shades of green,
none quite like the other.
On the rose bush next to it,
leaves and petals do just the same
and so do blades of grass,
lobelias and daisies,
each shade of color unique.
Akka Mahadevi longed
to find your face
and found it everywhere,
O Chenna Mallikarjuna!
Still revered today: a shrine to Mahadevi at Udathadi, her birthplace in Karnataka
After a few years of sadhana, Akka Mahadevi went to the famous Siva temple at Sri Sailam in Andhra Pradesh. It is said that she spent the last months of her life in various caves, completing her process of enlightenment, and attained Mahasamadhi, divine union with her Lord. Unverifiable historical records indicate that she died in her mid-twenties. Legend tells us that she was consumed in a flash of light, leaving only her poems behind as a chronicle of a spiritual journey that still evokes awe and respect in the hearts of all.
WIKICOMMONSbaseball
Japanese baseball sensation Masahiro Tanaka chartered his own Boeing 787 Dreamliner to fly him to New York, with the entire plane taken up by his five-strong party and his pet dog.
The ace pitcher, who has just signed a seven-year deal worth $155 million with the New York Yankees, is believed to have splashed out 20 million yen of his own money on the one-way flight.
"It's a (chartered) private jet. It's not something the Yankees have prepared," he told reporters at Narita Airport near Tokyo on Sunday.
Japan Airlines (JAL) confirmed he used one of its Boeing 787s but declined to disclose further details.
Jiji Press news agency said Tanaka booked out the whole plane -- which usually has about 200 seats -- for a group of five, including him and his wife. His pet dog -- -- a brown Toy Poodle -- was also aboard, the Sports Nippon said.
JAL said the plane had been booked ahead of the heavy snow that hit Japan over the weekend, grounding all regular commercial flights to New York on Sunday and causing travel chaos around the Japanese capital.
Even with the luxury of his own airliner, Tanaka did not escape the weather-induced misery, with his journey from a Tokyo hotel to the airport by car taking eight-and-a-half hours.
Tanaka paid for the plane in order to take part in the team's camp "in the best of form," a Japanese baseball official who accompanied him reportedly said.
He is to hold a press conference at Yankees Stadium on Tuesday before going to Florida for team training camp.
Tanaka, playing for the Sendai-based Rakuten Eagles, was unbeaten last season.
The right-hander went 24-0 with a 1.27 earned-run average and 183 strikeouts with only 32 walks in 212 innings for the Japan Series champion Eagles.
The Dreamliner has suffered a series of glitches since being rolled out by Boeing, most notably with the battery system, which last year saw the global fleet grounded for testing.
No problems were reported with Tanaka's flight.
© (c) 2014 AFPRussian President Vladimir Putin also used the documentary to take a familiar swipe at Western intervention in North Africa and the Middle East (AFP Photo/Natalia Kolesnikova)
Moscow (AFP) - Russia is not trying to bring back the USSR, President Vladimir Putin said in a documentary aired Sunday, but the problem is that "nobody wants to believe it".
Since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, which saw pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych ousted by pro-European demonstrators, Moscow has accused the West of using "the politics of containment" in a Cold War throwback.
"With Ukraine and other areas of the former USSR, I'm sure our Western partners aren't working in the interests of Ukraine, they are working to prevent the recreation of the USSR," he said in "World Order", a documentary broadcast on the public Rossiya 1 channel.
"But nobody wants to believe us, nobody wants to believe that we're not trying to bring the Soviet Union back," he said.
The president also used the documentary to take a familiar swipe at Western intervention in North Africa and the Middle East.
"You can't just impose your version of democracy, of good and evil, onto people of other cultures, with other religions and traditions in this mechanic, automatic way," he said.
"Apparently (the West) think they're infallible, but when the moment comes to take some responsibility, they disappear."Doctors from West Bloomfield, Farmington Hills and Harrison Township charged with peddling prescription pain pills on the black market. (Photo: Liz O. Baylen/Los Angeles Times)
DETROIT, Mich. -- Three metro Detroit doctors allegedly ran a $5.7 million drug ring that peddled prescription pain pills on the street, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
In yet another drug case targeting health care professionals, federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against doctors from Farmington Hills, West Bloomfield and Harrison Township.
The doctors ran the ring with the help of crooked pharmacists and patient recruiters who helped push roughly 1 million painkillers on the street, authorities said. The charges come one day after state officials announced that drug overdose deaths are up 14% in Michigan, claiming the lives of 1,745 people in 2014 — with heroin and painkillers as the culprits.
"Diversion of prescription pills to the street market promotes the addiction to painkillers that leads to overdose deaths," U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said in a statement. "We are focusing on charging doctors, pharmacists and the networks that are putting this poison on the streets."
According to the indictment, the 10 defendants were part of a prescription drug-trafficking scheme that ran between 2013 and 2015.
Chiropractor Boris Zigmond, 50, of West Bloomfield, was the leader of the operation, according to authorities. He secured prescriptions for painkillers that could be filled at various pharmacies. Once the prescriptions were filled the pills were funneled into the black market.
Zigmond didn't actually see patients himself or write prescriptions, authorities said. Instead, he set up office suites in several locations in Oak Park, where Dr. Jennifer Franklin and Dr. Carlos Godoy would see fake patients and write prescriptions, authorities said.
Zigmond was also charged with money laundering.
Attorneys for the defendants were not available for comment.
According to an indictment the defendants charged are:
Dr. Boris Zigmond, 50, of West Bloomfield
Dr. Jennifer Franklin, 39, of Harrison Township
Dr. Carlos Godoy, 78, of Farmington Hills
Rodney Knight, 32, of Highland Park
Tara Marcia Jackson, 53, of Detroit
Sashanti Morris, 44, of Detroit
Anna Fradlis, 61, of West Bloomfield
Maryna Pitsenko, 46, of Sterling Heights
Svetlana Sribna, 64, Sterling Heights
Marina Jacobs, 44, of West Bloomfield
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1piicX4Russian media has recently released reports that Hungary’s reigning Prime Minister Viktor Orban accepted bribes from the Russian mob back in the 1990s, as did his current police minister Sandor Pinter. The allegations are not new, but the story may be tied to Orban’s recently-found friendly relations with Vladimir Putin’s government. If the accounts of the story are to be believed, not only did Orban accept money, there is evidence of it, leaving him exposed to blackmail.
A story that dates back more than 20 years has resurfaced and is creating grounds for speculation.
German investigative journalist Jurgen Roth has recently published a book that explores the intertwining of politics and crime. A story covered mentions a senior young politician in Hungary accepting a considerable bribe from Russian organized crime through intermediary. Although Roth did not name the individual in his book, Russia’s Insider stated that the person in question is none other than reigning Prime Minister Viktor Orban. The suspicions were confirmed later on by Roth himself as well as Atlatszo.hu’s journalist, who recorded an interview earlier that led to the same conclusion.
This previous incident is perceived as the foundation of Orban’s newfound friendship with Russia, speaking out even at the time of sanctions that were imposed in response to the Ukraine aggression. Just recently, President Vladimir Putin paid an official visit to Budapest as a show of friendship. The explanation that Insider points to is that the Russians have “kompromat”, compromising evidence of Orban accepting the money from a Russian crime boss, who made a recording and passed on the footage to Russian secret services.
Atlatszo.hu was given permission from Roth to translate and publish the relevant chapter of his book.
The story dates back to the 1990s. When Orban was first elected premier, his Interior Minster Sandor Pinter, former national chief of police was already allegedly in connection with Russian crime circles operating in Budapest. There were also other signs, such as the statement of a woman who claims to have seen Pinter formally meeting her husband, Dietmar Clodo.
Clodo is a key figure of Hungary’s 90s’ crime tales. The German man has a very colorful past. He spent time in Afghanistan supporting the Mujahidin in their fight against the Soviets. He fought as a mercenary in Rhodesia in the 70s. Many sources say that he met several times with Osama Bin Laden. He speaks English, French, Arabic, Hungarian, German, but also Urdu and Pastu. He arrived in Hungary in 1989 at the time of the democratic transition, and then went on to promote Hungary as an attractive investment opportunity for investors abroad.
He met Semion Mogilevich, or “Seva” for short after an encounter at the airport in Frankfurt. He was approached by a man wearing gold chains, named Dimitri. The Russian was very grateful to Clodo, who helped him escape captivity in Afghanistan. He introduced him to his uncle Mihas who was also there along with two others. That was the nickname of Sergey Mihajlov, head of the biggest criminal organization in Russia at the time.
Clodo said he was worried about what his business partner may think if he saw who he was talking to, since the Russians had every characteristic of a “mobster” on them. A conversation about what he was doing and that he was doing business in Hungary was met with joy, since that “belonged to them.” Clodo was offered an introduction to Seva, who was in charge of the criminal organization’s Hungarian chapter.
The two met several occasions and apparently managed to establish a good relationship.
Clodo was entrusted with handling the payout of certain sums on Seva’s behalf. It was through this that as he later testified, he gave Pinter payouts that usually amounted to 10 thousand German marks. He wasn’t the only visitor to the residence where the transactions took place, the site was frequently visited by people who “did things” for Seva. Clodo later said he didn’t question the arrangement, mainly because he was handsomely compensated.
As it turns out Seva claimed that he wanted to get some insurance, accordingly there was a camera installed in the room where the deals took place and there are apparently recordings of the events. These records – if the allegations are true – include Viktor Orban accepting a briefcase containing one million marks. Interestingly enough, Clodo’s recollection of the alleged Orban payout has him meeting with a young and influential person he did not recognize, who he was told was going to be very important in the future.
Clodo had another interesting story to tell. He stated that Pinter at one point demanded that he should get a 51% stake in Clodo’s business, after which matters got heated and Clodo claims he struck Pinter, something his wife witnessed. Shortly afterwards, in June of 1998, he was the subjected to a police raid, handcuffed and arrested. The investigation found that he was in possession of 10 kilograms of explosives and 42 kilograms of chemicals needed to produce bombs.
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
However, a senior investigator closely involved with the case is to this day convinced that Clodo was framed. The man, B, stated that the person responsible of the numerous mob-related bombings in Budapest in the 90s’ was Seva’s security chief Leonid Stecura. B claims that Stecura was closely linked to the mob circles that operated at senior levels in the government and the state and that he personally ordered at least 25 assassinations. He said Stecura was actually far more dangerous than his boss, who had no knowledge of what his security chief was up to.
B firmly believes that it was Stecura who set up the arsenal that was used as the basis of Clodo’s arrest. B interviewed Clodo, believed him and wanted to investigate Pinter and other prominents implicated in the case. The matter was taken from him and he was discredited based on apparently unfounded blackmail charges.
Clodo then had a few occasion to voice his accusation while in custody, but neither the authorities, nor the media gave it any publicity. Roth recounted that Pinter once raised the need to explore one of the main scandals of the 90s’, which involved oil sales that the entire organized crime and many politicians were involved in at the time. Pinter tasked an independent expert with overseeing the investigation, Andras Horvath. As it turns out, earlier Horvath worked on the board of Pinter’s company, so there was surely no independence.
Roth’s sources in Hungary are convinced that Pinter only launched the probe led by Horvath so that he could make incriminating evidence disappear.
Clodo was transferred to Germany to serve out his sentence, but was released early. This was in part due to the confusing nature of Hungary’s court proceedings and also the fact that the presiding judge got a call from Pinter who tried to exert pressure for Clodo’s continued detainment. The judge took offense for the attempted interference and set the defendant free. Clodo remains associated with Seva and is also involved in charity work, educating children.
As Atlatszo.hu reviewed the accounts, we have to highlight several questionable aspects regarding Clodo’s claims.
It is difficult to believe that Clodo did not recognize Orban, who was all over the media. When we asked him Clodo said he simply had no interest in local political matters, that is why he could not immediately place a well-known political figure. There is a contradiction between Clodo’s accounts of the encounter about whether Orban went alone or if he had an associate presents. On separate occasions, he stated both accounts.
Those who do not believe Clodo believe that he simply fabricated a bombastic story seeing Orban’s rise to the forefront of European politics in the past years. What hasn’t surfaced, are the recordings of the dealings in Clodo’s Budapest office, even though there is police footage of discovering the hidden cameras, which are thus real.
Original articles in Hungarian here and here
Your support matters Atlatszo.hu is financed by nonpartisan and non-governmental sources; we do not accept money from state institutions, political parties and affiliates. We rely on support from readers. Donate here.Visitors play on a computer while visiting the Gamescom 2017 video gaming trade fair on Aug.22, 2017 in Cologne, Germany. (Lukas Schulze/Getty Images)
Computer Gaming Disorder to Be Classified as an Illness
After ten years of study, computer ‘gaming disorder’ will be listed as an illness by the World Health Organization for the first time next year.
WHO’s move to include computer gaming disorder in its International Classification of Diseases list comes after growing concern about the effects of gaming, especially among some Asian nations such as South Korea. South Korea has already introduced laws to limit access to computer games for children.
The list of diseases was last updated in 1990, reported New Scientist, who said the upcoming 2018 edition is still in its draft form.
As it is currently, the draft lists a range of criteria that medical professionals could use to decide if an individual’s gaming habits have developed into a serious health condition.
According to the draft seen by New Scientist, an individual has a gaming disorder if they give growing precedence to computer games “to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests.”
Such unhealthy behavior would have to be ongoing for at least a 12 month period before a diagnosis is made.
The draft also said sufferers will continue to play computer games even when it results in negative consequences.
Vladimir Poznyak from the WHO’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse told New Scientist that health professionals need to recognize that gaming disorders may have serious health consequences.
“Most people who play video games don’t have a disorder, just like most people who drink alcohol don’t have a disorder either,” said Poznyak. “However, in certain circumstances overuse can lead to adverse effects.”
Estimates of the proportion of computer game players who have a problem range from 0.2 per cent to one in five.
The Daily Mail reported that WHO has not listed other conditions linked to technology, such as so-called internet and smartphone addiction, owing to a shortage of evidence that they are real disorders.
The greatest people at risk of a gaming disorder are children and teenagers.
The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has issued a warning saying children and adolescents can become overly involved with computer games which brings on adverse results such as lower grades and poor social skills.
The academy noted that many of the most popular computer games emphasize negative themes and promote a range of negative behavior such as “the killing of people or animals” and “criminal behavior, disrespect for authority and the law.”
Approximately 90 percent of children in the U.S. play computer games, and more than 90 percent of those games involve mature content that often includes violence, reports Time.
America’s domestic computer game industry is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Please support independent journalism by sharing this article. Thank you very much!
From NTD.tvCongenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA) has two characteristic features: the inability to feel pain and temperature, and decreased or absent sweating (anhidrosis). This condition is also known as hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy type IV. The signs and symptoms of CIPA appear early, usually at birth or during infancy, but with careful medical attention, affected individuals can live into adulthood.
An inability to feel pain and temperature often leads to repeated severe injuries. Unintentional self-injury is common in people with CIPA, typically by biting the tongue, lips, or fingers, which may lead to spontaneous amputation of the affected area. In addition, people with CIPA heal slowly from skin and bone injuries. Repeated trauma can lead to chronic bone infections (osteomyelitis) or a condition called Charcot joints, in which the bones and tissue surrounding joints are destroyed.
Normally, sweating helps cool the body temperature. However, in people with CIPA, anhidrosis often causes recurrent, extremely high fevers (hyperpyrexia) and seizures brought on by high temperature (febrile seizures).
In addition to the characteristic features, there are other signs and symptoms of CIPA. Many affected individuals have thick, leathery skin (lichenification) on the palms of their hands or misshapen fingernails or toenails. They can also have patches on their scalp where hair does not grow (hypotrichosis). About half of people with CIPA show signs of hyperactivity or emotional instability, and many affected individuals have intellectual disability. Some people with CIPA have weak muscle tone (hypotonia) when they are young, but muscle strength and tone become more normal as they get older.Foster parent who has looked after 80 children struck off...because a Muslim girl in her care became a Christian
A foster mother has been struck off by a council after a teenage Muslim girl in her care became a Christian.
The carer, who has ten years’ experience and has looked after more than 80 children, said she was ‘devastated’ by the decision.
‘This is my life,’ she revealed. ‘It is not just a job for me. It is a vocation. I love what I do. It is also my entire income. I am a single carer, so that is all I have to live on.’
A foster mother is struck off after a 16-year-old Muslim girl in her care became a Christian
The foster mother said she had recently bought a larger car and had been renting a farmhouse, with a pony in a field, so that she could provide more disadvantaged children with a new life.
‘That was always my dream and then suddenly, bang, it was gone. I am now in a one-bedroom flat,’ she added.
The girl is understood to be back with members of her family, who have not been told of her conversion. A second girl the woman was fostering has been moved to another carer.
The woman insisted that, although she was a Christian, she had put no pressure on the Muslim girl, who was 16 at the time, to be baptised.
But council officials allegedly accused her of failing to ‘respect and preserve’ the child’s faith and tried to persuade the girl to reconsider her decision.
The carer, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is now preparing to take legal action against the council with the support of the girl, now 17, who also cannot be named.
Her case follows the controversy over Caroline Petrie, 45, the Christian nurse in Somerset suspended without pay in December for offering to pray for an elderly woman patient. She was reinstated this week.
Yesterday, Christians expressed outrage over the foster carer’s treatment, saying that it was a basic right for people to be able to change their religion and the woman should be praised, not punished.
Mike Judge, a spokesman for the Christian Institute, a pressure group which is funding her case, said: ‘I cannot imagine that an atheist foster carer would be struck off if a Christian child in her care stopped believing in God.
‘This is the sort of double standard which Christians are facing in modern Britain. In recent months, we have seen grandparents, a nurse, adoption agencies, firemen, registrars, elderly care homes and now a foster carer being punished because of the Christian beliefs they hold. It has got to stop.’
The carer, a mother-of-two in her 50s, has worked with young children for much of her life and became a foster parent for the local authority in the North of England in 1999.
In 2007, she was asked to look after the girl, who had been assaulted by a family member.
She told council officials that she was very happy to support the girl in her religion and culture.
‘We had a multicultural household and I had no problems helping the young person maintain her faith of birth,’ she said. ‘I have always prided myself in being very professional in what I do. If something works for a young person, whether I agree with it or not, I am happy to support them in that.’
But the girl, whom the foster mother describes as caring and intelligent, defied expectations by choosing not to wear overtly Muslim clothes or to eat Halal food.
The girl, whose interest in Christianity had begun at school some time before her foster placement, also made it clear that she wanted to go to church.
The carer, an Anglican who attends a local evangelical church, said: ‘I did initially try to discourage her.
‘I offered her alternatives. I offered to find places for her to practise her own religion. I offered to take her to friends or family. But she said to me from the word go, “I am interested and I want to come.” She sort of burst in.’
The carer said that the girl’s social workers were fully aware that she was going to church and had not raised any objections.
The girl had told her auxiliary social worker of her plans to convert before she was baptised in January last year, and the social worker had appeared to give her consent.
‘At that point the brakes were off,’ the carer said. ‘I couldn’t have stopped her if I had wanted to. She saw the baptism as a washing away of the horrible things she had been through and a symbol of a new start.’
Three months later, however, senior officials complained that they had not been fully informed of the girl’s intentions to become a Christian.
They said that she should have undergone counselling to ensure that she understood the implications, especially as such conversions are dealt with harshly in some Muslim countries.
The foster carer said, however, that the girl had thought about her decision very carefully and was aware that members of her family might react strongly, so she was adamant that they should not be told.
The carer said that as the auxiliary social worker knew about the baptism, she had not thought it necessary to tell the fostering team as well.
But she received a phone call from the fostering manager who was ‘incandescent with rage’ that the baptism had gone ahead.
The carer said: ‘Up to that point, we had had a good relationship, so I was quite taken aback. I was very shocked.’
In April, council officials told the girl that she should not attend any church activity for six months, so that she could reconsider the wisdom of becoming a Christian.
The carer was also instructed to discourage the girl from participating in any Christian activities, even social events. The council then told the carer there |
University of Victoria, said that health professionals can only guess why the province is restricting access to pharmaceutical data and defunding programs like the TI.
“If you were interested in stopping drug-safety evaluations in B.C., this is exactly what you would do,” he said. “Cut off data access for all the evaluators who were doing it, and then stop funding for the people who carry out this kind of work.
“Who is benefiting from this?” Cassels asked.T he massive 2012 Grand Prix schedule concludes with trips to ten different countries from September to December, including a rare visit to Moscow and the first Grand Prix in Costa Rica. That brings the total Grand Prix to be run in 2012 to an astounding 42 events across the globe.
To help kick off "Hook" block this fall, the Pro Tour returns to the birthplace of Magic for the first time since 2004. Seattle's Pro Tour will be held October 19-21, 2012 and the format will be Modern / Booster Draft with a Modern Top 8. The Standard-format Pro Tour Qualifier season for Seattle begins in April with in-person and Magic Online events.
Moving over to the Grand Prix schedule, this section of the year features five events in the United States, four in Europe, and visits to Canada, Taiwan, Japan, New Zealand, and the aforementioned Costa Rica. A full schedule can be seen below. Formats will be announced in the coming months, so be sure to keep an eye on the Grand Prix information page. The top four finishers at Grand Prix in this stretch of the schedule will earn invitations and airfare to the first Pro Tour of 2013. The prize payout for all of these events except Bochum will be $30,000. Bochum will offer cash-equivalent prizes equaling $30,000 (prizes subject to change).
Start your Grand Prix prep by finding a Grand Prix Trial at a Wizards Play Network location near you. Look for Trials for the autumn Grand Prix to start soon and get a leg up on your competition with a three-round bye.
Grand Prix Schedule (September-December)
City Country Dates San Jose Costa Rica September 15-16, 2012 Moscow Russian Federation September 15-16, 2012 Charleston USA September 15-16, 2012 San Francisco Bay Area USA October 13-14, 2012 Philadelphia USA October 27-28, 2012 Lyon France November 3-4, 2012 Auckland New Zealand November 3-4, 2012 Chicago USA November 10-11, 2012 Bochum Germany November 17-18, 2012 Taipei Taiwan November 24-25, 2012 San Antonio USA November 24-25, 2012 Lisbon Portugal December 1-2, 2012 Toronto Canada December 8-9, 2012 Nagoya Japan December 8-9, 2012
The complete 2012 Grand Prix schedule can be viewed here.According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Verizon is considering a takeover of Charter, which itself recently completely a takeover of Time Warner Cable. Merging the two companies would create a real telecoms giant: Verizon has over 100 million wireless customers, and Charter is now the second-largest broadband company in the country.
“Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam has made a preliminary approach to officials close to Charter and Verizon is working with advisers to study a potential transaction,” the report claimed, citing anonymous sources. A deal is not necessarily on the table at this point, but Charter shares are up by more than 7% following the news.
Merging the two companies would give the new Verizon/Charter behemoth the ability to sell “triple-play” bundling, the lucrative contracts where customers are getting wireless, broadband and cable from the same company. With the cable TV business under fire from cord-cutters and Verizon’s margins getting squeezed by T-Mobile, service bundling could potentially give both giants a new way of making money for the next few years.
Then, you have the standard monopolistic advantages of merging two internet providers. Verizon still provides broadband to millions of customers, as does Charter. Internet in the US is already a monopoly in wide swathes of the country. A Verizon-Charter merger would give the combined company about 26 million broadband subscribers, which is a little more than a quarter of the entire country.
In previous years, the biggest obstacle to such a deal would have been the FCC and Justice Department, which under Presidetn Obama took a dim view of mergers that concentrated power so heavily. President Trump’s administration, including newly-appointed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, is expected to be more business friendly, but we have yet to see any new policies or rulings that would go either way.
Update Reuters has published an article citing its own anonymous sources, saying that Verizon “has not proposed an acquisition to Charter Communications Inc.” The report gives no further details; reading between the lines, it might be that Verizon and Charter are still in highly preliminary conversations, or are discussing some kind of strategic partnership that does not include a wholesale merger.0 May 4, 2016 @ 4:30am PINNED: [INFO] READ BEFORE POSTING! BoB
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17 17 47 minutes ago Are there any mods to bring back the 2007 experience? Vyadei ❤Nature abhors a vacuum, it is said; and the internet abhors unexplained dissonance. When photographs emerged of police lieutenant John Pike pepper-spraying University of California Davis students, it wasn't just the violence in those images that captured the world's attention – it was the surreal juxtaposition of that violence with Pike's oddly casual body language and facial expression.
Picture: Lalo Alcaraz/laloalcaraz.com
Photoshop out the students from that picture with your mind. Forget about Pike's uniform, let's say he's just wearing street clothes. Now, instead of a policeman spraying a less-lethal chemical weapon down the throats of peacefully seated 20-year-olds, you might be able to interpret this tableau as a figure sauntering through a garden, spraying weeds. Or maybe he's your paunchy, moustached uncle, nonchalantly dousing bugs in the basement with insecticide.
One way the internet deals with that kind of upsetting dissonance is to mock it. And that's what the internet has done with Pike. The "casually pepper-spraying cop" is now a meme, a kind of folk art or shared visual joke that is open to sharing and reinterpretation by anyone. This particular meme has spread with unusual velocity – in part, I imagine, because the subject matter is just as weird as it is upsetting.
Even Kamran Loghman, one of the men who developed pepper spray as a weapon with the FBI in the 1980s, had a hard time reconciling it. "I have never seen such an inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents," Loghman told the New York Times. And Loghman might add "insouciant" to that list of adjectives. I mean, look at the guy. He's not braced for imminent attack by a foe; he does not move with tension as if navigating a hostile environment. He's administering punishment, and his face says: "Meh."
An investigation, to be led by former NY and LA police chief Bill Bratton, into whether there was police misconduct may take a while to reach a conclusion, but Photoshop justice has been delivered to Pike. And the expressions keep multiplying.
You can find them at Boing Boing's "Occupy Lulz" post, at Know Your Meme, at a Facebook page and at Reddit.
Pike's dissonantly casual body language in the context of violence brings to mind the photos from Abu Ghraib; Lynndie England smiling and giving the camera a thumbs-up in front of tortured prisoners. And, in a fit of macabre recursion, some of the casually pepper-spraying cop meme images reference those very photos from Abu Ghraib. Lynndie and Pike, two "bad apples" taking the fall for systemic problems with the institutions each represent.
Violence is nothing new, of course, and there are plenty of classic art and history images in which to insert Pike. A print of American revolutionary war figure Crispus Attucks, Picasso's Guernica for instance.
Classic album covers like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band get the treatment, too.
Pop culture and fine art images in which sympathetic figures are seated, supine or vulnerable are another frequently spotted base for Pike's shenanagins. Grandma at the holiday table is going to have some extra pepper on her turkey this Thanksgiving. Eeyore is not safe. Nor are the ladies of Seurat. And forget about the American constitution.
Still, none of us jaded internet chroniclers were prepared for the ultimate act of Inception-like recursion that came this week, when students at UC Davis printed out some of the meme images as posters, and carried them to a protest at the very site on the UC Davis quad where the pepper-spraying incident took place. Images of the casually-pepper-spray-everything-cop, held up as an act of protest on the same spot where Pike casually-pepper-sprayed-everyone. Good news: looks like there will be T-shirts for them to wear soon, too.Halfway through the year, the foreign box office is booming, but Hollywood's top blockbusters aren't doing nearly the business abroad that they were a year ago.
The top 20 movies at the international box office grossed 13 percent less through mid-year — to the tune of $4.81 billion — than the $5.54 billion that the top films earned during the same period last year, according to global box-office tracker The Numbers.
Because this tally includes only the biggest films, it provides just a snapshot rather than a complete picture of the nearly $24 billion international market, and several of this year's top films are still playing. But with foreign grosses now typically accounting for around 70 percent of a major film's grosses, it's something the studios are keeping an eye on.
Box office watchers point to two big differences this year: The growing importance of Chinese-made movies, and top hits that couldn't quite match the firepower of last year's mid-year leaders, starting with "Marvel's The Avengers."
Exhibitor Relations vice president and senior analyst Jeff Bock said these variations are "cyclical" — and last year's "Avengers" "really was a phenomenon."
The top of the chart tells the story: This year's biggest movie at midyear, "Iron Man 3," fell 10 percent short of "Marvel's The Avengers," its sort-of-sequel and this year's top film. And it wasn't the only one overshadowed by its 2012 counterpart.
The top 10 movies have brought in $3.09 billion in the first six months of this year, 21.5 percent less than the $3.96 billion their counterparts grossed through June 2012.
What might be worth watching, Bock said, is whether this reflects a cooling among foreign moviegoers toward 3D. "If foreign moviegoers start getting as tired of it as we are here, it will hurt."
Fourteen of the 17 U.S. movies in the top 20 were released in 3D abroad, where the format is still novel and moviegoes are more apt to ante up for higher-priced tickets.
Also read: Summer Box Office Up 13 Percent: How Hollywood's Big Bet Is Paying Off
Chinese films are definitely making a mark. Three films produced in China — "So Young," "Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons" and "Lost in Thailand" — cracked the top 20 films for the year's first half. None did last year.
It's not that the Chinese are exporting hits — all three did nearly all their business at home — but they're doing enough domestically to make the list of leaders. The Chinese box office grew by 36 percent to become the No. 2 global film market in 2012, and it is still expanding.
Also read: How China Is Driving Its Own Box-Office Boom
“We’ve seen this huge expansion in the Chinese market over the past few years and that created a huge need for content,” said Bruce Nash, founder of The Numbers.
“Initially, it was Hollywood that was filling it, but Chinese filmmakers are adapting and starting to make movies that have a great deal of appeal.
“If Hollywood wants to stay dominant in that market, it won’t be enough to just wait for another ‘Avengers,'” Nash said. “It might be partnering with Chinese studios and filmmakers, or making films that really do play to Chinese sensibilities, but they’ll have to do something different. And it’s clear now they’ll have to compete with the Chinese themselves.”
China's "Journey to the West" was the first half's highest-grossing non-U.S. movie, with $207 million. That's about half of the $413 million that France's "The Untouchables" grossed internationally in the first six months of 2012.
In terms of distributors, the wealth was spread around. Warner Bros. and Paramount had four films each in the top 20, while Disney, Fox and Universal each had three. The No. 5 movie, "Oz the Great and Powerful," gave Disney a second film in the top five.
Conventional wisdom says U.S. comedies don't translate at the foreign box office and that was true in the first six months of this year. The lone comedy to make this list is Warner Bros.' "The Hangover Part III," which has brought in $228 million. Last year there were two — "The Dictator" with $119 million and "Ted," which brought in $330 million for Universal.
Despite the overall downward trend, there have been some success stories for U.S. films.
Also read: 'Lone Ranger' Takeaway: Disney, Forget Original Franchises
With "Star Trek Into Darkness," Paramount turned around that franchise's traditional struggle with foreign audiences, and it has taken in $218 million abroad. It's one of six sequels on the top 20 list this year, compared with three last year.
This year's No. 2 movie, Universal's "Fast & Furious 6," blew past earlier entries in the franchise to bring in $450 million.
The "we'll do better overseas" mantra offered up by distribution executives disappointed with their domestic results was borne out in the mid-year results.
Every American film on the top 20 list made more abroad than at home, and several that tanked in the U.S. have done OK overseas, including "Jack the Giant Slayer: ($132 million) and "After Earth" ($131 million).By of the
The federal government appears to be moving toward criminal charges against ConAgra Foods Inc., the manufacturer of the salmonella-tainted Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter that sickened at least 425 consumers in 44 states -- including Wisconsin -- about eight years ago.
The tainted peanut butter caused a nationwide salmonella Tennessee outbreak starting in late 2006 and early 2007.
ConAgra recalled the contaminated Peter Pan and Great Value (Walmart brand) peanut butter in February 2007. ConAgra later said jars were contaminated with moisture from a roof leak mixed with dormant salmonella bacteria in peanuts at the Sylvester, Georgia, plant where it was made from August 2006 to January 2007.
Federal inspectors confirmed the leaky roof and also found roaches, mold and other sanitation problems during an inspection at the plant.
Food Safety News reports today that a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice's Consumer Protection Branch sent letters dated Aug. 20, 2014, to consumers who purchased the contaminated peanut butter.
"You are receiving this notice because the government has reason to believe that you may have been the victim of a crime related to an outbreak of salmonella infections caused by contaminated peanut butter in 2006-2007," Alan Phelps of the DOJ wrote, according to Food Safety News.
Crime victims have the right to be notified of court proceedings for pleas or sentencing. Notices of proceedings in the Peter Pan/Great Value case will be posted on a special website.
ConAgra also disclosed in annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company would likely be charged with a federal criminal misdemeanor for the peanut butter incident, according to Food Safety News.
"We are pursuing a negotiated resolution, which we believe will likely involve a misdemeanor criminal disposition under the Food, Drug & Cosmetics Act," the company states in its 2014 10-K filing.
The company set aside $25 million in connection with the recall in fiscal years 2012 and 2013 and another $6.7 million in fiscal year 2014.
Nobody died during the outbreak, but 20 people were hospitalized.
Salmonella is an ongoing concern related to peanut butter.
The Peanut Corporation of America made a separate recall of peanut butter due to salmonella in 2008. The ensuing outbreak sickened 700 people and killed nine. That case is on trial on felony charges. The recall caused a ripple effect leading to several hundred companies recalling almost 4,000 products.
Less than two weeks ago, nSpired Natural Foods recalled peanut butter and almond butter for salmonella concerns. The butters were sold under the brands MaraNatha, Arrowhead Mills, Whole Foods 365, Trader Joe's, Safeway and Kroger.
Want more recalls, consumer news, viral stories and occasional freebies? Follow Gitte Laasby on Twitter @GitteLaasbyMJS or like her Facebook page.eso1638 — Science Release
ESO’s VLT Detects Unexpected Giant Glowing Halos around Distant Quasars
An international team of astronomers has discovered glowing gas clouds surrounding distant quasars. This new survey by the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope indicates that halos around quasars are far more common than expected. The properties of the halos in this surprising find are also in striking disagreement with currently accepted theories of galaxy formation in the early Universe.
An international collaboration of astronomers, led by a group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, has used the unrivalled observing power of MUSE on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory to study gas around distant active galaxies, less than two billion years after the Big Bang. These active galaxies, called quasars, contain supermassive black holes in their centres, which consume stars, gas, and other material at an extremely high rate. This, in turn, causes the galaxy centre to emit huge amounts of radiation, making quasars the most luminous and active objects in the Universe.
The study involved 19 quasars, selected from among the brightest that are observable with MUSE. Previous studies have shown that around 10% of all quasars examined were surrounded by halos, made from gas known as the intergalactic medium. These halos extend up to 300 000 light-years away from the centres of the quasars. This new study, however, has thrown up a surprise, with the detection of large halos around all 19 quasars observed — far more than the two halos that were expected statistically. The team suspects this is due to the vast increase in the observing power of MUSE over previous similar instruments, but further observations are needed to determine whether this is the case.
“It is still too early to say if this is due to our new observational technique or if there is something peculiar about the quasars in our sample. So there is still a lot to learn; we are just at the beginning of a new era of discoveries”, says lead author Elena Borisova, from the ETH Zurich.
The original goal of the study was to analyse the gaseous components of the Universe on the largest scales; a structure sometimes referred to as the cosmic web, in which quasars form bright nodes [1]. The gaseous components of this web are normally extremely difficult to detect, so the illuminated halos of gas surrounding the quasars deliver an almost unique opportunity to study the gas within this large-scale cosmic structure.
The 19 newly-detected halos also revealed another surprise: they consist of relatively cold intergalactic gas — approximately 10 000 degrees Celsius. This revelation is in strong disagreement with currently accepted models of the structure and formation of galaxies, which suggest that gas in such close proximity to galaxies should have temperatures upwards of a million degrees.
The discovery shows the potential of MUSE for observing this type of object [2]. Co-author Sebastiano Cantalupo is very excited about the new instrument and the opportunities it provides: “We have exploited the unique capabilities of MUSE in this study, which will pave the way for future surveys. Combined with a new generation of theoretical and numerical models, this approach will continue to provide a new window on cosmic structure formation and galaxy evolution.”
Notes
[1] The cosmic web is the structure of the Universe at the largest scale. It is comprised of spindly filaments of primordial material (mostly hydrogen and helium gas) and dark matter which connect galaxies and span the chasms between them. The material in this web can feed along the filaments into galaxies and drive their growth and evolution.
[2] MUSE is an integral field spectrograph and combines spectrographic and imaging capabilities. It can observe large astronomical objects in their entirety in one go, and for each pixel measure the intensity of the light as a function of its colour, or wavelength.
More information
This research was presented in the paper "Ubiquitous giant Lyα nebulae around the brightest quasars at z ~ 3.5 revealed with MUSE", to appear in the Astrophysical Journal.
The team is composed of Elena Borisova, Sebastiano Cantalupo, Simon J. Lilly, Raffaella A. Marino and Sofia G. Gallego (Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, Switzerland), Roland Bacon and Jeremy Blaizot (University of Lyon, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, Saint-Genis-Laval, France), Nicolas Bouché (Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Toulouse, France), Jarle Brinchmann (Leiden Observatory, Leiden, The Netherlands; Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Porto, Portugal), C Marcella Carollo (Institute for Astronomy, ETH Zurich, Switzerland), Joseph Caruana (Department of Physics, University of Malta, Msida, Malta; Institute of Space Sciences & Astronomy, University of Malta, Malta), Hayley Finley (Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, Toulouse, France), Edmund C. Herenz (Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany), Johan Richard (Univ Lyon, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, Saint-Genis-Laval, France), Joop Schaye and Lorrie A. Straka (Leiden Observatory, Leiden, The Netherlands), Monica L. Turner (MIT-Kavli Center for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA), Tanya Urrutia (Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany), Anne Verhamme (University of Lyon, Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, Saint-Genis-Laval, France), Lutz Wisotzki (Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany).
ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.
Links
Contacts
Elena Borisova
ETH Zurich
Switzerland
Tel: +41 44 633 77 09
Email: [email protected]
Sebastiano Cantalupo
ETH Zurich
Switzerland
Tel: +41 44 633 70 57
Email: [email protected]
Mathias Jäger
Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 176 62397500
Email: [email protected]
Connect with ESO on social mediaRepublican Senate candidate Roy Moore released a video message on YouTube in which he appeared to refuse to admit defeat and railed against "immorality" in the U.S.
Moore looks to have lost the Alabama Senate election race which took place Tuesday. With 99 percent of the vote in, NBC News projected Wednesday that Democrat Doug Jones was the winner with a margin of more than 20,000 votes.
But in an online video on Wednesday, Moore appeared to still be resisting any concession to Jones, insisting that there was still a chance he could win the closely-run vote.
"In this race, we have not received the final count to include military and provisional ballots. This has been a very close race and we are awaiting certification by the Secretary of State," he said in the video.
In the rest of the message, Moore said he was "concerned about the future of our country — both financially and morally." He then continued to speak on abortion, homosexuality, drugs, transgender rights and materialism, saying "immorality sweeps over our land."
"Today, we no longer recognize the universal truth that God is the author of our life and liberty," he said in the video.Astronomers have detected our "grotesque" twin: A planetary system arranged much like our own solar system, a new study says.
Dubbed GJ676A, the system has two rocky planets orbiting close to its host star, and two gas giants orbiting far away. This means the system is arranged like our system—though in GJ676A, everything is much larger.
For instance, the smallest rocky planet in GJ676A is at least four times the mass of Earth, while the largest gas giant is five times the size of Jupiter.
Other multiple-planet systems have been discovered, such as HD10180, which has been called the richest exoplanetary find ever because of the seven to nine planets orbiting its host star. (Also see "Our Solar System May Have Millions of 'Twins.'")
But HD10180's planets are all gas giants in relatively close orbits, while GJ676A has both rocky and gas planets—and its "Neptune-like" planet takes 4,000 days to make one orbit, said study leader Guillem Anglada Escudé, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Gottingen in Germany.
The long orbits of GJ676A's gas giants and the short orbits of its close-in, extremely hot super Earths are what led the astronomers to dub GJ676A our solar system's twin.
"Hidden" Planets Detected Via New Technique
Anglada Escudé and team used a new data-analysis technique to detect smaller planets around the star, which had already been known to host one gas giant.
"This means that it's likely that other systems have hidden companions," he said. "We just need to apply the new techniques to find them."
The finding also may refine planetary-formation models, he added. According to one popular explanation for super Earths so close to a host star, the planets form farther out and migrate inward.
"But your planet that moves picks up all the mass with it," Anglada Escudé said.
"That didn't happen here, because you still had mass to form the gas giants. It's possible that the gas giants formed first in long-period orbits—they didn't migrate—and then a few million years later, you start forming super-Earths with the leftovers."...and it's only a few hundred million miles away. Better fuel up your rocket and get started today, however, because we're talking about Saturn's moon Enceladus and the incredibly fine, snowy powder that covers its surface:
"The particles are only a fraction of a millimeter in size … even finer than talcum powder," study leader Paul Schenk, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, said in a statement. "This would make for the finest powder a skier could hope for."
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The discovery was made by a joint effort between the ever-effective NASA Cassini orbiter and maps of the moon's surface that used various colors to represent the age of surface features. The image included here is an artist's rendition of the surface.
In some places the snow cover is an estimated 330 feet deep! Bring your fat skis.
[National Geographic via Boing Boing]At an event hosted in New York this week by Solar City, CEO Lyndon Rive and chairman Elon Musk announced that within five to 10 years every set of solar panels that Solar City installs will come with a battery pack to help deal with the intermittency of solar power—one of the key factors limiting its use. Musk says his company Tesla Motors will supply at least some of those batteries.
Solar City has already installed hundreds of backup battery systems in homes, like the one shown here.
Solar City, one of the largest solar panel installers in the United States, announced earlier this year that it intends to build the country’s largest solar panel factory in New York. The company currently installs and leases solar panels, and it already sells small battery packs for backup storage to some of its customers.
Rive and Musk, who are cousins, also said at the New York event that within the same time frame electricity from solar power would become cheaper in the U.S. than power produced from natural gas. To meet that target, the pair both plan to build two major manufacturing operations that will feed off each other. One of Musk’s other companies, Tesla Motors, announced plans earlier this month to build a vast factory for producing lithium-ion batteries in Nevada (see “Does Musk’s Gigafactory Make Sense?”). This factory will supply batteries for its electric vehicles as well as to Solar City. While some lithium-ion batteries and solar cells are made in the U.S. today, the vast majority are made in Asia.
Both companies’ manufacturing plans are ambitious but also risky, given the recent track record of U.S. energy companies, and because unexpected technology advances could quickly render the components produced in those plants outmoded. In the case of solar panels, there is also the continued threat of heavily subsidized competition from China. For both companies, the bet is that rapidly growing demand will allow new economies of scale to lower the cost of manufacturing these components, which in turn will lower the cost of solar power.
Although Solar City has only one small factory so far, it’s negotiating with New York State and potential partners to fund one about as big as the largest one in Asia. Rive says he plans to follow this with factories 10 times as large. At such a scale, assuming solar cell efficiencies can be steadily improved, the cost for installed solar panel systems would be cut by about half, from $2.30 per watt to $1.20, Rive says.
At full capacity, the battery factory that Tesla plans for Nevada would eclipse all of the current lithium-ion battery production in the world. Musk believes his factory will help lower the cost of batteries to less than $100 per kilowatt hour of storage—down from what analysts estimate is about $300 now.
Solar City only decided to get into the business of making solar panels, instead of just installing and maintaining them, this year. In June it bought a startup called Silevo that has technology that improves the efficiency of silicon solar panels without complicating manufacturing (see “Startup Silevo Scales Up Even As Others Shut Down”).
Other ambitious solar and battery projects have failed in recent years. The U.S. government attempted to foster an automotive battery industry, but demand failed to materialize and projects were abandoned or delayed. It also helped fund solar panel startups, including most notoriously the solar panel maker Solyndra, whose failure cost the government $535 million. Likewise, many venture capitalists have lost hundreds of millions of dollars on solar startups that haven’t been able to compete with cheap panels from Asia.
One key difference for Solar City is the technology it is using. Whereas Solyndra and others attempted to commercialize novel materials, Solar City is making a new kind of silicon solar cell. That should be easier because silicon manufacturing techniques are already well established.CodePink activists protest against John Brennan, the hard-nosed architect of the US drone war against Al-Qaeda, outside the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, on February 7, 2013. Brennan's confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee for the post of head of the CIA, thrusts a rare public spotlight on President Barack Obama's covert drone use and associated missile strikes, which have become a hallmark of his presidency. AFP PHOTO/Jewel Samad (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama has abandoned his two-year push to consolidate his controversial targeted killing program under Pentagon control and has spent the past several months finalizing a new plan that would give the Defense Department and the CIA joint control of drone strikes, sources tell The Huffington Post.
Two years ago, Obama promised during a speech at the National Defense University that he would move the CIA's controversial drone program out of the covert shadows and into the relative sunlight of the Defense Department. Drone critics greeted the announcement with cautious optimism, hoping that a Pentagon-run drone program would be more transparent and allow more oversight of targeted killings.
The CIA and its allies on the congressional intelligence committees resisted Obama's proposal. But until recently, the Obama administration was still publicly pushing forward, saying as recently as April that it wanted to take the trigger out of the CIA's hands for good.
Behind closed doors, all of that has changed. On June 10, administration officials gave a classified briefing to lawmakers laying out a blueprint for a new transition plan that would involve a dual command structure. That blueprint is all but complete, U.S. officials briefed on it said.
"About 95 percent," one U.S. official who attended the briefing told HuffPost. "The 5 percent is details."
The White House's stark departure from its promises isn't sitting well with everyone. Although the CIA and Pentagon have both backed the new plan, lawmakers aren't convinced that the two bureaucracies -- each of which has long charged that the other isn't qualified to manage the drone program -- can finally cooperate.
"[The White House] was almost laughed out of the room," said another official in the June 10 briefing. "It was just totally unworkable. It was dual command... that's not what the president's direction was."
The officials who agreed to speak with HuffPost requested anonymity to discuss the still-classified plan.
The first source said that although the White House publicly implied it wanted to end the CIA's drone program, that was never a realistic objective.
"It's more centrally operated than they may have originally intended, but the intention was always integration," the source said.
The White House declined to comment, but one administration official suggested the president had never intended to end the CIA program entirely.
"The broader point is we're not going to shut out any part of the United States government," that administration source said. "Especially one that has the expertise and experiences that is useful across a range of means."
That includes analytical and operational capabilities, the official continued.
Control of the drone program has long been a tense issue in Washington. The notoriously independent CIA is infamous for its tendency to not play nice with others, and suspicions abound in the beltway that the agency frequently trash talks the Defense Department, charging that they're not as precise nor careful as the CIA. The Pentagon's backers, meanwhile, have long insisted that soldiers, not spies, should be in charge of paramilitary operations, and CIA critics have argued that the agency's program is unchecked, citing the errant strike that took out two Western hostages, including an American, in Pakistan in January.
The CIA declined to comment for this story. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
On Capitol Hill, the CIA's defenders -- many of them on the Senate Intelligence Committee -- have lauded the agency's precision and care in conducting strikes, and insisted the CIA's oversight is second to none. Meanwhile, the Senate Armed Services Committee, led by Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), has consistently pushed to have the program moved fully to Pentagon control -- and under that panel's oversight jurisdiction |
The U.S. women’s national team is in the middle of the 2017 SheBelieves Cup, a three-game tournament held in the U.S., and the team’s only major international competition of the year. They beat Germany 1-0 on Wednesday in Pennsylvania, play England on Saturday in New Jersey, and face France in Tuesday’s finale in Washington, D.C.
But after these games, the immediate future of women’s soccer in the U.S. gets a whole lot murkier, thanks to the current black box of contract negotiations between the USWNT and the U.S. Soccer Federation. Will they reach a collective bargaining agreement? The National Women’s Soccer League season, subsidized by U.S. Soccer, is looming. Could the USWNT members strike, depriving the NWSL of its best players and biggest draws? They have flirted with the idea before (notably before the Olympics), but now—with the added attention of the SheBelieves Cup and the upcoming NWSL season—a strike threat might be the best leverage they have.
In late December 2016, days before the existing collective bargaining agreement was set to expire, the union fired its executive director Rich Nichols, who also represented five U.S. players in their Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against U.S. soccer that was filed last March. The complaint alleged “gross disparity of wages,” which U.S. Soccer attributed to the fact that the USMNT is compensated on a pay-for-play model and that the men’s team brings in more money than the USWNT. (The USWNT has also beefed with U.S. Soccer over having to pay on artificial turf, a subpar, potentially dangerous surface that their male counterparts do not play on.)
On firing their union head, the team said:
Rich Nichols will no longer serve as counsel to the U.S.W.N.T. Players Association.... We are focused on productive conversations with U.S. Soccer regarding our future. We are also grateful for the tremendous ongoing support for women’s soccer from all of our beloved fans worldwide, and look forward to seeing everyone over the course of the NWSL season, as well as at the 2017 SheBelieves Cup in March.
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With no new agreement in place, both the team and the federation have continued operating under the terms of the expired CBA, which can only be ended with 60 days’ notification from either side.
Then in mid-January, with no reports of contract talks, Alex Morgan told the Guardian that a player strike wasn’t out of the question.
“It’s necessary for change sometimes,” Morgan says of a possible strike. “It wouldn’t be the first time women decided to strike. Colombia and a couple of other countries might do the same. And Australia didn’t play us a year ago because of the same battle. We were supposed to play them in a few weeks and they decided not to get on the flight because they weren’t getting paid what they were worth – or anywhere close. “To force a change sometimes you need to stand up. You know what you’re worth – rather than what your employer is paying you. We’re not scared. To move the women’s game ahead we need to do what’s necessary. I feel other national teams are looking at us for that guidance.”
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She also said:
“We don’t have a World Cup or Olympics to use as leverage while we negotiate a new contract. But we have an important tournament coming up [in March]. The SheBelieves Cup brings France, England and Germany to the US. Before we play those matches we want to get a deal done so we can move on.”
But even though a deal didn’t get done, the USWNT was evidently unwilling to miss its only international tournament of the year by going on strike.
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A month after firing Nichols, the USWNT restructured its players’ union, electing Becky Sauerbrunn, Christen Press and Meghan Klingenberg to leadership roles and hiring a new union executive director, Becca Roux. Talks resumed and U.S. soccer President Sunil Gulati said the tone of the negotiations had changed, which he called a “positive.”
But since then, there has been nary a peep from either side about what a potential contract agreement might be. If there was ever a time to apply the type of pressure Morgan described, it could be now, under the relative spotlight of the SheBelieves Cup, and before NWSL preseason training camps begin on March 13.
In an apparently unrelated move, NWSL Commissioner Jeff Plush announced Thursday that he is stepping down “to pursue new opportunities.
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U.S. Soccer subsidizes players’ salaries for the 10-team NWSL, which is entering its fifth season. And after two other failed U.S. women’s leagues, it’s committed to this one’s success—It would be a huge embarrassment if the reigning World Cup champion nation couldn’t keep any of its best players on domestic rosters. (As it is, some national team players are already fleeing to Europe amid the contract uncertainty, a bruise for the league). The NWSL also just inked a three-year television deal with A&E, making it even more important that matches are as competitive and entertaining as possible.
Sauerbrunn told the Associated Press in February that the players would not publicly discuss the negotiations.
“Hopefully, the next time we talk to the public about it, we’ll have the CBA signed and done and we can talk more about the specifics at that time,” she said.
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She’s stuck to her promise so far, and it’s unclear what’s happening with the negotiations. Maybe they’re going great; maybe they aren’t. But if it’s the latter, there won’t be a better time than now for the players to play their last card and announce an NWSL season strike.School's homeland security studies get noticed JOPPA, Md. Call it vocational education for the 9/11 generation. The nation's first comprehensive high school homeland security program, a three-year course to help kids land jobs in the growing anti-terrorism industry, is in its infancy in Maryland. But it's recently been attracting the attention of educators and school districts from as far away as California and Florida. The program, started at Maryland's Joppatowne High School with 61 sophomores, provides "an opportunity for kids to see relevance to being in school," says Frank Mezzanotte of the Harford (Md.) County Public Schools. "It gives kids additional options." COOL SCHOOL: Course helps Md. teens become better citizens Students have toured a Coast Guard command center, visited a county detection center, practiced emergency response in a fictional town called "Joppaville" and heard an Iraqi-born speaker explain cultural differences between Americans and Middle Easterners. "We're trying to set high expectations," says student Megan Bell, 15. "We don't want to be known as just the school with the good football team. Now we have homeland security." Other school districts are taking notice. Mezzanotte says he's been contacted by individual schools and education departments in more than a half-dozen states. "Joppatowne broke the ground for all of us," says Lise Foran of Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland. Next fall, Meade High School will begin a Homeland Security program. "We're following in Joppatowne's footsteps." And on Wednesday, Mezzanotte will be in Las Vegas, where he has been asked to give a presentation on the program to the Association for Career and Technical Education annual conference. Some question whether the program will teach students to be open-minded about the government's national security policies, given its goal of getting kids jobs with defense and homeland security contractors and the military. The liberal magazine Mother Jones dubbed Joppatowne "the academy of military-industrial-complex studies." Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University history of education professor, says "the devil lies in whether this is going to be a school for education or indoctrination." Other educators applaud the school for taking steps to prepare kids for one of the nation's expanding job markets and for connecting what they learn in school to what's happening in the real world. "This sounds to me like it has all the earmarks of what keeps young people in school," says former West Virginia governor Bob Wise, now head of the Alliance for Excellent Education. "It gives them the skills necessary for the modern workplace." An 80-minute class in the homeland security curriculum at Joppatowne High School last week featured Iraqi-born Haider Abbud, a former NATO adviser in Iraq, who described the cultural and religious differences between Middle Easterners and Americans.
By Dennis Drenner for USA TODAY Conversation guidelines: USA TODAY welcomes your thoughts, stories and information related to this article. Please stay on topic and be respectful of others. Keep the conversation appropriate for interested readers across the map.COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Republican lawmakers have introduced a new wave of legislation that would continue to expand gun rights in Ohio.
Among the proposed changes are measures that would allow public officials to carry firearms in the Statehouse and other "non-secured" public buildings, ban law enforcement from melting down confiscated guns and loosen the state's definition of "automatic firearm."
The fresh legislation piggybacks on years of significant changes to Ohio's gun laws, which began in 2004 when Republican Gov. Bob Taft signed a law legalizing concealed handguns.
The proposals have gun advocates rejoicing and opponents reeling.
House Bill 191, introduced by Republican Rep. John Becker, of Southwest Ohio, would strip a clause from Ohio's definition of "automatic firearm" that classifies a semi-automatic weapon that fires more than 31 rounds without reloading as "automatic." The legislation would keep language that defines "automatic firearm" as a gun that fires multiple rounds with a single trigger pull -- a more traditional definition.
Doug Deeken, director of Ohioans for Concealed Carry, said the move is "just good house cleaning legislation."
"A firearm is either automatic, or it isn't," Deeken said. "This keeps Ohio from calling something a machine gun that the federal government wouldn't even call a machine gun. It's an arbitrary limit that needs to go."
Toby Hoover, executive director of the Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence, said housekeeping is not the rationale behind HB 191.
"I think the motive there is to make sure Ohio is not limiting the number of rounds that can be in a magazine," Hoover said. "I think the motive is to make sure the number of rounds you can have is unlimited."
Becker's House Bill 210 would stop the state's law enforcement agencies from destroying legal, confiscated firearms and ammunition. Instead, agencies would be compelled to sell the ordnance to a federally licensed dealer.
The measure also gives law enforcement the option to sell the guns "for sporting use or as a museum piece or collectors' item."
"I like this one a lot," Deeken said. "The police or any agency should not be melting down a revenue source. They are beholden to this cult-like agenda in which they have to destroy them.
"I think it's a crime to melt down guns. The gun didn't do anything wrong. A person did something wrong."
Becker is also toiling on legislation that would give public employees who have a concealed-carry license the right to carry guns inside the Statehouse, including the House and Senate floors.
The legislation, which Becker said could be introduced this month, would apply to all "non-secured" public buildings.
"If the nut cases can get in with guns, then the good guys need to be able to defend themselves and shoot back," Becker said. "The bottom line is that it's about safety and security."
A "non-secured" public building would be defined as one that does not require every person who enters to pass through a metal detector, Becker said, adding that he intends to prohibit local and state governments from overriding the legislation if it's passed.
"I'm sort of divided on this one," Hoover said. "Do I think guns belong there? Absolutely not. But it's good that [legislators] are no longer exempting themselves from where guns are allowed."
The bill could run into a wall with the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board. The group is considering spending nearly $2 million to fortify the Statehouse with metal detectors and other security measures.
Becker said he has spoken to public employees in his district and has not received any negative feedback.
The idea doesn't sit well, however, with Democratic Rep. Nickie Antonio of Lakewood.
"At first blush, I think this is irresponsible and very troubling to hear," Antonio said. "It's just inappropriate. We are not living out on the prairie in the Wild West."
Since the 2004 legalization of concealed carry, Ohio lawmakers have tweaked the law to make it less restrictive, for example, by allowing concealed guns in bars, restaurants and stadiums. They also have enacted other laws expanding gun rights, including a measure in 2006 that voided assault weapons bans in Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton and the "castle doctrine" law in 2008, which assumes a homeowner who injures, maims or kills an intruder is acting in self-defense and places the burden on police and prosecutors to prove otherwise.
Becker's three gun proposals are not the only controversial firearms legislation on the agenda of this General Assembly, which is controlled by Republicans.
GOP Rep. Terry Johnson, of Southern Ohio, introduced a bill that would allow people from outside the state to carry a concealed gun in Ohio if they hold a concealed handgun license issued in another state. The proposal included in House Bill 203 would apply only to licenses issued by states that recognize concealed handgun licenses issued in Ohio.
In addition, HB 203 would change the training requirement to obtain a concealed handgun license. Current law states a person must go through 12 hours of training. HB 203 doesn't set a minimum number of hours required for competency.
Johnson's bill would also arm Medicaid fraud investigators appointed by the attorney general and expand the "castle doctrine" to apply outside of the home in any place a gun owner "lawfully has a right to be."
"Not everyone is a track star and the legal duty to retreat in Ohio law places the elderly, the infirm and those of us who have gained a few pounds at risk," Deeken said. "It's absurd that in order to satisfy the law that I must flee to protect my loved ones. 'Castle doctrine' was a great first step but [HB 203] is where the law should be."
Johnson did not respond to a request for comment on his gun legislation.
Hoover said the slew of new gun legislation would misplace priorities.
"We are making guns more important than people," Hoover said. "The whole scheme is always to let more people carry more guns in more places with less training."
On Twitter: @BlackwellTweets
Gun restrictions eased in recent years
January 2004: Republican Gov. Bob Taft signs a bill legalizing concealed carry in Ohio.
December 2006: The legislature overrides a Taft veto, enacting a bill that expands the concealed-carry law. The bill allows permit holders to drive with their weapons holstered and hidden and sets one set of gun rules statewide -- nullifying more than 80 local firearms ordinances, including assault weapon bans in Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton.
June 2008: Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland signs the "castle doctrine" bill, which assumes a homeowner who injures, maims or kills an intruder is acting in self-defense and shifts the burden to police and prosecutors to prove otherwise. The law also allows concealed-carry permit holders to transport loaded firearms or unloaded weapons and ammunition together in the unlocked glove compartments or center consoles of vehicles.
June 2011: Republican Gov. John Kasich signs a bill that allows permit holders to carry firearms in all of Ohio's Class D licensed liquor establishments, which include bars, restaurants, nightclubs, shopping malls, museums and sports stadiums.
December 2012: Kasich signs a bill that permits guns to be kept in vehicles in the underground parking garage at the Ohio Statehouse. The bill also eliminates a requirement that concealed-carry permit holders obtain a competency certificate to get their licenses renewed and changes the definition of an unloaded weapon so that magazines could be kept loaded in a vehicle as long as they were not kept in the same compartment as a gun.
June 2013: Lawmakers introduce more gun-related bills. One would eliminate language in state law that defines an automatic weapon as "any semi-automatic firearm designed or specially adapted to fire more than 31 cartridges without reloading." Another would prohibit law enforcement officials from melting down confiscated guns.
Coming soon?
Legislation is in the works to allow public employees with permits to carry guns in the Statehouse and other public buildings.With Number Of Ticks On The Rise, This Season Could Be 'Horrific'
The Wall Street Journal is warning us today that tick season is upon us and because of a series of ecological events, it could be a "horrific" season for the diseases they carry.
But the Journal reports that while some of the uptick (The Journal uses this pun: "This Season's Ticking Bomb") is directly related to this season, there's a bigger narrative here. They explain:
"Between 1992 and 2010, reported cases of Lyme doubled, to nearly 23,000, and there were another 7,600 probable cases in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But CDC officials say the true incidence of Lyme may be three times higher. Other infections, including babesiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and anaplasmosis are steadily increasing, too. While not all ticks carry disease, some may spread two or three types of infections in a single bite. "Researchers say the primary reasons for the global rise of tick-borne illness include the movement of people into areas where animal hosts and tick populations are abundant, and growth in the population of animals that carry ticks, including deer, squirrels and mice."
The AP reports that this year's mild winter doesn't mean there will be more ticks but that they will be out before people are expecting them.
But what we found interesting is a study done by the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies in New York. It found that this year may be perfect for a large tick population that is very hungry and looking for its next meal — that means you.
Fox News spoke to Richard S. Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the institute, who explained that in 2010 there was a huge crop of acorns and those acorns led to a big mice population. Ticks had a field day feeding on mice. But last fall, there was a much smaller acorn crop, which led to a smaller population of mice. Now, Fox reports, "this large tick population has grown into nymphs and are ready for their next meal."
"This spring, there will be a lot of black-legged ticks in our forests looking for a blood meal. And instead of finding a white-footed mouse, they are going to find other mammals—like us," Ostfeld told Fox.
So, what to do? The Wall Street Journal has a good guide on how to avoid tick bites and how to recognize the symptoms of Lyme disease.
We'd say one of the easy pointer to follow is to "bathe or shower as soon as possible after going indoors (preferably within two hours) to wash off and more easily find ticks that may be on you."The Prime Minister is setting up a bitter clash over the changes next year, as the Liberal Democrats have said they will vote against the proposals.
Mr Clegg, the deputy Prime Minister, said on Monday that his party could not support the boundary changes because the Conservatives have dropped reforms to the House of Lords.
He declared the Coalition's contract to be "broken" and accused the Conservatives of failing to live up to their promises.
However, Mr Cameron today brushed off Mr Clegg's claims by saying he "does not accept" accusations that the Coalition agreement has been breached.
"We want the boundary change vote to go ahead," he said in Wales today.
The Prime Minister said he would ask every MP to support the plans to make parliamentary constituencies more equal in size.
"I am going to be saying to every MP 'Look, the House of Commons ought to be smaller, it ought to be less expensive and we ought to have seats that are exactly the same size'," he said.
"I think everyone should come forward and vote for that proposal because it is a very sensible proposal and it will be put forward."
But he said ultimately "every party will have to make up its own mind how it votes."
The decision to proceed with a vote means Liberal Democrat ministers will have to vote against the Government - potentially a sackable offence.
Jeremy Browne, a foreign office minister, became the first Liberal Democrat to confirm he would vote against the Government.
"What has become clear is that the two parties cannot agree on that constitutional reform package and it seems to me to make sense that if there's an area we can't agree on, we put that to one side, we accept that we can't agree on that and we get on with working together on all the areas we can agree on," he told the BBC.
Duncan Hames, a ministerial aide to Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, also said he was prepared to resign his job on the government payroll rather than vote for the boundary reforms.
The Government must now decide how to spend weeks of parliamentary time previously earmarked for debating the Lords reforms.
The Prime Minister today said scrapping Lords reform would at least give ministers "the space to make the economy the Government's number one priority".
He said he was not prepared to see Parliament "gummed up" with arguments over the reforms, adding: "I was not going to have months and months of wrangling."
"It became quite clear to me that the Labour Party and others in Parliament were not going to allow Lords reform through," he said.0 0 0 35 0
Sooner or later every single IT guy comes to the idea of having some lab. There are a million reasons why you would need a lab: learning new technologies, improving skills, trying crazy ideas you would never dare to try in the production network, you name it. Even though it is a work-related activity for most home labbers this is just another hobby for many of us. That’s why people spend so many hours of their personal time building the homelab, investing significant funds into new hardware, thoroughly planning its setup, looking for a help in online communities or sharing their experience to help others. There is a whole universe of home labbers and I am happy to be part of this community.
In this post, I would like to share my experience with 3 generations of home labs I have had so far and the thoughts about next generation.
Generation 1
The first idea of having my own home lab was triggered by a new project at work 4 years ago. At that time, I used to work for a small managed services provider and my task was to create a PoC of the DR scenario.
The project’s focus was mostly about failing over public IP subnets using BGP and I was planning to use GNS3 to simulate networking part of the disaster recovery, but to make it more interesting I decided to use nested vSphere as well for a full-blown test.
Coincidentally, I was looking for a new laptop as my daily commute on the train was about 2 hours and it was the perfect time to do something useful.
After some research, I ended up with latest and top specs MacBook Pro. With i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and 1TB SSD drive I had plenty of capacity and performance resources at that time.
Here is a quick look at what I could squeeze into one laptop for my project.
Please note that I was running vSphere 5.5. These days, I will not be able to squeeze the same setup running vSphere 6.x into the MacBook.
On top of that, it was a very mobile lab, so my 10 weekly hours of commute time were more productive.
However, this solution was not impeccable. There were few issues I had faced with:
16 GB of RAM looked like a lot of memory at first, but very quickly RAM has become the bottleneck and I had to juggle virtual machines to stay within 13-14 GB of available RAM. Unfortunately, there was no way to add more RAM to the MacBook.
It was not possible to have the lab running 24×7. The laptop was getting hot and a bit noisy. So, I had to use few scripts to power on/power off different lab deployments in the correct order. And sometimes it could easily take 20 minutes before you could log in to vCenter.
You don’t get much bang for the buck. For 3200 AUD I could have bought way bigger and juicier second-hand rack server, but I had no place in our house to put this kind of server.
With all that said, the Macbook served its goal quite well even though this wasn’t an ideal lab.
Generation 2
vSphere 6.0 release raised system requirements. vCSA server only would take half of available RAM on the Mac. So, I felt like it was time to man up and get some real gear.
I spent days exploring different options and trying to match my budget. There were very few options of the small form-factor server at that time. I know people used Apple Mac Mini. A bit later Intel NUC was introduced on the market and I know few people who built the 5-7 nodes vSAN cluster on them. There was also HP Microserver Gen8. However, none of them was my choice giving the 16GB limit per node, though I liked how compact and quiet these servers are. Going with NUC or Mac Mini would also mean having 1Gb Ethernet port only. Some people tried to use USB-ethernet adapter and invested the significant amount of efforts to make it work, but any new ESXi version could break its functionality.
That’s when I stumbled upon reviews of Avaton processors and few feedbacks of running ESXi on these CPUs. This was a new generation of Intel Atom processors. Very common perception of Atom processors is that they are not capable to run the serious workload. Their niche is low power routers/switches/mobile phones/etc. However, Avaton showed impressive performance results compared to its predecessors. According to multiple performance comparison charts, Avaton CPUs were on par with Intel i3 processors which was very promising.
Also, none of the reviews of ESXi running on Avaton had any complaints about performance. The last bit of info that convinced me to buy Avaton CPUs was that they supported up to 64 GB of memory. That means I could start with 32GB per server and still had head room for future expansion.
The main benefits of Avaton were:
TDP under 20W
It is fanless
Small form factor
Supports up to 64GB of RAM
Officially supported by VMware (even in vSphere 6.5 U1)
Has IPMI interface and 2 built-in gigabit NICs
For the shared storage, I chose Synology DS415+ which seemed to be the perfect balance of performance and price.
BOM
* Prices are in AUD, actual for July 2015
I wrote a couple of detailed posts on my blog about planning and building this setup. It was a bit challenging at first because the last time I had to assemble PC myself was about 15 years ago. I also recorded a short video about vSphere performance on these processors.
Overall, I was very happy with these servers. They gave me a feeling of having the real servers, especially when using server’s console through IPMI. And TP-Link switch had familiar Cisco-like CLI. Running 2 servers in HA cluster with shared storage allowed me to update servers without shutting down all virtual machines. That is still one of my favorite arguments against running everything on one large server.
This setup was perfect to prepare for VCAP5-DCA exam and to improve my vSphere skills.
As always, it was not perfect. The storage became the bottleneck very quickly. With 4 x 1TB 7.2K HDD in RAID5, you cannot get enough IOPS for 10-15 virtual machines. I made some attempts to improve the storage performance using Pernix FVP, but that was not successful enough.
Also, as my lab was growing I noticed that Avaton were a bit underpowered. This was especially noticeable when I was powering on the 2-site nested lab which could take up to 40 minutes.
However, the biggest disappointment was the RAM price. Even though the Avaton CPU supports up to 64GB of RAM you would need 4 x 16GB unbuffered DDR3 DIMMs. With 200 AUD price for each DIMM, it would cost you 1600 dollars to get to 128GB RAM. However, 8GB DIMMs were relatively cheap so you end up with 32GB of RAM in each server.
Over time I extended my home lab with few local disks – SSD and HDD – and got a taste of vSphere vSAN, but I couldn’t run it in the supported config with two servers only so I settled down with StarWind Virtual SAN for a while. I even wrote a very comprehensive 7-parts review of the Startwind product.
StarWind Virtual SAN eliminates any need for physical shared storage just by mirroring internal flash and storage resources between hypervisor servers. Furthermore, the solution can be run on the off-the-shelf hardware. Such design allows StarWind Virtual SAN to not only achieve high performance and efficient hardware utilization but also reduce operational and capital expenses. Learn more about ➡ StarWind Virtual SAN.
Generation 3
It took me a year to grow out of this lab. It was my first year since I started working for VMware as a PSO consultant and idea of having the lab with the full suite of VMware products looked very appealing. However, the specs of the Avaton lab was nowhere near what you need to run vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vROPs, vRA, vRLI products. And I wanted to run all of them at the same time because you never know what you will have to test next day after a customer asks you a tricky question.
So, after another couple of weeks of reading reviews and forums, I ordered my first Supermicro SYS-E200-8D. I even wrote a review comparing this model with Intel NUC.
The major benefits of this model for my 3rd generation of the home lab were:
High performance 6 cores Xeon D-1528 processor
Up to 128GB of RAM
Low TDP – 35W
Built-in 2 x 10GB and 2 x 1GB ports
Compact form factor
M2 slot
After few months of tests, I realized that it was not quite enough for my living room. The 2 x 35mm fans would rev up during high load and become very loud. Also, I was not happy with space for a single 2.5 disk in the small case.
3 months later I ordered X10SDV-6C+-TLN4F mobo – it is the same one that is installed in SYS-E200-8D and placed it in a bigger case with bigger and quieter fans. Additional benefits of this custom build over E200 was that I could use PCIe slot and install more than one disk. It turned out to be the ideal home server. So, I moved mobo from E200 to a bigger case too. Now the servers were taking a bit more space, but they were consistently quiet all the time.
Here is the BOM of my custom build
Now, with 4 servers in total I built 2 vSAN ROBO clusters:
Each cluster runs its Witness appliance in the opposite cluster. Officially this scenario is not supported, but it provides enough redundancy for the homelab and let me play with Hybrid and AF vSAN. Now I also have enough capacity to use NSX.
All these improvements and additional capacity made me re-consider the way I was using home lab. Previously, I would use my vSphere to test whatever I wanted. After few months of active testing I usually had quite a mess – many virtual machines I couldn’t even remember why I deployed, inconsistent configuration of hosts, plenty of alerts and warnings in vCenter. When I had just a vSphere in the home lab it was quite easy to re-install everything from the scratch instead of fixing the lab issues. But now with vSAN, NSX, vROPs the re-installation of the home lab could easily take few days. So, I started treating my home lab as production environment.
The nested environments became the new sandbox. William Lam did a fantastic job creating nested ESXi appliance and then developing PowerCLI script that automates deployment of the nested vSphere and vSAN. NSX allowed to create limitless combination of network topologies for the nested labs. These factors led to new home lab concept – vSphere-as-a-Service (VaaS).
If you are a big fan of vRA you can have a look at the following blog post explaining how to build VMware Hands-On-Lab with vRA and NSX.
There is a still a discussion between those who prefer to consume VaaS in one powerful server or others like me who still choose to use multiple physical servers as you have High Availability and more flexibility during patching/upgrades, though it costs more than a single server solution.
The only drawback of the 3rd generation of my home lab is unexpected raise of the memory price. The DDR4 price almost doubled since last year and there is nothing you can do about it. That is the only factor which sometimes makes me think about second-hand rack-mounted server, e.g. Dell R710.
The home network grew as well. I realised how big it has become only after I made a high-level diagram of my network.
The biggest and most valuable addition to the network was a tiny EdgeRouterX which proved to be a reliable multifunctional device. It now plays the role of router, firewall, switch, OpenVPN server, OpenVPN client.
All-in-all, the home lab has been an interesting and useful hobby. I use it almost daily in my work and I can’t see myself without home lab in my current job. I already have plans to expand it further and definitely prefer to use my own private cloud rather than public ones.
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No Ratings YetAs Erik Spoelstra was howling at the officials Monday night, for missing a clear Bradley Beal travel on a pivotal possession, many Heat fans on social media were howling at the Heat coach.
How, they wondered, could Spoelstra have sat Hassan Whiteside for the game's final 14 minutes with the Wizards going extremely small, and Whiteside 7-for-7 in the game? And would have the result have been different, different than 114-103 Wizards, with Washington scoring the final 11 points of the game?
Whiteside may have been wondering the same. He seemed lost in space during late huddles, biting or curling his lips, and he didn't stick around to speak with the media afterward.
Assuming that might happen, I thought would be worthwhile to get the Wizards' perspective instead -- specifically their coach, Randy Wittman, and their journeyman wing, Jared Dudley, who played a lot of center at 6-foot-7.
Did Wittman go small in part to get Whiteside off the floor?
"Well, I didn't have any other option, in truth," said Wittman, who was without frontcourt regulars Marcin Gortat and Nene. "And Duds does a good job of defending. I thought he fought (Chris) Bosh as good as he could. You know, we probably would have continued to do that. If they wanted to go big, we felt we'll let 'em post Whiteside. You know, that's something I don't think they want to do a whole lot the way they play. So we're making them do something they don't want to do."
Some will read that as an indictment of Spoelstra. Why not just punch it inside? But couldn't it also be seen as a dare to go to Whiteside, whose post game -- especially his passing -- still requires some refinement? It's not as if Whiteside was killing the Wizards with his post play earlier. Six of his seven baskets were dunks off passes from Dwyane Wade (three assists) or Goran Dragic (three assists). He's becoming an elite relief option, when a guard can't get all the way to the rim, or that guard sees a lob as a better option than a shot. That doesn't make him a primary option, not yet.
OK, now Dudley.
When's the last time he played that much center?
"You know what?" Dudley said. "Junior high. When I was in high school or college, you wanted to play the three/two. It was bad to be a tweener. Now people are looking for that. So I don't even look at myself as a three. I look at myself as a four. But to be able to go five, it's weird, but you do it right, it can be effective at times. And sometimes we have to do it a little too much, because of our situation. But even with Gortat coming back, it's not a bad thing to do it spot minutes every blue moon."
When I suggested that Spoelstra left Whiteside on the bench in the fourth quarter out of the fear of chasing Dudley out to the arc, Dudley replied, "I bet."
Dudley explained that, with Josh McRoberts guarding him, and Wade guarding point guard Ramon Sessions, the Wizards got the Heat in a pick-and-roll situation, and Sessions made an open three-pointer.
"So whoever has the mismatch with the big, we were gonna put them in pick-and-rolls," Dudley said. "And that's what we have to do with our team right now."
Dudley said, as many have, that the NBA's current smallball trend started with the Heat's Big Three team, with LeBron James at power forward and Bosh at center. "And then the uniqueness of Draymond Green (in Golden State)," Dudley said. "(Stephen) Curry and the shooters have so much more space. And for us, it was obviously due to circumstances, but we have Otto (Porter) who can rebound pretty good for a three-man. And myself, I think I did a pretty good job on Bosh. If you have fours who can defend, otherwise it's gonna be closed curtains."
Dudley said if Whiteside had come back in the game, he would have fronted the Heat center, with teammates trapping if the ball went over the top.
"But the hardest thing with someone like him is not the post-ups, it's the offensive rebounds," Dudley said. "Because you're helping on D-Wade, and the shot goes up, and then now I've got to find him, he's already down low. And it's hard for me to move him. Now I can't move him."
For the record, Whiteside has played in 15 of the Heat's 19 fourth quarter, and |
are fragments -- maybe 15 seconds on the evening news. It is with extended interviews, such as the Sunday shows, that we get to visit with the man -- and that man, for all his splendid virtues, seems to lack fight. Maybe he's worried about how America would receive an angry black man or maybe he's just too cool to ever get hot, but the result is that we have little insight into his passions: What, above all, does he care about? The answer, at least to the Sunday TV viewer, was nothing much.
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One wife, many husbands.
That’s the solution to China’s huge surplus of single men, says Xie Zuoshi, an economics professor at the Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, whose recent proposal to allow polyandry has gone viral.
Legalizing marriage between two men would also be a good idea, Mr. Xie wrote in a post that has since been removed from his blogs. (He has at least three blogs, and his Sina blog alone has more than 2.6 million followers.)
By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors — called guanggun, or “bare branches.” Birth control policies that since 1979 have limited many families to one child, a cultural preference for boys and the widespread, if illegal, practice of sex-selective abortion have contributed to a gender imbalance that hovers around 117 boys born for every 100 girls.
Though some could perhaps detect a touch of Jonathan Swift in the proposal, Mr. Xie wrote that he was approaching the problem from a purely economic point of view.
Many men, especially poor ones, he noted, are unable to find a wife and have children, and are condemned to living and dying without offspring to support them in old age, as children are required to do by law in China. But he believes there is a solution.
A shortage raises the price of goods — in this case, women, he explained. Rich men can afford them, but poor men are priced out. This can be solved by having two men share the same woman.
“With so many guanggun, women are in short supply and their value increases,” he wrote. “But that doesn’t mean the market can’t be adjusted. The guanggun problem is actually a problem of income. High-income men can find a woman because they can pay a higher price. What about low-income men? One solution is to have several take a wife together.”
He added: “That’s not just my weird idea. In some remote, poor places, brothers already marry the same woman, and they have a full and happy life.”
Polyandry has been practiced before in China, particularly in impoverished areas, as a way to pool resources and avoid the breakup of property.
Yet much of the online response to Mr. Xie’s proposal has been outrage.
“Is this a human being speaking?” a user with the handle dihuihui wrote on Weibo.
“Trash-talking professor, many single guys want to ask, ‘Where’s your wife?’ ” a user who identified as Shanyu jinxiang1887003537 wrote.
Attempts to contact Mr. Xie on Monday were unsuccessful.
On Sunday, he published an indignant rebuttal on one of his blogs, accusing his critics of being driven by empty notions of traditional morality that are impractical and selfish — even hypocritical.
“Because I promoted the idea that we should allow poor men to marry the same woman to solve the problem of 30 million guanggun, I’ve been endlessly abused,” he wrote. “People have even telephoned my university to harass me. These people have groundlessly accused me of promoting immoral and unethical ideas.
“If you can’t find a solution that doesn’t violate traditional morality,” he continued, “then why do you criticize me for violating traditional morality? You are in favor of a couple made up of one man, one woman. But your morality will lead to 30 million guanggun with no hope of finding a wife. Is that your so-called morality?”
In addition to provoking guardians of traditional morality, the proposal has been pilloried by feminists and gay rights advocates.
“Men are publicly debating how to allocate women, as though women were commodities like houses or cars, in order to realize some grand political ideal originating from either the patriarchal left or the patriarchal right,” Zheng Churan, one of five women’s rights activists detained in March, wrote in an essay for a WeChat group called Groundbreaking.
“Behind the imbalanced sex ratio of 30 million bachelors lie 30 million baby girls who died due to sex discrimination. But somehow everyone’s still crying that some men can’t find wives.”
Mr. Xie also has supporters. On his Sina blog, he posted a comment from a student at Nanchang Hangkong University. “You are standing alongside the poorest working-class people,” the student wrote. “When there’s no better way, why don’t we get rid of so-called morality and solve society’s problems?
Vanessa Piao contributed research.
Follow Didi Kirsten Tatlow on Twitter @dktatlow.Now that Google has conquered a majority of the earth’s major streets with its Google Street View project, the company is starting to move inside. It’s creating the Google Art Project, a virtual equivalent of 17 major art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Britain and National Gallery in London, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, among many others.
Amit Sood, director of the project, said in a company blog post that the documentation of major museums began when a small group of Google employees with a passion for art started wondering how they could make major art museums, and the works they house, more accessible to people worldwide.
The new art project is housed at an interactive Web site, Googleartproject.com. Once inside the site, viewers can travel through a museum’s interior through the same technology used to navigate city streets on Google Maps and Google Earth. People can move from room to room within the virtual space; over 1,000 artworks painted by 400 artists can be seen.
Mr. Sood said the artworks were documented using an extremely high resolution technology, “gigapixel,” which allows people to zoom into the images to see detailed brush strokes and the subtlety of each artist. “Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera,” Mr. Sood wrote.
The museum project is one of a number of digital explorations taking place in museums today as these venerable institutions struggle to adapt to the changing digital world.
The video below shows a behind-the-scenes look at the Google Art team building the site.The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.
In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.
This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.
Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
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Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because “they disproportionately favor upper-income voters” who “don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.” After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.
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The insults continued on Tuesday night when a surrogate preceding Mrs. Clinton onstage at an Ohio rally, Tom Buffenbarger of the machinists’ union, derided Obama supporters as “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” Even as he ranted, exit polls in Wisconsin were showing that Mr. Obama had in fact won that day among voters with the least education and the lowest incomes. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Obama received the endorsement of the latte-drinking Teamsters.
If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama’s “plagiarism.” And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.
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The other persistent gripe among some Clinton supporters is that a hard-working older woman has been unjustly usurped by a cool young guy intrinsically favored by a sexist culture. Slate posted a devilish video mash-up of the classic 1999 movie “Election” : Mrs. Clinton is reduced to a stand-in for Tracy Flick, the diligent candidate for high school president played by Reese Witherspoon, and Mr. Obama is implicitly cast as the mindless jock who upsets her by dint of his sheer, unearned popularity.
There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however demeaning it may be to both candidates, but in reality, the more consequential ur-text for the Clinton 2008 campaign may be another Hollywood classic, the Katharine Hepburn - Spencer Tracy “Pat and Mike” of 1952. In that movie, the proto-feminist Hepburn plays a professional athlete who loses a tennis or golf championship every time her self-regarding fiancé turns up in the crowd, pulling her focus and undermining her confidence with his grandstanding presence.
In the 2008 real-life remake of “Pat and Mike,” it’s not the fiancé, of course, but the husband who has sabotaged the heroine. The single biggest factor in Hillary Clinton’s collapse is less sexism in general than one man in particular — the man who began the campaign as her biggest political asset. The moment Bill Clinton started trash-talking about Mr. Obama and raising the specter of a co-presidency, even to the point of giving his own televised speech ahead of his wife’s on the night she lost South Carolina, her candidacy started spiraling downward.Thursday’s official announcement that Strikeforce’s January card will be its last on Showtime is certain to fuel plenty of speculation over the weeks ahead.
Chief amongst it will be which Strikeforce fighters have punched tickets to the UFC, provided the promotion is indeed shuttering and not merely ending its broadcast deal.
It has long been presumed that Strikeforce champion Gilbert Melendez is the world’s best non-UFC lightweight. But before Strikeforce came into the Zuffa fold, there was World Extreme Cagefighting. And Anthony Pettis, the final 155-pound champ in WEC history, knows a thing or two about not having three awfully big letters in front of your name.
Pettis came to the UFC after the merger with the WEC, which came after WEC 53 in December 2010. At that event, he beat Benson Henderson – the current UFC champ with two title defenses already on his resume – to win the final WEC belt. He was the promotion’s most highly touted lightweight, not that guys like Henderson, Donald Cerrone, Danny Castillo, Anthony Njokuani were any slouches.
The WEC lightweights had doubters, and lots of them. But they made their presence known in a big hurry, in particular the triumvirate of Henderson, Pettis and Cerrone. Those big three went a combined 8-2 in the UFC in 2011. In 2012, their success continued – going unbeaten at a combined 6-0.
The two losses came when Pettis was outwrestled by Clay Guida at the TUF 13 Finale, though Pettis worked throughout the fight from his back at submission attempts that never quite came close enough, and when Cerrone tried to go a basically unheard of 5-0 in a UFC calendar year and was outboxed by Nate Diaz at UFC 141 a year ago.
Their success, though, even caught one of the WEC’s firmest believers a little off guard.
“It surprised me how good the WEC guys did (in the UFC),” Pettis told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) earlier this month. “I mean, we’re at the top of the top. Everybody doubted the WEC – our skills weren’t good enough. And we proved everybody wrong. Henderson’s at the top, I’m right there, me and Cerrone are about to fight for the No. 1 contender. We’re all very well-skilled – the WEC had the best 155ers in the world, and now we’re fighting to be at the top again.”
And indeed, that’s what Pettis (15-2 MMA, 2-1 UFC) and Cerrone (19-4 MMA, 6-1 UFC) are set for – a fight to be at the top. The two never got a chance to fight in the WEC – though had that promotion not been folded into the UFC, it would have been likely that Pettis’ first title defense would have come against Cerrone, who lost a pair of title bouts to Henderson.
Pettis and Cerrone meet on the main card of UFC on FOX 6, which takes place Jan. 26 at United Center in Chicago. The main card airs live on FOX following prelims on FX and Facebook.
It’s a fight years in the making, and despite falling below a flyweight title fight and the return of Quinton “Rampage” Jackson on the bill, it’s arguably the most anticipated fight on the card.
The winner, as Pettis said, could very well be the next challenger for Henderson, who is coming off a dismantling of Nate Diaz earlier this month at UFC on FOX 5. Of course, if Melendez comes into the fold, as Strikeforce champion he may jump to the front of the line. And that’s something Pettis is no stranger to.
When he came to the UFC, he was expected to meet the winner of then-champ Frankie Edgar and Gray Maynard at UFC 125. That fight, of course, resulted in a draw, and the two didn’t rematch until October 2011 at UFC 136.
In the meantime, Pettis took the fight with Guida, lost a decision, dropped back in the title picture and picked up a few detractors. His next fight was a cautious split-decision win over Jeremy Stephens at UFC 136. But he followed that with a head-kick knockout of Joe Lauzon in February, his most recent fight before going on the shelf with surgery.
Before the Lauzon fight, it had been a peculiar and quick fall from glory for the Milwaukee-based fighter whose “Showtime Kick” off the cage against Henderson was seen around the world, made him an instant star and guaranteed him a spot in highlight reels for eternity.
“When you’re coming off a loss like the Guida fight, you kind of have to play it safe,” Pettis explained. “You can’t have two losses in a row in the UFC. I was trying to find my bearings. In the Joe Lauzon fight, it all came together. I ended that fight quickly with a dangerous opponent. Lauzon is a dangerous, dangerous guy.
“I’m finding my own in the UFC now and I’m putting everything in the past behind. I’m not letting that WEC stuff get to my head, the ‘Showtime Kick,’ none of that stuff. I’m just going to keep remaking a name for myself with this fight.”
Cerrone has won back-to-back fights since his loss to Diaz, though his pace slowed considerably in 2012 with just the pair of fights after five UFC outings in 2011 – which gave him six fights in 379 days, a staggering frequency at the UFC level.
It’s an opponent Pettis has had his eyes on since he signed with the WEC, just like anyone else in the weight class.
“I pay attention to all the guys in the 155-pound division,” he said. “I’ve never had any of these guys as friends – eventually I’m going to be fighting these guys. Not that I hate them, but we’re going to be fighting one day. So I pay attention to everybody.”
And because he’s paid attention, he knows a few things about “Cowboy,” and it sounds like he believes it’s a fairly even matchup. The oddsmakers agree, making Cerrone just a slight favorite at -125 over Pettis’ -105, which may be due to what will be an 11-month layoff for Pettis as much as anything.
“He’s dangerous everywhere. I really have a lot of respect for his skill set,” Pettis said. “He’s a good kickboxer, he’s good off his back, he’s got decent wrestling – he’s as tough as they come. This is going to be a fight where someone’s going to make a mistake, and we have to capitalize. I’m training for a tough, tough fight with someone who’s good everywhere.”
If a win over Cerrone puts Pettis back in a title fight with Henderson, one in which he is once again chasing Henderson’s belt, that’s fine. If he has to wait a little longer, he’s used to it. And if someone else has Henderson’s title in the meantime, that’s fine, too.
Pettis knows why he’s here, and it doesn’t much matter who’s staring across the octagon from him.
“I should’ve had a title shot two years ago, and here we are in 2013 and I still have to fight my way to the top,” he said. “I’m not complaining about it, but there was a lot of stuff that didn’t happen. Until it really happens, then I’ll believe it.
“I don’t really care (who I fight). I beat Henderson once already, so it’s not for me to have a rematch. I don’t really care who it is. I beat him once, and I want the belt, so if it’s him and me, let’s do it.”
For more on UFC on FOX 6, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.GOLD Coasters have voted with their feet and made more than six million trips on the light rail system during its first year.
The $1.2 billion tram system today marks one year since it first took passengers and the Bulletin can reveal patronage figures have exceeded the wildest expectations of GoldLinQ and political leaders.
Figures show 6.18 million trips were made on the 13km system across 365 days — or around 18,200 trips each day.
UNIONS PUSH FOR LIGHT RAIL FUNDING
LIGHT RAIL IS STATE’S JOB: ABBOTT
media_camera Gold Coasters have voted with their feet and made millions of trips on the light rail in its first year.
This was far beyond the 5.70 million expected before launch, with the State Government now tipping close to 7 million in the next year.
These figures do not include the 80,000 people who used the trams on its free trial day one year ago. That figure was also above the forecast 50-70,000 users expected.
State Government budget papers show the trams have powered a 25 per cent spike in public transport usage on the Gold Coast and slashed patronage on buses.
Figures show the light rail has become so successful that it fell just short of exceeding the number of passengers on Brisbane’s CityCat ferry system.
Deputy Premier and Transport Minister Jackie Trad said the tram system had become the “backbone of the Gold Coast’s transport network”.
“Gold Coast light rail is a transformative piece of infrastructure that has helped to change the way people get around the Coast,” she said.
“The trams have travelled more than one million kilometres and driven a 25 per cent increase in public transport patronage on the Coast in the first year alone.
“Patronage continues to exceed expectations, with an average of more than 18,200 trips made on Gold Coast light rail each day.”
The success of the first year has added to the momentum for a deal to be struck to make the second stage, linking trams to trains, a reality.
Mayor Tom Tate, speaking from the UK, demanded the state and federal Governments “do the math” and fund the link between Griffith University and Helensvale.
“Everyone needs to do the math because these figures show there is no need for a feasibility study because we have a reality study,” he said.
“These figures show it will only grow in the future and I do not know of any business, be it public or private, that has been so much more successful than the prediction.
“This is a dream come true... we need to do stage two soon, and start planning for a future link to the airport.
“It is a no-brainer.”
An exclusive Bulletin Gold Coast Pulse survey found more than 82 per cent of respondents would like to see trams and trains linked, connecting the city through its burgeoning northern suburbs to Brisbane.
GoldLinQ boss Phil Mumford said he was looking forward to seeing patronage figures grow.
“G:link’s first birthday today is a fantastic milestone and everyone involved in getting the project to this point should be very proud of what has been achieved,” he said.
“We look forward to increasing this patronage... particularly as the city grows around the light rail, proving the value of this type of city building infrastructure”.
Join us on FacebookDoom's been having a bit of a renaissance of late. Sunn O))) are collaborating with Scott Walker, Earth just released a new album to mass critical acclaim and everyone wants to hear something that sounds even remotely like Deafheaven's Sunbather.
It's a good time, then, for the return of Dorset alchemists Electric Wizard who've been making corrosive doom metal without apology for over two decades. They're about to release their eighth studio effort Time To Die. It's the longest LP they've ever released and marks the reintroduction of original drummer Mark Greening into the mix.
And guess what you lucky doom fans, you can stream the whole of Time To Die right now, exclusively on Noisey. While you're listening you should probably check out our comprehensive A-Z of Electric Wizard.Pirate Party Australia: Moving Forward
[PDF Version]
With Julia Gillard calling the election for August 21 it is with some regret that we must announce we will not be able to contest this election as a Party. Our application to register is before the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), however a Party cannot be registered once an election has been called.
This does not mean that you won’t hear from us this election. We’ll continue to highlight important issues that have been largely neglected by other political parties, and to lobby and campaign for a better policy direction with respect to transparent governance, the Internet and civil liberties. We will continue to work to grow the Party, build a stronger base and be better placed to campaign for the next federal election. You may even see us at a state election. As with any start-up organisation, we are still finding ourselves, and our first National Congress occurs on July 31 in Sydney, where our members will formally adopt our first statement of platform, and our first manifesto — and discuss the future of the Party, the future of the democracy in Australia, and how we plan to make it better.
In the short time we’ve begun formally organising the Party, we’ve created what we believe has been a positive effect on political discourse — we’ve worked to highlight the issue of Internet censorship to many different community groups through various actions. We’ve highlighted the importance of access to information with Exit International, we’ve worked with other groups to show the ineffectiveness of the proposed mandatory Internet censorship regime of the Australian Labor Party.
The issue of file sharing, and how copyright should function in the digital paradigm, the importance of our civil liberties and network freedom, is increasingly becoming a topic of discussion and we hope to continue in making this a topic of national debate. Access to information, knowledge and culture, and how we relate to them, is quickly becoming the most important debate. The information society demands an information party — we are that party. We will continue to be that voice.
The deceptively named Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) threatens freedom, access to pharmaceuticals and threatens the democratic process. The prospect of blanket data retention that represents a wholesale invasion of privacy is looming. These are the issues about which we should be asking lawmakers in this campaign — make them accountable, make them promise they will not marginalise civil liberties, and think about where your vote will go. It is the most important and powerful mechanism you have as a citizen in a democratic nation such as ours.
We won’t tell you how to vote — there are other parties that have some overlap. We may provide an analysis of other parties and their policies, possibly including some recommendations, however we hope you examine each party’s formal and written policies before casting your vote. Choose a party with policies that you are comfortable with, place your own preferences, and use the power that preferential voting provides to direct preference flow.1 Also, make certain that you are enrolled!
Choose a minor party that you think will do great things for this country. Our preferential voting system means a vote for a minor party is not a vote wasted!
We regret that we cannot represent you as candidates at the forthcoming federal election, but we will not be giving up, and we will still work to make these issues election issues, and topics of public debate and concern.
[1] http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/07/how-to-vote-guide.htmlSrinagar: Terrorist sympathisers in Kashmir Valley have named cricket teams participating in certain tournaments after terrorists, a trend security officials say should be nipped in the bud to avoid "huge problems".
A cricket tournament was recently played in Tral area of south Kashmir's Pulwama district which had few participating teams named after terrorists like Aabid Khan Qalandars, Khalid Aryans and Burhan Lions.
While Burhan has emerged as one of the most wanted commander of Hizbul Mujahideen over the past one year, Khalid was his brother who was killed in a security forces' operation.
Burhan had shot into prominence late 2015 after he uploaded pictures of his and his comrades on a social networking site.
Several of 11 terrorists featuring in those pictures have been eliminated but Burhan remains elusive for the security forces.
Many sports events, named after slain terrorists and separatist leaders, have been held over the past 20 years in different parts of Kashmir.
Shaheed-e-Millat cricket tournament, organised in memory of Mirwaiz Mohammad Farooq -- slain father of Hurriyat Conference chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, has not become a regular feature of the cricketing calendar in Srinagar.
However, this time the security forces seem to be concerned over the latest move. "If this practice is not nipped in the bud, it can create a huge problem in coming months and years. The psyche of the impressionable minds is sought to be influenced," a security official said.
He said before the onset of militancy in the state, a football club was formed in the memory of JKLF founder Mohammad Maqbool Bhat following his hanging in Tihar Jail in 1984. "This club would take part in tournaments within and outside Kashmir and seemingly there was nothing wrong with it.
However, when militancy erupted several players joined the ranks," the official said. National Conference working president Omar Abdullah saw a link between the trend of naming cricket teams after militants and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti representing south Kashmir in Lok Sabha.
"Lest we forget this South Kashmir being mentioned is Mehbooba Mufti's Lok Sabha constituency," Omar said. Ruling PDP leaders chose not to comment on the issue.Moscow is considering plans to return to Cuba and Vietnam where it had military bases in the past, Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Nikolay Pankov said on Friday, according to RIA news agency.
READ MORE: Russia intends to restore Cuban spy base – MP
“We are working on this,” Pankov said, while declining to elaborate. The Russian Defense Ministry is re-assessing the decisions made in the past to shut down the bases in those countries, according to the defense official.
Previously the deputy head of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian parliament, Aleksey Chepa said that Russia “should re-assess the issue of our presence in other regions of the world. I believe that it would correspond with Russian interests to restore the bases in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa that were closed,” as quoted by TASS.
There were Soviet and Russian military bases in Cuba and Vietnam until 2002. The Russian navy was deployed in Cam Rahn, Vietnam, and Russia had a radio-electronic intelligence center in Lourdes, Cuba.
READ MORE: Russian navy base in Vietnam may be restored
While functioning, the Lourdes SIGINT facility was the largest of its kind operated by the USSR (and later Russia) outside of the country. The facility occupied 73 square kilometers and hosted some 1,500 employees at the peak of its activity.
The Soviet Union leased the Cam Rahn base rent-free from 1979 until 2004. In June 2001, the Vietnamese government announced that following the expiry of Russia's lease, Hanoi would “not sign an agreement with any country to use Cam Ranh Bay for military purposes.”
However, at the end of 2014, a deal was signed between Russian and Vietnam, setting up standards of use of Russian warships in the port of Cam Ranh. According to the simplified procedure, Russian ships would only have to give prior notice to the Vietnamese authorities before entering Cam Ranh Bay, while other foreign navies would be limited to only one ship visit a year to Vietnamese ports.
Back in May, Vietnamese Ambassador to Russia Nguyen Thanh Sean told RIA Novosti that Vietnam isn’t against the return of Russia to the military base in Cam Ranh Bay, but this cooperation shouldn’t be directed against third countries.Donna adjusts her wig before her number.
Olivia attaches her false eyelash.
For Beautiful by Night, San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker James Hosking chronicles life in Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, the one and only gay bar left standing in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that decades ago, was renowned for its thriving LGBT community. In tracing the nightly routines of three of its older drag queens— Donna Personna, Collette LeGrande, and Olivia Hart, Hosking traces the rich history and uncertain future of drag in the crime-ridden area.
In recent years, the Tenderloin has seen thirty-five times the crime rate of surrounding areas, reports Behold, and its decline has come at the expense of a once-flourishing gay nightlife. Hosking was drawn to those queens who had experienced those early years of drag, those who pushed through their fears of prejudice and societal disapproval to practice what they love. Hosking was endeared to Aunt Charlie’s, which he discovered in an alternative newspaper, in part because of its imperfect performances. The club has no windows and no stage, and the queens must wind in and out of the crowd during their sets, for which they choose their own songs.
Their nights are long, beginning with makeup from 6:30 PM to around 9 PM before dressing and preparation time at the club, which continues until 10:30, when the show starts. Until 12:30 AM, the queens will lip synch their hearts out for one dollar tips while rotating around the club. They will change outfits before each number, and after the show, they might mingle with the audience before grabbing dinner and heading home at 1:30 AM.
Despite the demanding nature of their work, Hosking explains that it is profoundly therapeutic. It offers Donna a reason to confront her anxieties head on, Olivia a motivation to stay sober, and Collette a way to express herself and her femininity. More than just a means to making a living, drag is an enduring and lifelong passion. “I think they’d miss it if they stopped,” says Hosking.
Hosking’s documentary film, Beautiful by Night, was shot by Vanessa Carr with sound design by Miik Dinko.
Collette LeGrande at home.
Olivia applies make-up.
Collette before leaving for Aunt Charlie’s.
Olivia greets a shopkeeper on her way to Aunt Charlie’s.
Gustavo at his home in Cupertino, California.
Gustavo holds a photo of Donna over his face.
Gustavo transforms into Donna Personna.
Classy, a performer, lights a cigarette backstage.
Olivia applies make-up.
Olivia pauses for a cigarette in her room.
Olivia reaches Aunt Charlie’s.
Olivia checks her décolletage.
Collette performs Ke$ha’s “Tik-Tok.”
Donna backstage at Aunt Charlie’s between sets.
Rahni, a performer, makes a final check before she goes on stage.
All images © James Hosking
via BeholdA speeding truck driver was recently surprised by the kindness of an Indiana state police officer who chose to pray with him rather than ticket him.
Rodney Gibson said he was so upset this past Monday -- struggling to accept the fact his daughter's breast cancer was not going away -- that he didn't realize he was speeding down a busy highway in Bloomington, Indiana, ABC affiliate WRTV reported.
Indiana State Police Sgt. Todd Durnil told ABC News today when he pulled Gibson over, Gibson appeared to be very "upset and angry" -- not about the traffic stop, but rather -- about "something else going on."
The officer was trying to "figure out a way to get through to" Gibson when he noticed an angel pin on Gibson's sun visor that was actually identical to one he had, Durnil said.
Durnil pointed the angel pin out to Gibson, "thinking how we're probably not all that different," and Gibson then explained "with tears in his eyes" that the pin was from his daughter. She was recently told the breast cancer she'd been battling for six years metastasized and that she likely wasn't going to make it.
Kind Kansas Cop Buys Diapers, Shoes for Struggling Mom Who Shoplifted Them For Her Kids
Cop Issues Thank You Letter to Mom Instead of Speeding Ticket
Massachusetts State Trooper 'Rescues' Little Girl's Teddy Bear From Highway
On his way back to his patrol car, Durnil said his first thought was that Gibson really needed prayers and that he would tell his family and church to pray for Gibson.
"I also thought, this man already has enough, I'm not going to write him any paperwork for a ticket or even a warning," he said. "When I walked back to his truck, I explained everything. He still seemed agitated, but not as bad, and he apologized, saying, 'I'm sorry, I usually don't act this way, I've just been going through a lot.'"
Durnil then asked Gibson if there was anything else if he could do for him and Gibson told him, "Do you know how to pray?"
"Here I was thinking this man needs prayer, and now he's asking me for a prayer," Durnil said. "The good Lord put us together for a purpose."
Durnil then went over to the right side of the semi, took his hat off, knelt down, took Gibson's hand and said a prayer. Both the men had tears in their eyes, Durnil said.
The following morning, Durnil said he found out that his station received a call from Gibson saying he wanted to thank Durnil for his kindness.
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within the system or from the outside?" Sussman said. "There are some fabulous teachers who in good conscience say, 'I can't sign it.' And if that happens, ultimately, the Catholic Church loses out."
Some East Bay parents fear the controversy surrounding the new language will spill over to the classroom. Newman, who has not yet decided whether he will sign the contract, worries about the message it sends to prospective students and parents, who over the years have asked him whether a Catholic school would, for instance, be accepting of a student who is gay.
"I always say, 'Yes,' " said Newman, who is not Catholic. "But now I'm kind of lying about that, in terms of what I sign."
Gives a parent pause
Adam Byer, who is the parent of a child at an East Bay Catholic school, said if teachers are dismissed because of what they do in their private life, he would "think long and hard if I want my daughter to be in that school."
Some teachers like Sussman are proposing that educators work under the old contract for this year while they discuss any proposed changes with the diocese.
But at this late date, Brown, the diocese's spokesman, said: "It's clear that's not going to be the case.
"It's in each principal's best interest to know who will be teaching at the school in the fall," he said.NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News Channel has corrected its story suggesting that former FBI Director James Comey publicly leaked classified material relating to his conversations with President Donald Trump.
A supportive Trump had retweeted the story after its original airing on Monday.
Fox said the program had been mistaken in suggesting that memos written by Comey and provided to congressional investigators contained “top secret” information. Instead, the material had a lower-level security classification.
The correction, however, left murky the question of whether Comey released any classified information to the public. Comey insists he did not.
It was unclear whether anyone involved in the story on “Fox & Friends” morning show on Monday was disciplined. Fox had described the information as a bombshell that accused Comey of “putting our national security at risk.”It’s halfway through January and it’s past time to take a look back at LA’s 2013 and take a peek into what 2014 might hold. We’ll see how our predictions from last year held up, and make some new ones for the new year. Plus, you can enter our contest to win a Beer of Tomorrow prize-package!
Editor’s Note
First up, I’d like to extend an apology to all the loyal Beer of Tomorrow readers and fans. I fell far short of my post frequency goals for the site in 2013, and that’s a disservice to all of you who’ve supported me and the site as I got it up and running. Of course, I wasn’t slacking-off or tied down to a desk – I was quite busy with other beer-writing gigs and assignments (which I am tremendously grateful for).
Much of the news stories that would have run here on Beer of Tomorrow were instead covered by me for the Los Angeles Times Daily Dish, and I hope that those of you interested in LA beer news were able to follow my updates over there. Additionally, much of my feature writing was run in Beer Paper LA where I joined the team as an Associate Editor. As always, the best way to keep abreast of what I’m covering is to follow me at Twitter (@Octopushat), follow Beer of Tomorrow on Twitter (@BeerofTomorrow), or like us on Facebook.
I have big plans and ideas for Beer of Tomorrow in 2014, and I hope that you’ll stick around to see where we’re going!
And on that note, I am looking for some contributors and other miscellaneous assistance with the site. If you’re interested in writing for Beer of Tomorrow, drop me a line and we can talk!
Looking Back at 2013
That was a hell of a year for craft beer in Los Angeles!
New breweries opened, new projects got started, Beachwood Brewing took home a set of medals at GABF, and generally the craft fans in LA had lots to celebrate.
At the beginning of 2013 we made some predictions for what the year would bring. Let’s see how on-track those forecasts were.
Prediction #1 – “The number of LA-based breweries will keep growing”
Okay, that was a pretty easy one to call. 2013 saw Smog City move into its own production brewery, Angel City Brewing open their Public House and ramp-up their production volume, LA Ale Works and Phantom Carriage begin distributing their brews, and The Dudes Brewing begin production. There are probably some new operations that I’m missing too.
I also had this to say about breweries opening in 2013:
In addition to these breweries-in-planning, I think that one large midwest or east coast brewery will announce an expansion project in Southern California. Sierra Nevada, Oscar Blues, and New Belgium are all working to increase their national production with new eastern breweries, and it only makes sense that someone will see LA for the (comparatively) wide-open market that it is.
While no non-Californian breweries opened expansions in LA, we did get the very exciting news that popular regional brewery Firestone Walker Brewery will be opening a taproom and restaurant in West LA in 2014! (So I wasn’t too far off.)
Prediction #2 – “Dedicated beer retail spaces will blossom”
This one was another mixed-bag. I said:
With the continued success of great bottle shops like Sunset Beer Co and Buzz Wine Beer Shop other new retail spaces will open. The combination of a great bottle selection, tasting events, and even on-site taps turn a liquor-store into a destination. The Bruery closing their Provisions retail location in Orange caused an uproar in the community, and some entrepreneurs are going to see the space in the marketplace for high-end beer retail.
It turns out that the Provisions market wouldn’t stay closed long. The Haven Group (those behind Orange County and Pasadena’s Haven Gastropub / Brewpub) announced that they would take over the vacated Bruery Provisions space in downtown Orange. Will Dee and company did a fantastic job with the space, and you can bet that I’d be a regular there if I was anywhere near Orange regularly.
I spoke recently with the operators of both Sunset Beer Co and Select Beer Store, and they both expressed awe at just how much the beer retail business is booming. Sunset Beer Manager Jeff Sapsford said the sales volume at Sunset Beer Co is off the charts, while Wes Jacobs of Select Beer has been humbled by the local response to his retail shop and taproom.
Can somebody please open a bottle shop in Hollywood?
Prediction #3 – “There will be more focus on food and beer pairings”
Apart from the focus that I devoted to this subject while preparing for the Certified Cicerone® exam, and an unbelievable beer dinner during LA Beer Week that paired the beers of Craftsman Brewing Co with Andre Guerrero’s intense food at his Maximiliano restaurant, this one didn’t really happen.
There were certainly beer dinners happening around town – even when it wasn’t LA Beer Week, but there just wasn’t the level of attention paid to food and beer by the average craft beer fan that I’d like to see.
One of my goals in 2014 is to help spread the love for a thoughtful match between beer and food for every occasion!
Prediction #4 – “Golden Road Brewing will get more respect from the beer-geek crowd”
As an early, dedicated fan of GRB, I can’t express just how edifying it is to see this one (mostly) come true. Last year I said:
It’s little secret that Golden Road has been struggling with the perceptions of their operation and their beer, especially among the more dedicated craft beer fans. I believe they are listening to their critics, and they will continue to improve their product. When news broke that Brewmaster Jon Carpenter was leaving it was a surprise, but not much of a shock. Very smart business people are behind that brewery and their number one goal is to make a beer that is beloved by Angelenos. The product that Golden Road puts out in 2013 will be iteratively better than the beer in 2012, and some new and exciting brews will recapture the beer-geek crowd’s imagination.
As you probably know, Jesse Houck was named Brewmaster around February last year, and the Drakes Brewing alum quickly went to work tweaking (or all-out redesigning) the GRB beers. His first big hit was the reimagined Wolf Among Weeds, and that was followed by the home run of LA beer in 2013 – Heal the Bay IPA (which returns this Summer). Big IPAs and a parade of pub specialties followed, and Houck shows no signs of slowing down.
Looking Forward to 2014
I’m not going to make a bunch of detailed predictions this year – beer in LA is growing too fast, and there are simply too many moving pieces to consider. I will, however, mention a few things that I’m really excited about.
More packaged LA beer!
So many LA breweries began packaging beer in 2013! From reluctant bottlers Beachwood Brewing, to the Dudes pint cans of 10%ABV DIPAs, to El Segundo Brewing Co’s hop-heavy line-up and Monkish’s 750ml Belgian ales, and even Angel City Brewery’s bottled-in-Ohio six-packs there is now more LA Beer on the shelves than ever before! This trend will continue in 2014 with Smog City Brewing planning to begin bottling by Spring, and the persistent rumors that Mark Jilg will actually fire-up the Craftsman bottling line (we’ll believe that when we have a bottle in our hands).
More flavorful session beers.
The LA scene is the perfect environment for flavorful, sessionable brews that keep the ABV below 5%, and some fantastic examples (Solidarity, Little Bo Pils, Moria) are already brewed here. I know that Firestone Walker is planning to release a new session IPA (possibly named “Easy Jack”), and where the Lion & Bear go, more craft breweries will follow. We want to see more brewers take the chance on beers that can be enjoyed by the pitcher, on the patio, while soaking in the LA sun.
More cask beer.
Many of LA’s breweries are suffering growing pains due to the meteoric growth in craft popularity in LA. Brewers are hitting fermentation capacity issues, brewing schedule difficulties, and many have commitments to their distributors that mean focusing on their core brews. They are (relatively) good problems to have, but they do stifle a brewer’s creativity a bit as time, space, and equipment needs to be allocated to tried-and-true brews before experimental ones. So what’s a brewer to do? We’re seeing more and more turn to inventive cask experiments to scratch their creative itch. Eagle Rock Brewery, Angel City Brewing, Smog City, and Noble Ale Works are just some of the breweries who have expanded their cask beer program in 2013, and this trend should continue in 2014 as the craft fans get more comfortable with real ale.
There is even a festival dedicated to cask beer planned for March! Firk Fest will feature 24 breweries creative casks in an Anaheim park.
Win Big with Beer of Tomorrow
I’ve assembled a nice little prize-package that I’ll be giving to one lucky reader. All you need to do to enter is comment on this post with you favorite beer from 2013, your favorite beer event in 2013, or you favorite beer-news story from 2013. I’ll select (at least) one winner at random on February 1st.
Thanks again for all the support over the last year, and stay tuned for our Second Anniversary Party announcement in the next few weeks!
Cheers!FIA takes Zafar Hijazi into custody after a special court dismisses his interim pre-arrest bail application
ISLAMABAD: The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) chairman, Zafar Hijazi, was arrested on Friday after a special court dismissed his interim pre-arrest bail application in a case pertaining to tampering with records of the companies owned by the Sharif family.
The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) took Hijazi into custody from the premises of the Special Court Central, where he had appeared for the confirmation of his pre-arrest bail.
The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) – which had probed into the Sharif family’s offshore assets in line with the apex court’s April 20 verdict in the Panamagate case – alleged that the SECP chairman tampered with records of the Sharif’s sugar mills.
Subsequently, the FIA launched an investigation into the allegations on the directives of the Supreme Court, and later endorsed JIT’s claim.
On July 10, FIA’s Special Investigation Unit (SIU) lodged an FIR against him under Sections 466 and 471 of PPC read with 5(2)47, the Prevention of Corruption Act.
However, the Islamabad High Court granted him a transitory bail against surety bonds of Rs10,000 till July 17 with directions to appear before the proper forum. Later, the special court also granted him a bail against a surety of Rs0.5 million till July 21.
FIA finds SECP chief guilty of tampering with record of Sharifs’ companies
When the court took up the case, the counsel for Hijazi argued that the allegations levelled against his client were false and he had never pressured any SECP official to tamper with the records, adding that the officials had done so on their own and had falsely accused Hijazi.
He argued that the FIA did not arrest the officials who were directly involved in the case but booked Hijazi who is not even a co-accused in the matter.
The counsel for the FIA, however, opposed the bail application saying no mala fide was involved and the case was registered on the basis of evidence following an inquiry into the case. After the arguments, the court dismissed his bail plea.
Stance in the petition filed before IHC
In the petition, Hijazi through his counsel Shiekh Zameer Hussain said the FIA had not proceeded in the matter as it ought to have, adding that Hijazi led the life of an honest and upright man without any blemish; yet his prestige and dignity had been put at stake.
In 2011, the petitioner said, a case was initiated in the SECP to probe into affairs of Chaudhary Sugar Mills (Pvt) Ltd qua the money laundering suspected to be used as a medium to launder the outcome by concealed and fraudulent activity in the disguise of regular and legitimate business activity.
The Central Authorities in UK and Financial Services Authorities were approached for requisite information, the counsel said, and a clarification letter was issued to the company in 2011 and proceedings under sections 261 and 263 of the Companies Ordinance were also initiated.
He maintained that two files were maintained — money laundering file and the routine examination file — and the company provided detailed information and documents through its reply in 2012 and 2013 which were found satisfactory.
The counsel said the FIA did not bother to look into the money laundering file and took the advantage of discrepancy, attributed to the petitioner with mala fide intent as the date mentioned in the routine examination file was nothing but an error which has been wrongly attributed to petitioner.
SC orders FIA to probe tampering allegations against SECP
Hussain said that all three officers — Abid Hussain, Ali Azeem Akram and Maheen Fatima — of the SECP agreed on the point that the issue was closed in 2013 and yet it is alleged that Hijazi pressurised them in 2016 to ante date note as 14.1.2013. “The officers of FIA have failed to explain or examine what benefit the petitioner would derive from such oral order,” he stated.
The counsel argued that the record could have been rectified with a simple note to the effect that although the main file was closed in 2013 but due to sheer inadvertence no order was passed in the routine file and that the omission is being rectified. But such a note, he added, would have adversely affected the three officers for their inefficiency and negligence.
“In order to save their skin they blamed the petitioner for pressurising as they slept over the files without proceeding further for more than three years,” he alleged. In addition, they blamed Hijazi to cover their illegal acts and omissions.
The counsel further argued that the officers, highly educated and having sufficient time, did not report the matter to the higher authorities in the federal government. There is no evidence on record to constitute any of the offences and yet the FIA has registered the case.
Finally, Hussain argued that Hijazi is an old man — 64 years old — who had a kidney transplanted in 2001, has developed diabetes mellitus type-2, needs specialised medicine and his detention in jail environment would be injurious and a danger to his life.
He requested the court to grant pre-arrest bail till the final decision of trial. The court, however, granted him transitory bail till July 17 with directions to appear before the relevant court.
Read full storyApostolic nunciature, Washington D.C. (Georgetownvoice)
Vatican Diplomat in Holy See’s DC Embassy Investigated for Child Pornography
Vatican announces that the senior official has been recalled to Rome after U.S. authorities cited possible ‘violation of child-pornography laws.’
A priest working in the apostolic nunciature in Washington, D.C., has been recalled to the Vatican after U.S. authorities cited possible violations of child-pornography laws, the Vatican said Friday.
The Vatican declined to identify the diplomat nor disclose which nationality he belongs to, but confirmed he is a senior member of the Vatican embassy staff and that he is now in Vatican City.
According to the Vatican’s Yearbook, three priest diplomats serve in the nunciature as counselors, in addition to the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Christoph Pierre, who has been ruled out.
In a statement released this afternoon, the Vatican said that after being notified by the U.S. authorities of the possible violations, the Holy See, “following the practice of sovereign states, recalled the priest in question.”
It added that having received such information from the U.S. government, the Secretariat of State passed this information to the promoter of justice of the Vatican Tribunal — the Vatican’s chief prosecutor.
It went on to say that the promoter of justice then “opened an investigation and has already commenced international collaboration to obtain elements relative to the case.”
The Vatican also stressed that, in accordance with laws “applicable to all preliminary inquiries, the investigations carried out by the promoter of justice are subject to investigative confidentiality.”
The Associated Press reported that the State Department had asked the Vatican to lift the official’s diplomatic immunity on Aug. 21, but that request was denied.
It added that for the State Department to make such a request, its lawyers would have needed to be convinced there was a reasonable cause for criminal prosecution.
Recalling Vatican envoys is not new: In 2013, Msgr. Jozef Wesolowski was ordered to leave as apostolic nuncio to the Dominican Republic after being accused of sexually abusing young boys on the Caribbean island. Two years later, while being held under house arrest in Vatican City, he was indicted for possession of child pornography.
The Vatican justified not sending Wesolowski back to the Dominican Republic for trial by submitting him first to a canonical court proceeding at the Vatican and having him tried in the Vatican's criminal court, which has jurisdiction over the Holy See's diplomatic corps.
Wesolowski was laicized but died of natural causes before the criminal trial got underway.
Should the Vatican prosecutor conclude enough evidence justifies a trial, these are likely to be the criminal proceedings taken in this case.
The possession of child pornography is considered a “canonical crime” in the Church, and in 2010, Benedict XVI added it to the list of “most grave delicts,” meaning crimes, which are dealt with directly by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and can result in dismissal from the clerical state.
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued the following statement Friday:
"This is a serious issue," he said. "We hope the Holy See will be forthcoming with more details. While we don’t know all the facts, consistent with our Charter [for the Protection of Children and Young People], we reaffirm that when such allegations occur, an immediate, thorough and transparent investigation should begin in cooperation with law enforcement and immediate steps be taken to protect children. The protection of children and young people is our most sacred responsibility.”The Browns will start Kevin Hogan at quarterback Sunday against Deshaun Watson and the Texans. The most compelling storyline is obvious: Did the Browns make a mistake by passing on Watson twice in the 2017 Draft?
For obvious reasons, Browns coach Hue Jackson did not feel like talking about it on Wednesday.
"I totally get it," Jackson said, per Pro Football talk. "What did I tell you guys earlier in the week? You guys can say whatever you like. I get it. I get the second guessing, the questions and all of that. You are entitled to do all of that. DeShone Kizer is on our team. Deshaun Watson is on their team. We can't all of a sudden flip them, so why are we having this discussion?"
We're having this discussion because the Browns benched Kizer and are now preparing to start their 28th quarterback since 1999. Meanwhile, the Texans appear to have found their franchise quarterback in Watson. And the only reason why the Texans have Watson is because they traded up with the Browns to take him with the 12th overall pick. The Browns also owned the first pick in the draft. So technically, they passed on Watson twice in a span of 12 picks. That's why we're having this discussion.
Don't bother asking Jackson if he wanted to take Watson with one of those picks. He won't say.
"It doesn't matter," Jackson said. "He is in Houston. It doesn't matter for this reason: Whether we did or didn't, that is not the point. The point is we are getting ready to play the Houston Texans in Houston. Here is our football team. We are 0-5, and we are trying to go get a football victory. It doesn't matter. He plays quarterback there. Kevin Hogan is playing quarterback for us this week, and DeShone Kizer is backing him up.... I understand how you guys feel, but to me, to go down that road and talk about this, that, what should have been and what could have been, that doesn't do anything for anybody."
Hindsight is always 20/20 and there have been plenty of first-round quarterback busts over the years...
Reminder NFL hit rate on 1st-round QBs last decade is 35%. Far worse than coin flip. There isn't a QB evaluator with more hits than misses. — Evan Silva (@evansilva) October 11, 2017
... but it's worth noting that Watson has completed 62.1 percent of his passes, averaged 7.39 yards per attempt, thrown 12 touchdowns and four picks, rushed for two touchdowns and posted a 100.7 passer rating in five games (four starts). That sounds like a quarterback who could've helped the Browns. As it currently stands, the Texans -- not the Browns -- are the team that can have no regrets about the draft day trade.
But the Browns did at least get defensive end Myles Garrett No. 1 overall, who has played in one game and already has two career sacks. Furthermore, this is not the time to give up on Kizer, who the Browns selected in the second round. Kizer still has potential and as the Browns get better at every position -- they still own a ton of draft picks -- he'll likely improve. And let's not act like we know for certain that Watson would be a star on a Browns team that doesn't have DeAndre Hopkins like the Texans do. There's a ton of variables at play in this hypothetical situation.
Besides, let's see how the Browns look in a few more seasons once they're done using all of those draft picks they're collected over the past couple seasons. According to Cleveland.com, they have two first-round picks and three second-round picks. If they can hit on those picks -- and that's one big if -- no one will care nearly as much about their decision to pass on Watson.Damage
Roughly R7500
What you need to know:
Full HD 5″ display
20MP main camera
Built-in wireless charging
Weighs 167 grams
Available in green, orange, white or black
32GB memory
What we think you should know:
I’ve sat for the longest time trying to determine some clever quirk or fun thing to add to this review. We usually take phones off to high tea or on road trips to try add some spice. I don’t think any amount of spicing will do this phone justice. It is, without a doubt, the best Windows phone on the market. While the Windows operating system may put you off it shouldn’t. Over the last few months Windows has been launching a host of your favourite apps for the OS and I found, after trawling the app store that most of my app needs were met. Other than Instagram for Windows not allowing video functionality I wasn’t left wanting.
Okay, enough about the operating system. This is a Lumia 930 review so best I review it right? Right out the box I was impressed with the phone. For starters, it is only 5″ which means it sits rather well in the hand. It doesn’t feel light and plasticky but rather sits weighted in your palm. Brendan Ambrose from Tech Human mentioned in his review that the Lumia 930 comes “in orange for professional clowns and construction workers”. I’ll be updating my LinkedIn profile accordingly because my review unit was orange and I loved the way the phone looked. I thought the pop of colour added a little bit of fun and funk to an otherwise dull coloured smartphone market. The Lumia 930 is also available in green, white or black (so the more conservative can let out a sigh of relief).
During our time together I dropped the Lumia not once, not twice and no not even 3 times. The poor phone hit the ground a total of 5 times in our time together. The photos you see here were taken the day I stopped using it – not a mark on it. I’m rather clumsy when it comes to my phones. I drop them a lot. The fact that the Lumia 930 could take a beating was a serious plus for me.
I record all Tech Girl’s videos on a mobile phone. It’s hit or miss sometimes on recording quality. I never missed with the Lumia 930. The video quality was exceptional and even in the bustling chaos that is the rAge Expo, I was able to conduct an interview, record it and still have decent sound quality. You can watch that video here. The photo quality produced by the Lumia 930 beat some cameras on the market but that was to be expected as Windows’ Phones are renowned for their camera capabilities.
One of the things that I need in a smartphone is GPS functionality. I can’t read a map and I forget road maps all the time. It’s so bad that I refer to Highways in Joburg as “the concrete/Soweto highway, the double decker and the airport road” (brownie points for anyone who guesses which ones those names refer to correctly). It’s important that my phone offers up decent navigation. The Lumia 930 didn’t disappoint. Windows has outdone themselves with HERE maps. Moving back to my regular Android phone and Waze was somewhat of a disappointment (Waze is also available on the Windows OS in case you were wondering). HERE maps have also been made available to Android users.
Because I use GPS navigation and the camera so frequently I did find the battery in the Lumia 930 a little lacking. When you’re constantly utilising the high definition display you’ll drain it quicker than you’d like. For the most part I got to about 3/4pm before I needed to recharge. Keep in mind I start my day at 4:30 am so a regular 9 to fiver you’ll likely find the battery life rather satisfactory.
I have a rather great opportunity in that I get to spend time with a host of smartphones. Every other week I’m changing devices. Let me tell you something about reviewing smartphones: there are ones you like, ones you forget and ones you buy. I’d buy this one.
So rad:
A good phone “size”. It fits comfortably in your hand and doesn’t push into phablet territory.
The camera is out of this world. Nothing compares.
Makes us sad:High school senior Madeline Scott was so excited when she received the acceptance text from UC Berkeley that she called her mother immediately.
“I got into UC Berkeley,” she gushed.
The euphoria didn’t last.
When her mother, Tammy Rae Scott, signed onto the Berkeley admissions website, she learned about an apparent University of California policy requiring that incoming students be vaccinated for measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis and meningitis. They also must undergo screening for tuberculosis.
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Madeline hasn’t had an immunization since age 3 when she had an adverse reaction to the MMR shot for measles, mumps and rubella, her mother said.
“If I chose to attend Berkeley, I would have to catch up on 17 years worth of vaccinations,” said Madeline Scott, who lives in Arcata. “I feel that Berkeley is infringing on my right to refuse medical procedures.”
While Berkeley is telling newly admitted students to get vaccinated, the UC system decided at the last minute to give one final reprieve to the freshman class entering this fall.
Last month, the UC system decided to delay its vaccination requirement for a year. Starting in fall 2018, entering UC freshmen will have to meet the requirement for the first time, system officials say.
“We are doing this for very important public health reasons – to protect the students on our campuses,” said Brad Buchman, UC director of Student Health and Counseling. “The reason: We continue to see cases of these illnesses every year.”
Between 2000 and 2012, the number of personal belief exemptions from vaccine requirements climbed in California schools as some parents feared that immunizations caused autism or other health concerns. Medical experts say such parents were relying on misinformation and that the country’s vaccine supply is safe and effective. State leaders in 2015 eliminated personal and relief exemptions from vaccine requirements for K-12 students.
Though the UC system will not block unvaccinated freshmen this fall, campuses are asking students to provide information about their immunization history. UC schools will send letters for the first time telling them to get vaccinated.
Most of the students coming to the University of California without the required immunizations are from other countries, some with limited access to vaccines, according the university. In 2016, the university system had 12,000 international students, or 14 percent of its enrollment.
Buchman said the decision to add the vaccination requirement came after pressure from state and county public health officials. The UC system has multiple cases of respiratory infectious disease every year, including meningitis, mumps, measles and chicken pox, he said.
“The medical literature is rife with examples that a single case can be rapidly transmitted to a lot of people in congregate housing,” he said.
In 2015, a UC Davis student was diagnosed with meningococcal disease, a type of meningitis that can be life threatening.
Meningitis outbreaks occurred in 2013-14 at Princeton University and UC Santa Barbara, spurring widespread student vaccinations. A student at Drexel University died from meningitis that school year after having close contact with students at Princeton.
Since last summer, California students must have vaccinations or a medical exemption when they enter kindergarten or seventh grade or transfer to a new school district. State leaders eliminated personal belief exemptions after the 2015 measles outbreak tied to Disneyland.
The state reported this month that school vaccination rates were the highest in more than 15 years at 95.6 percent of kindergartners in the current school year.
Some campus officials remain unaware that students have been granted a reprieve from immunizations for one more year. Tammy Rae Scott said she called Berkeley on Wednesday to confirm that her daughter could enroll this fall. She said she was told her daughter’s registration would be blocked if she failed to comply with the vaccine requirement.
“No holds will be placed on any student registrations this fall at Berkeley or any other UC campus,” Buchman said, when asked about the call. “This information has been communicated to the campuses and we will continue to do so.”
Just in case, the Scott family will continue to look for doctors to write an exemption for Madeline, whose adverse reaction to vaccines was never documented. Six, including their family doctor, have turned them down, according to Tammy Rae Scott.
“I’m in the process of trying to find a way around this as I do not believe vaccines are safe or effective,” she said.
Madeline Scott shares her mother’s views and wrote a 4,000-word paper on the topic in high school. Despite her opposition to vaccines, Madeline said she will get them if she must in order to attend Berkeley.
“She has worked so hard to get into a great school and, if we are unable to find a physician that will sign a medical exemption, she will unwillingly consent and receive 11 vaccines to gain entry,” Tammy Rae Scott said.
Fiona Grant’s children won’t be able to avoid vaccines if they enroll at an University of California campus. Her daughter Sally, 15, has her eye on Berkeley. The Eureka family said the vaccine requirement makes them “far less inclined” to look at UC campuses.
Fiona has no plans to have her daughter vaccinated, although she acknowledges that is up to Sally after she is 18. “Probably what would happen, even if we decide to apply, it would mean a medical exemption or not going to the UC system,” she said.
“This is going to push a lot of talented people out of the state and out of the UC system,” she said. “It really is a private matter.”
SHARE COPY LINK The Democratic state senator from Sacramento on June 26, 2015 recounted why he introduced Senate Bill 277, a hugely controversial bill requiring vaccinations for California school children.With her back to a wall and a body by her feet, Inka is faced with the terrifying might of the cultist Charon. Realising that throwing herself into more and more danger might not be what she really wants. The latest arc of Fire Force is about to explode! Let’s recap the latest events of the Fifth Pillar arc. Or the Inka arc if you like.
Chapter Summary
While trying to get some answers as to why exactly this mysterious man wants her, Inka smells and sees a line, one end is a starting point and the other is labeled the goal (written in English, for some reason) inside Charon’s body. Inka runs her finger across the line and a row of explosions manifest exactly where the line indicated, starting in the air and blasting into the blind mook’s shoulder. Both Charon and Inka are shocked, but Inka does it again as soon as she sees another guideline, which starts inside her attacker’s body ends slightly above his head. It works again and Inka uses the opportunity to run away, so that Charon will chase her and leave her friend Panda alone. While running through the streets, Inka senses where a fire is going to start: on her arm. She lurches to the side and it turns out she predicted and avoided Charon’s grab. She avoids a second grab and creates another explosion. You might have noticed that Charon has been caught in three different point-blank explosions, one to his left side and two on his right. It’s not doing anything to him. He is so resistant to heat and fire that he isn’t even slowing down, it’s just making him a little curious. He’s amused because Inka seems to have awakened her Third Generation Ignition ability. Basically she is now able to create fire and has realised she can’t escape, so she’s trying to stand her ground. When his goons ready themselves to grab Inka, Charon starts asking questions. Inka has noticed something and he’d like to know what it is. A fire is going to strike Charon’s head from above. Inka looks up and Shinra of Company 8 files in, striking Charon’s skull with his knee. It does nothing but Shinra is able to land between Inka and the White Hood so he can stop Charon from attacking her. Shinra tells Inka that she is the Fifth Pillar and that he’s going to protect her. Confusing Inka even further, but amusing her nonetheless. Disbelieving that Shinra will/can save her. Charon attacks, noting that they were going to kidnap Shinra (the Fourth Pillar) at some point anyway, so this makes his job even easier. Suddenly, Charon and his men start chanting and shouting “1,2,3,4, Overwhelm!”. It looks like a Kiai, which is when a martial artist yells before acting. I know very little about martial arts, but a Kiai seems to about forcing the correct breathing and organising the flow of energy inside the body. Which makes sense because Charon suddenly lashes out violently against Shinra. Striking him so hard that he files back back, slams into a street sign, bounces off it, bounces of the ground three times and finally crashes it something. That was just one punch. Shinra attempts to regain momentum by using his Rapid Tiger Sign Kick (note his fingers), directing his power and speed into a single, direct strike. Which does nothing expect give Charon a chance to grab Shinra by the leg and stomp him into the dirt, grind him though the earth and kick the devil away. Again. Charon grins, noting that Shinra is no threat without access to the Preacher’s Divine Protection or a Fourth Generation ability. The blind zealot takes a step forward… and the street starts erupting into a mighty blaze behind him. Haumea watches from a distinct rooftop in one of her rare somber moments. She simply explains that Shira needs to protect Inka or Haumea’s side are going to take her away. Charon gives Shinra a chance to run, but Shinra struggles to his feet and says he won’t run. While Inka, who’s eyes have begun a metamorphosis, begins to see the absurd pressure Charon is placing on them. TO BE CONTINUED…
Thoughts
Goodness gracious, that was a good action chapter! Inka’s talent is |
first officer’s father agrees that his son was alone in the cockpit at the time of the crash and that he adjusted the altitude controls. However, he brings up two factors to cast doubt on the idea that the crash was deliberate.
The first is the so-called test run of the descent which appeared on flight data recorder of an earlier flight that day.
07:19:59 The aircraft was cruising at FL370 (37,000 feet). The cockpit door opened and then closed as the captain left the cockpit.
07:20:29 Air traffic control asked the flight to descend to FL350 (35,000 feet). The co-pilot correctly read back the instruction.
07:20:32 The altitude was set to FL350 and the aircraft was put into a descent.
07:20:50 The selected altitude was decreased to 100 feet. It was then increased to 49,000 feet and then decreased again to 35,000 feet.
07:21:10 Air traffic control instructed the crew to continue the descent to FL210 (21,000 feet).
07:21:16 The selected altitude was set to 21,000 feet.
07:22:27 The selected altitude was set to 100 feet.
07:24:13 The selected altitude was changed several times but then set back to 21,000 feet.
07:24:15 The buzzer sounded to request access to the cockpit.
07:24:29 The cockpit door was unlocked and opened, corresponding to the return of the captain.
07:25:32 The flight crew was instructed to descend to FL170 (17,000 feet).
07:26:16 The altitude was selected and the aircraft began its descent. The flight continued normally.
Because the autopilot was engaged, the changes in selected altitudes did not influence the aircraft’s descent path. The report concluded this was a practice run, which makes sense to me. However, the pilot’s father claims that this simply shows that he often played with the controls without any ill effects.
Further, Hradecky argues that it is impossible to know what was in the mind of the first officer and that the changes to the altitude in both instances could be simply innocent pilot activity. Note that in this case, he seems happy that the FDR data was the result of inputs by the pilot whereas on the accident flight, he queries whether the pilot input the information at all (more on this below).
The first officer used to be a glider pilot (who needed to exactly time his approaches into an airfield to arrive on the runway, not before and not beyond). It is quite possible that by selecting the aerodrome level (elevation 14 feet, closest possible setting 100 feet on the altitude target) he just checked, where the current rate of descent and speed would take them in order to plan the rate of descent, power setting etc. to perform a continuous descent until reaching the IAF. There are other explanations as well without the need of assuming malicious attempt. Fact is that this target altitude never had influence on the aircraft’s flight path, and any claim he was testing his suicide can only and only remain speculation by the states attorney of Marseille and the German accredited BFU representative as stated in his letter published in the Annex of the BEA final report (they don’t know what was on the first officers mind and can’t prove therefore whether there was any malicious intent associated with it or whether it was some very innocent pilot practise to check out, instead of computing manually, where the aircraft would reach that altitude).
This habit of playing with the controls when alone in the cockpit is relevant to the accident flight because although it is clear that the first officer was alone and in the cockpit at the time of the descent, his father says that there is no proof that he was conscious. His father argues that the sound of the breathing on the cockpit voice recorder only shows that he was alive.
Hradecky goes one step further in his Aviation Herald piece, pointing out that the Flight Data Recorder shows that the selected speed changed but that this does not prove that a human in the cockpit changed the selected speed, as the FDR records changes to parameters but not the input mechanism used to make them. Similarly, the FDR recorded side stick changes but this data does not come directly from the side stick but is analysed by a further computer. The exact sources and the exact logic, he says, can only be come from Airbus, however the BEA did not asked them for an examination and explanation of the FDR data. Additionally, apparently the FDR shows two conflicting modes for the autopilot pitch channel which Airbus has confirmed is not possible to have active at the same time. Hradecky says that no further investigation was made into this and he believes it could mean that either the FDR was receiving invalid data or the autopilot had suffered a malfunction, in which case no human intervention at all was needed to initiate the descent and crash. He does not explain how the “test run” on the previous flight fits into this theory.
The conclusion seems to be that the first officer may have innocently manipulated the controls, having safely done so previously without affecting the flight. Then he was incapacitated in some way, which is why he did not reset the altitude and he did not open the cockpit door for the captain, as he had on the previous flight.
Hradecky says that there’s no evidence that the door switch was flipped to the LOCK position and that this is simply an assumption on the part of investigators.
In this case, the captain should be able to use the emergency code to gain entrance. However, Hradecky cites earlier maintenance as a possible issue, causing the emergency code to fail.
Could it be related to an alleged incident some time earlier, where with the aircraft being electrically powered a crew on the ground managed to lock themselves out of the cockpit due to a failed digit key on the door-keypad and needed maintenance to get into the cockpit again? BEA and BFU were informed about that alleged occurrence on D-AIPX some time prior to the accident, however, there is no evidence in the files that this was investigated. Would it not have been mandatory according to MEL that at any time there are two persons in the cockpit? It is noteworthy that the function of emergency entry code is tested only by maintenance every 12,000 flight hours. No check is performed routinely before flight or when conducting the first flight of the day.
So according to the Aviation Herald analysis, we have a number of alternative explanations:
The first officer did not suffer from depression or a mental disorder but had been seeking treatment for a vision issue, which he felt could be a physical or a psychological issue.
The references to the hospital stay for depression was a mistake by the first officer’s general practitioner and the BEA references to hospital visits in 2008 or 2009 were incorrect and did not happen.
The first officer was routinely changing the selected altitude and did not expect it to have any effect.
Some unknown issue caused the first officer to be incapacitated in the process of changing the selected altitude.
The FDR data showing continual inputs up to the final seconds of the flight, was invalid, corrupted, or caused by a faulty autopilot rather than any human at the controls
The emergency code on the door was malfunctioning and thus the captain could not regain access to the cockpit.
My problem is this: in order for me to believe that the aircraft crashed in a tragic accident instead of a deliberate action by the first officer, all of the above needs to be true. It’s possible that this chain of events, starting with a simple clerical error by the doctor, could have led an unconscious man to lie in the cockpit of a descending aircraft with a broken lock on the door. However, I have to say that it doesn’t seem very likely.
The principle of Occam’s razor seems to apply: the simplest answer is most often correct and this version of events is anything but simple.
You can see the full list of questions that Hradecky has put to the BEA towards the end of his article on the Aviation Herald. This post has gone on long enough and I am disinclined to repeat them.
In any event, the BEA has decided not to deal with them individually. This is the response that the BEA sent last weekend.
I am well aware that the recent press conference has renewed the interest in this event but as far as the BEA is concerned, we have published the final report and have nothing else to add or to comment. Regarding the recent press conference and any questions related to what was said or suggested, our position is as follows: What was presented or suggested is incompatible with the factual and recorded data contained in the final report of the BEA. In particular, the co-pilot’s breathing has remained normal and constant and remains active at the aircraft’s command until a few seconds before the impact. Conversely, it is observed that the co-pilot did not at any time seek: – to use the on-board telephone – to contact air traffic control – to open the cockpit door – to solicit the assistance of the pilot-in-command Furthermore, generally the BEA does not take part in speculations. Thanks in advance for your understanding
Hradecky has posted this along with his belief that a further investigation is needed to clarify the points that he and the first officer’s father have raised and that the Aviation Herald will continue to monitor the developments.
Maybe I’m a cynic but I remain unconvinced that this is in the best interests of the relatives of the victims of the crash.What you don't know is that the maus actually began production but there was only one turret and two hulls finished before the russians took the factory, and the complete one went through testing like a beast, and at the time there were almost no tanks on the allied side that could pen the maus, and the fact that they were set to operate in pairs meant that you would almoat always loose, the maus is actually one of the most advanced tanks designed in the second world war, I think the complete one is on display in a russian museum, or maybe moving to, it would possibly have won the war if it had been deployed, and the turret was NOT hand cranked, it was far too hard to hand crank a multi-ton turret. Most of the things you put up for changes could be overlooked, I think if you just updated armor and armament, it would make a far better tank today, the only reason it was so slow is that it had electrically driven drive wheels, and the engine was a simple generator, also the mantlet was SEPERATE from the actual turret armor, and this means it was thick af spaced armor and spaced armor has a habit of eating HEAT, now modern heat would still kill it, but none of these tanks would be completely destroyed by one shot unless it caused an explosion as there were armor plates and a motor between the drivers and the main compartment, so it would take at least 2 barring a magazine shot or similarly lucky hit
Click to expand...– A west Michigan business owner claims he’s been the target of death threats after he announced he won’t serve gays.
Brian Klawiter, who owns Dieseltec Automotive Repair in Grandville, posted a message on his business’ Facebook page saying that he is a Christian, and that his company does not welcome “immoral behavior” — including homosexuality.
“Our rights as conservative Americans are being squashed more and more everyday. Apparently if you are white (or close to it), you have a job, go to church, and own a gun… That translates into racists, privileged, bigot, conspiracy theorist.
“…I would not hesitate to refuse service to an openly gay person or persons. Homosexuality is wrong, period. If you want to argue this fact with me then I will put your vehicle together with all bolts and no nuts and you can see how that works,” the post reads, in part. [Read the compete message here].
The post went viral and now has hundreds of comments, mostly from people calling him names and accusing him of bigotry; although a handful of supportive commenters commend him on his stance.
Speaking to WWJ Newsradio 950’s Zahra Huber, Klawiter would not agree to an interview, but did confirm that he and his family have received death threats, with some saying they’d burn down his shop. He also said there have been people protesting outside his business.
In a new Facebook message posted Thursday morning, Klawiter said he doesn’t mind people expressing opposing views — but the threats are unacceptable.
“Listen up folks, If you have an opposing view to mine that IS OK, what is NOT OK is threats to kill me, my family, and friends; threats to burn down my shop and my home. I will stand firm on my views and will not back down, however, because of the ridiculous backlash I am requesting any supporters of ours that would be willing to stand with us to help secure my home and business. (There also seems to be a TON of confusion about one of my comments, the bolt and nut thing was a reference to physiology, bolt penis and nut vagina. I DID NOT threaten to purposely put a vehicle together wrong to harm someone,” the post reads.
A Grandville police sergeant said they haven’t received any calls regarding the alleged threats, but they are monitoring the situation.
She said the department is deploying extra officer patrols in the area surrounding the business, to “make sure nothing gets out of hand,” and to “protect everyone” involved.Cocaine lab found in Brazilian prison
Posted
A routine search of a prison in Brazil's Amazon region has found a flourishing criminal enterprise behind bars in the form of a cocaine-refining lab hidden behind false walls, officials said on Friday.
Guards discovered the illegal apparatus and a kilo of cocaine paste, along with 27 cellphones and 20 containers of chemicals like acetone and ether in the facility in Caceres, a spokesman for the prisons inspection said.
He confirmed information given by a local police commander, Lieutenant Colonel Jadir Metelo, who told the newspaper O Globo:"They were preparing the drug to sell it inside the prison."
The facility's warden has been absolved of participation or knowledge of the lab, but an administrative investigation has been opened.
- AFP
Topics: prisons-and-punishment, community-and-society, drugs-and-substance-abuse, law-crime-and-justice, crime, brazilThis book offers the relatively rare case in which the value of the whole is precisely equal to the sum of its parts. The book consists of six independent essays, apparently based on a conference on deontology at the University of Reading in 2010. The essays do not engage each other, nor is there any introduction to them. So the value of the collection just is the value of the individual essays, summed. Fortunately, the cast of contributors is stellar, and the essays are uniformly intelligent and well-argued. The value of the essays to particular readers will likely depend on the readers' interest in their several topics. So I will remark on the essays seriatim.
The first, by Michael Smith, is "Deontological Moral Obligations and Non-Welfarist Agent-Relative Values." Smith intends to discredit the idea that a plausible moral theory should be built on maximizing intrinsic value, where such value is understood as welfarist and agent-neutral. Smith's argument is built on the neo-Humean moral psychology familiar to readers of his work, and is constructed with Smith's characteristic clarity and lucidity.
Smith's foundational concern is that it cannot be the case (as he credits Hume with thinking) that norms for reasoning are purely procedural, in the sense that one may reason correctly whatever the "intrinsic desires" one happens to have. ("Intrinsic desires," unlike "extrinsic desires," are not sensitive to our apprehension of reasons.) Why not? If we could do so, one could (Smith argues) deliberate correctly from (i) one's reasons and (ii) one's intrinsic desires, to contradictory practical conclusions. Thus, a fully rational agent must possess certain intrinsic desires, including the desire that he not undermine his own capacity to believe for reasons, that others not interfere with that capacity, nor he with theirs, and that he help both himself and other rational agents to have the resources essential for believing for reasons. Since any agent must, qua fully rational, have these desires, and (on the view Smith favors) having reasons is a matter of having desires given correct deliberation, Smith arrives at the "conjecture" that each agent has the corresponding moral obligations (10). But these obligations are grounded in agent-relative, not agent-neutral, value (that is, the value to each agent in not interfering with and promoting the requisite rational capacities in himself and other agents). And, since these capacities are not (Smith says) part of one's welfare, our fundamental moral obligations are not welfarist, either.
Needless to say, this last step requires that one have a view of welfare on which the possession and exercise of one's rational capacities are not part of one's welfare. If that seems an implausible conception of welfare (as it does to me), then the non-welfarist part of Smith's argument fails. Does the rest of the argument do better? Once the door is opened to the idea (foreclosed to the Humean) that rationality might require having certain "intrinsic desires," one might wonder whether other desires besides those Smith considers belong on the list, and what kinds of priority relations among them might hold.
In the second paper, "Recalcitrant Pluralism," Phillip Stratton-Lake attempts to secure a form of Rossian deontology resistant to being recast as a form of consequentialism. Basic moral principles, Stratton-Lake argues, must, in good Rossian fashion, be understood as providing plural prima facie moral duties, as contrasted to "duties proper" that occur at the level of specific act recommendations and are warranted by the basic moral principles. Stratton-Lake's argument is directed against an "expanding the good" strategy for absorbing into a consequentialist view any putative counterexample to it. The example Stratton-Lake chooses (borrowed from Rob Shaver, who in turn borrowed it from H.A. Prichard) is of a son torn between rendering vital aid to his father or a stranger. Plausibly, the moral reasons for the son to render aid to his father are stronger than his reasons to aid the stranger, which one might think flies in the face of consequentialist impartiality. But a consequentialist can attribute intrinsic value to a son helping his father in a way, explaining why aiding his father brings about the intrinsically best state of affairs.
Stratton-Lake argues that such a consequentialist strategy depends on an impoverished and implausible understanding of moral reasons. The motivating reason for the son is not (even if he is a morally good person) bringing about the intrinsically best state of affairs: it is rendering aid to his father. This, Stratton-Lake argues, is just because rendering aid to his father is what he has normative reason to do. The production of the most valuable state of affairs plays no part in this story; the value is explained by the duty the son has to the father, rather than the duty being explained by the value. Moreover, the argument is cinched by considering the reasons for resentment the father might have were the son to help the stranger. If the consequentialist expansion story were right, the father might be entitled to disapprove of the son's failing to promote the most valuable state of affairs, but not to resent it (33).
So construed, Stratton-Lake offers us a careful version of the "wrong-kind-of-reasons" objection to consequentialist conceptions of moral responsibility, of a sort that have become familiar in recent years.[1] The value in advancing this line of thought will derive from (i) his careful rehearsal of a conception of the relation between various reasons involved in moral obligation and (ii) his application of those relations to the Rossian framework.
Ralph Wedgwood defends the "doctrine of double effect" (DDE) in the aptly-titled third essay, "Defending Double Effect." This essay involves focusing on the nature of the doctrine, in contrast to other recent defenses of (and attacks on) it, and offering an alternative to a "closeness" strategy for defending it against a certain range of objections. As Wedgwood defends the principle, it maintains that "there is normally a stronger reason against an act if that act has a bad state of affairs... as one of its intended effects than if that bad state of affairs is merely one of the act's unintended effects" (35). The principle so specified comports (Wedgwood argues) with a large number of moral intuitions. His explanation for what is going on at bottom is this: reasons against performing a certain action are grounded in, first, the badness of the consequent state of affairs, and second, the degree of "agential involvement" in bringing about that state of affairs (43). "Agential involvement" itself is a compound of two effects: first causal (where Wedgwood wants to distinguish causing from merely failing to prevent), and second intentional (where intending, rather than merely foreseeing, intensifies the reason against the action).
This reference to intention provides Wedgwood a tool for meeting the "closeness" problem. This problem occurs in cases such as Judith Thomson's,[2] where one can prevent a trolley from killing five people by pushing a man off a bridge above in order to collide with the trolley. Wedgwood argues that it is wrong to claim, as some defenders of DDE do, that the intention merely to have the man collide with the trolley is sufficiently "close" to intending to kill him to trigger a prohibition. After all, objectively one does not have to intend the death, merely the collision. Wedgwood's proposed alternative is to rely on a notion of "bad news". The idea is that we are guided by moral generalizations, and being so guided, we form expectations about the kinds of outcomes that would be seen as "bad news." Thus, the "bad news" about a man being pushed to collide with an oncoming trolley is sufficient to indicate that there is strong reason not to do so, even if one does not intend his death.
Wedgwood's device here is ingenious, but in a way it aggravates a concern about the degree to which his project is one in deontology. To the extent the doctrine is conceived in terms of, and largely driven by, reasons to avoid bad states of affairs, it seems amenable to being cast in consequentialist terms. It may thus be vulnerable to "expansive" strategies such as those Stratton-Lake is at pains to frustrate. On the other hand, to the extent it puts a premium on the moral value of intending per se -- to the extent it begins to treat outcomes not merely as states of affairs but as ends of particular moral agents (even if universally so) -- it lends itself to a virtue-ethical understanding. Whether that is a virtue rather than a vice may depend on the perspective of the reader.
The fourth paper, "The Possibility of Consent," is by David Owens. In it he explores the contours of "normative interests" -- interests we have in controlling the rights and obligations of ourselves and those around us. Owens develops his account of these interests by beginning with a Humean form of skepticism about the (alleged) powers of promises: if our reasons are rooted in our motives, and our motives in our interests (whether in ourselves or others), how could a mere declaration change the reasons one has? Owens argues that there is a common explanation for both the power of promising and the power of consent to change the normative landscape, and this is our interest in normative control: control over the obligations that we and others have. This interest is closely related to, but ultimately distinct from, our non-normative interests in things that may be the object of choice.
The paradigm case for Owen's argument is rape. Owens follows John Gardner in maintaining that the wrong in rape is a "bare wronging" -- a wronging that is independent of our non-normative interests in bodily integrity (66 ff.). Rape very often involves harms to bodily interests, but even when it does not, or even when such wrongs can be alleviated (say, by tranquilizers), the basic wrong of rape remains untouched. Consent and only consent is the only way for sexual intercourse not to constitute such a wrong. In fact, Owens argues that even choice cannot avert rape (70). "'No means No' even where the perpetrator is correct in supposing that the victim wish them [sic] to go ahead" (70). This is precisely because the normative interest in control has parted company with the non-normative interest in bodily integrity. The strength of this conclusion invites one to wonder whether these two kinds of interests are or should be taken to be as independent as Owens makes them out to be, but the paper offers a persuasive case that we have such interests in normative control.
Peter Vallentyne argues in the fifth essay, "Enforcement Rights against Non-Culpable Non-Just Intrusion," for an element of the enforcement component of rights-theory. This element addresses "non-just" intrusions (instances in which the requirements of rights are not satisfied, either as the result of a non-autonomous choice of the intruder, or as a matter of infringement of the right). The question is the extent of the liberty the rights-holder has to inflict harm upon the intruder, given facts about the harm the intrusion will impose upon various parties (the rights-holder, the intruder, and others), the harms the response will inflict on these parties, and the response alternatives available to the rights-holder. Vallentyne is meticulous in setting out the various elements that go into his proposal, and there is far too much detail to summarize adequately here. The effect is a defense of a sufficiency condition on permissible enforcement, and a promissory note on necessary and sufficient conditions for such enforcement. Those working in rights theory, or more interested generally in the moral issues surrounding self-defense, other-defense, innocent threats, and so on, may do well to engage Vallentyne's study.
The final paper, by Elizabeth Harman, asks, "Does Moral Ignorance Exculpate?" Her answer, in response to Gideon Rosen, is essentially "no." Harman works through a number of cases in which, Rosen claims, wrong actions are nevertheless blameless due to ignorance of non-moral facts (e.g., what one takes to be sugar is really arsenic) or moral facts (e.g., a Hittite slaveholder believes slavery is permissible). One issue is the role of the source of the relevant ignorance: whether one is culpable for the management of one's beliefs. Rosen and Harman agree that this sort of ignorance is not necessarily exculpatory. But Rosen maintains, and Harman denies, that if there is no fault in the management of beliefs, then the ignorance is exculpatory. Harman maintains that we can be obligated to believe the moral truths relevant to our actions, and be blameworthy for failing to do so, even if we have not mismanaged our beliefs (111). The dispute here is thus a blameworthiness analog to the dispute between Bernard Williams and his various opponents over Williams' claim that reasons for action must be "internal," with his opponents denying that the lack of a pertinent motive in one's "subjective motivational set" undercuts the claim that one has reason of a sort to act. I do not know whether the lessons from one debate might carry over to the other (in either direction), but as with the other papers in this collection, Harman's piece is carefully crafted and argued.
Some general remarks in closing: the title of the collection, Developing Deontology, is curious in two ways. First, while arguably the papers in the collection may be seen as originating from within a certain framework for thinking about ethics (that is, deontology), there is no attempt to develop that framework in any significant way. The papers do not engage each other at all, and it would be a challenge to identify the larger commitments they share. It might be true that each is a piece in a distinct broadly deontological ethical view, but this is not the place to look for, say, a systematic deontological reply to challenges to that framework from consequentialists or virtue ethics. Still, the collection is a powerful indicator of cutting-edge issues in deontological theory.
Second, the contributions these papers make are hardly limited to deontological ethics. For example, Stratton-Lake's and Owens' papers may well be especially congenial to contractualism. I can imagine ways in which Wedgwood's and Vallentyne's papers might be of value in a sophisticated consequentialism. The arguments in these essays will be of interest to many beyond the pale of deontology. For those who are interested in the topics these essays address within any normative ethical framework, the volume and its contributions may be quite valuable.The team behind Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, the Australian TV show about a dashing lady detective that’s become a cult favorite in the US, has been talking about taking Phryne Fisher to the big screen since last fall. And now they’re launching a fan funding campaign on Kickstarter to make it happen.
For the uninitiated, the Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher (Essie Davis) is a glamorously wealthy and cosmopolitan woman living in Australia in the 1920s. She spends her days wafting around Melbourne in a variety of beautiful outfits, solving murders and having romantic tension with the long-suffering Detective Jack Robinson (Nathan Page), but also seducing any particularly attractive man whom she happens to come across in the course of her investigations, because why not. (Pro tip: If you’re having trouble figuring out who the killer is in any given episode, remember that Phryne never seduces murderers. Her libido just has a sense for these things.)
The entire thing plays like a James Bond fantasy for women: Phryne’s hats are always as immaculate as James Bond’s suits, even if she’s scaling the walls of a Turkish bathhouse/secret opium den, and she’s just as suave, debonair, and unfailingly competent as 007 is, whether she’s at a gala or a crime scene.
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries ended after three seasons, and Davis headed off to join the cast of Game of Thrones (she played an actress Arya Stark was supposed to assassinate in season six), but the show’s production team has always said they’d love to do a film sequel, or even a series of films. And now, they’re announcing, a Miss Fisher movie is in the works — but they need fan support to make the budget work.
“We need your help to fund a gap in our financing,” says the Kickstarter description, “and prove to our investors that we have a strong fan-base who will come out to watch the film.”
With this campaign, Miss Fisher is following in the steps of that other beloved female detective of the small screen, Veronica Mars. The UPN/CW show was a beloved cult favorite with low ratings, and while fans continually called for a movie, rights holder WB refused to fund it. It took a fan campaign in 2014 to bring Veronica to the big screen. It’s worth noting that studios in general seem averse to funding movies about female detectives, even those who have already proved their popularity on the small screen.
The Miss Fisher movie campaign has set a goal of $199,723 US, and as of this writing, it’s raised $57,573, with 29 days to go. Fan supporters will receive prizes ranging from notes from Miss Fisher and behind-the-scenes updates to the chance to be an extra in the film and ownership of a piece from Miss Fisher’s iconic wardrobe.
You can visit the Miss Fisher Kickstarter here.sorry for spoilers kinda?
I won't be posting any more frozen art on deviantart, if you want to see more of my frozen work follow my fan art blog on tumblr -> lovewillthaw-frozenfan-art.tumblr.com
So I don't know how this happened. I watched Frozen and next thing I knew I was drawing these two non stopI'm getting quite the human practice, although I know the flaws are endless in this lolI'm amazed I actually had the time to do this. Tis nice though, so much hustle and bustle these days I barely have any time to create art for myself.I had this idea in my head the moment I saw the sword shatter into pieces. I imagine as she's rushing to her sister how all these memories came flooding back to her.Janice Galloway via The Scotsman
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I.In the eponymous story from her most recent collection, Jellyfish, Janice Galloway shows her genius for the ‘ouch’ principle: the wince-inducing collision of something exposed and over-sensitive with something brutal and sadistic.
We feel it coming; harbingers and hints surround Monica and her four-year-old son, on an outing to the beach as a last hurrah, the day before school starts. Alert to the impending separation, Monica sees danger and careless indifference all around her: in the mother who chats to a friend, unaware that her toddler in his buggy hangs over the kerb, too close to the wheels of a passing lorry; in the angry father swearing viciously at his little boy. She worries too much, she wants to protect. Somewhere between the wild beauty of the coast and the unsavoury piles of rubbish dumped by locals, they come across a parliament of stranded jellyfish. Transparent and ‘gummy’, out of their natural environment, one of them is little more than viscous pulp, object of blunt force trauma by human hand. How is the mother to explain this act of random violence on something so exquisitely vulnerable? ‘Maybe they hurt it – her voice faltered – they hurt it just because it can’t stop them.’ Ach, the jellyfish, so hopelessly undefended, not even a skin to mask its insides; the stupid jellyfish, out of its element and asking for trouble. The sight is painful because Monica – and through her eyes, the reader – knows how it feels, recognizes how easily one might end up in its place, how a cherished child might end up in its place. Characters in Galloway’s books are often alive to their inner jellyfish, and aware of – even enduring – the myriad situations in which the hammer may fall.
The recent Guardian review of Jellyfish suggested that these stories held new departures for Galloway in their focus on the parent-child relationship and the natural world. But both make fine provocations for the sort of catastrophic thinking typical to her work; thinking that has flowed and been repressed so many times it creates a carboniferous pragmatism. In the story that intrigued me perhaps the most, Eric Blair (otherwise known as George Orwell), is living with his young son on the Scottish West Coast island of Jura after the death of his wife, Eileen. It’s a hardscrabble existence in a place with no amenities and only the most basic of resources, and Blair is in denial over the diagnosis of his own soon-to-be-fatal tuberculosis. ‘You don’t fight an illness by fighting it; it gives not a hoot about your stoicism,’ the doctor tells him. But Blair is nothing if not stubborn: ‘Rest was not an appropriate response to encroaching lack of breath, lack of power. They had no idea what they were asking.’
Inside his mind, two concerns breed fear; his belief that another war is coming, and his determination to ‘toughen up’ his young son. Excessive fear promotes a formidable fight response, but Blair cannot allow himself anything as weak as emotions; they must harden into ideologies. The story follows his trip to the general stores where he asks whether his parcel – a firearm – has arrived (it hasn’t), and then he begins the twenty mile return trip on his motorbike. The sound of a gunshot from the hills unsettles him so much he comes off the bike, but he’s okay ‘after a fashion’. Menace and machismo shadow box across the pages. He continues hoping for another five years in which to finish his novel and form his son: ‘He’d ruddy well achieve it by means of will alone.’ He was to die less than two years later. But his novel, 1984, the crystallisation of sadism and denial of feeling into a society in which only the broken would survive, lived a dark and splendid life after him.
It’s a fascinating portrait of an artist, from an artist who grew up in what seemed to be a sort of Scottish working-class family microcosm of 1984. Love in the form of brutality, the grim reckoning that the worst would be likely to happen and the best would be to face up to it, deprivation of all kinds, were basic elements of Galloway’s upbringing that transmuted into her writing. But her literary imagination tempers its casual cruelty with tenderness and a cautious optimism. Critics use the word ‘visceral’ a lot, but note the glittering seam of black humour. The New York Times Book Review memorably claimed her work ‘Resembles Tristram Shandy rewritten by Sylvia Plath’, which we might reasonably take to mean that she is an original. Her first novel, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing (1989) won the MIND/Allen Lane award, and was followed by two more novels, two short story collections and, before Jellyfish, two extraordinary memoirs that took the reader deep into the phenomenology of childhood whilst advising caution towards a simple overlap of reality and narrative. There were prizes all around. Not bad for a woman who claimed that an artistic vocation was unimaginable for her as she ‘thought writers were wealthy people who just wrote things out of the goodness of their heart and gave them as gifts.’
II.
Janice Galloway was born in 1955 in Saltcoats, Scotland, to a mother who ‘thought I was the menopause’. In the mythic version Galloway tells in her memoir, This Is Not About Me, which might be the true one for all she knows, her mother was unaware of the pregnancy until her waters broke, perhaps in denial of the freedom-busting, life-ending truth. The young Janice is never in doubt about her status as nuisance. ‘If I’d kent, she’d say, her eyes narrowing. If I’d just bloody known.’ Galloway’s father makes scant appearance in the pages, dying when Janice is only six, though when he’s there, he makes his mark felt. By throwing supper out the back door in a fit of temper, locking Janice inside and making her play chequers with him while her mother is locked out, knocking pitifully on the windows. And finally, setting fire (he was drunk and smoking) to the cigarette stand they owned but had not insured. Just over fifty pages in, she and her mother move into a tiny attic flat above the doctors’ surgery where her mother finds work as a cleaner.
This relative idyll does not last, for Janice’s older sister, Cora, joins them. Cora is seventeen years older and has left behind |
stop on a road trip or a Midwest adventure. You can explore underground caves at Henry Doorly Zoo, or experience the growing indie music scene. Omaha was named the most hungover city (with most bars per capita) in the United States, which means it's probably a really fun place to drink.
Bisbee, Arizona
Bisbee was once a prolific copper-mining town. But when the mine closed, the hippies arrived, and the town was reinvented as an artist's colony in the 1970s. You can still take a tour of the mine, for a historical experience. The town has been modernized since, but there are still remnants of the 70s, and the town still has a strong art culture. Also, there is no shortage of marijuana in Bisbee, if you were wondering.
Anchorage, Alaska
If you're looking for an adventure, you can't get much better than Anchorage. Anchorage has all the appeals of an urban city, with perfect proximity to untouched wilderness. While in the city, visit the Anchorage Museum, which recently received a $75 million renovation, or rent a bicycle and tour the city (which has been nicknamed "Bike Uptopia") on wheels. Right outside Anchorage is Chugach State Park -- the perfect place to ski, hike, raft, camp or climb.
Ocean City, Maryland
Lovingly referred to as the Eastern Shore by mid-Atlantic locals, Ocean City is ideal for a summer visit along an East Coast road trip or in addition to a visit to Washington, D.C. or Baltimore. There's something nostalgic and all-American about walking the Boardwalk, especially at night, stopping for local treats like Dumser's ice cream and Thrasher's french fries (with malt vinegar, of course) and going for a ride on the ferris wheel. By day, try your hand at crabbing or visit Assateague Island, where horses roam the beach.
Honolulu, Hawaii
Who doesn't want to go to Honolulu? The capital of Hawaii has been called the greenest city in America. Go to experience one of the most unique American cities, with a number of cultures mingling in one gorgeous city. Balance trips to museums, cultural centers and the Waikiki Aquarium (which is also a working marine biology laboratory) with relaxing rests on the stunning neighboring Waikiki beaches. A number of hostels and community centers make staying in Honolulu affordable for those who aren't exactly seeking out luxury.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
If you're a "Breaking Bad" fan, this is an obvious choice for you. But you can sway your travel companions to make a mecca here with all the other great things Albuquerque has to offer. Chances are you don't spend a lot of time in the desert, so that makes Albuquerque an automatic escape from everyday life. The city is 28 percent parkland, and has been named the top city for nature lovers. It's also been called a top "value" city -- meaning you don't need to spent a lot to have a good time. The annual Balloon Fiesta is reason enough to go.
Savannah, Georgia
Get a strong dose of Southern charm at this quintessential Georgia city. You will eat delicious food and won't spend a lot of money -- Savannah is incredibly affordable. Also, Downtown Savannah is one of the rare places with no open-container laws, so grab your beverage of choice and roam the streets during happy hour. The city is the oldest in Georgia, so it's rich in history and culture.Share this
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Email You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. University University at Buffalo
Engineers are testing a new method to program a team of drones to quickly map an oil spill. The work is inspired by nature and guided by a mathematical formula.
“Nature may not proactively use mathematics, nor does it have foresight. It behaves in ways driven by feedback, implicit drive for adaptation, and a certain degree of apparent randomness,” says Souma Chowdhury, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the University at Buffalo’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “But we can look at what kind of mathematical principles define that behavior. Once we have that, we can use it to solve very complex problems.”
In a recent paper, Chowdhury’s team describe how they optimized and simulated a five-drone swarm that can map a nearly one-kilometer wide spill in nine minutes. They presented the results at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Science and Technology Forum.
The team had to overcome the lack of communication bandwidth typical of a flying ad hoc network and the short battery life of off-the-shelf drones.
“Communication is the foundation of any swarm.”
Following the principles partly inspired by the dynamics of a flock of birds, Chowdhury devised a method for the drones to quickly record whether they are over water, oil, or the edge of the spill.
In addition, the drones assume that the space around the oil they have spotted is also oil, although that is recorded as less than certain. This simple information is shared with the other drones in the swarm, as opposed to sharing actual images or video, which would require too much bandwidth.
“Communication is the foundation of any swarm,” he says.
As the drones move from point to point over the spill, they avoid going over space that other drones have already covered. Thus, with five drones making observations every five seconds, the size of the spill can be determined quickly.
Keep costs low
The drones also fly to their base, on a boat, when their batteries get low. The drones that replace them on the search already have the information from all the other drones, so they avoid previously mapped locations.
“The thematic focus of my lab is developing computational design approaches that take inspiration from nature,” Chowdhury says.
The low computer power—each drone can operate with a $35 Raspberry Pi computer—keeps costs low. Chowdhury’s approach accomplishes a complex task using simple agents.
“There is no need for human interaction during its entire mission,” he says. “That’s the big deal.”
“This task can be accomplished by off-the-shelf drones that cost under $1,000.”
Another big deal is the cost. Chowdhury’s approach assumes simple, affordable drones, which makes it accessible to many more people.
“This task can be accomplished by off-the-shelf drones that cost under $1,000. All they need is to have a simple drone-mountable camera system and use our software,” he says.
Collision avoidance is another challenge for the swarm, and here too, Chowdhury is following nature’s simple rules. In recent work reported by the University of Queensland, researchers watched very carefully how parrots never crashed into each other. They observed through tunnel experiments that they always veer to the right, a simple rule that keeps every member of the flock safe.
Chowdhury’s lab is exploring how using similar principles, drones can pre-emptively turn a certain angle to the right when they sense another flying member of the swarm. He is writing that in a companion paper to be submitted to another international conference later this year.
Swarming drones could be used elsewhere, such as mapping forest fires or other natural disasters. It’s possible they could be used to help locate people trapped after an earthquake by changing the type of cameras used.
Source: University at BuffaloGet Yer Turkey Legs Here!
Turkey Leg? Yes, please.
Me thinks the wench is hungry for thou leg of turkey.
Not a pretty sight.
Hungry, Val?
Pappy Biggins will hook you up!
mead
Puss to eat, my lord?
If not puss, how's about my sausage?
Want some head?
Toad in whose hole?
forcemeat
Elizabethan buffet.
Wenching her thirst!
Feast of Fowl.
Meat pie a la Scots.
Would you ride a guy named Pony?
I swear, it's not just about turkey legs at the. Okay, I will admit I had some solidly rooted preconceived notions about the Renaissance Fair. Ideas like goofy guys walking around as court jesters, Robin Hood look-alikes, men-in-tights-in-general and women in wench wear baring canyon-esque cleavage.I imagined enduring tinny harpsichord music thick in the dusty Irwindale air while actors recited Shakespeare on stage as people drinking from de rigeur tankards filled with Bud Light looked on and heckled in fabricated Elizabethan accents.Alright, so it's all those things, but (I swear on Hamlet's skull) it's so much more too! There is a palpable and contagious sense of community, abandon and pure fun. If you do the Renaissance Pleasure Faire right, you'll do it without self-consciousness and judgment, and that's when the "pleasure" part will kick in big time.However, being a snobby food lover, my prejudices about the "food" at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire were even more difficult to reconcile. Visions of turkey legs and churros were the only two things frolicking in my head. Oh, sure, there were turkey legs......lots of turkey legs!There was no resisting. The free flowing ale only made the stomach yearn turkey leg even more.These turkey legs were delicious. Better than any other fairs' turkey legs. Even better than the honkin' ones at Disneyland. Theirs are smoked while these are roasted fresh then grilled before serving. Thus, making the ones at Ren Faire juicier, more tender and less of a sodium bomb.The meat scepter can do a lot of damage — delicious damage!And, as I happily experienced, it was not all turkey legs. However, if you needed to wash the taste of turkey out of your mouth in a sweet way, Pappy Biggins will be more than happy to assist you. He'll pour heavy on the— a sweet and delicious wine made of honey — to vanquish any gobble left in your gullet.Not everything edible meant you could eat it, though. There were some colorful purveyors of shock food. Not for sale. More for gawking, really, and making conversation or just a photo op for a Facebook profile pic.I definitely avoided the basket of raw sausage baking in a basket with its hawker trying to avoid the health department official.Talk about dead head, there probably were a few Grateful Dead fans milling about the faire, but I didn't anticipate a cabeza monger to be strolling the grounds trying to unload a very real and very decapitated pork head. Too bad he didn't take debit cards.Although the stand advertised "toad in a hole", it wasn't the genuine English dish. It was actually a very tasty sausage roll. Fried in a nice, flaky pastry casing and filled with well-seasoned pork— a type of finely ground, casing-less sausage — this "toad in a hole" was custom made for the faire. May the force meat with you!In addition to the "toad in a hole", the "Knight's Lance" was a welcome excuse to eat some bacon wrapped asparagus or whatever those green things were.Our fair wench, Darien, showed us the ins and outs of navigating the food court as we made royal swine out of ourselves. She even explained how "wench" was not a derogatory term back in the Elizabethan day. Now is a different situation.Sometimes you just can't decide between white and dark meat. Well, throw in chicken, duck and quail meat and see the indecisiveness go wild. Or, you can just order the Feast of Fowl, which is chicken leg, duck leg and whole quail. It's not duck, duck, goose here.One of the best food stands was the Meat Pie stand because of its good selection of meat pies to choose from: steak & mushroom, chicken, cottage, Scottish and shepherd's pie. The Scottish meat pie basically was a flaky over-sized hockey puck stuffed with minced meat seasoned with spices to give it a distinct haggis flavor.The "Pony Ride" was a traumatic experience for me that will require weekly, intense, therapy sessions to erase from memory. I won't say anymore. You'll just have to sit through the Deep End Dining/Trippy Food Photo Podcast below to see for yourself. *sob* Sorry, I just can't bring myself to revisit the "Pony Ride". I need a hug!
RenFaire2011HD from Ed Lin on Vimeo.
WATCH THE PODCAST! Also, THANK YOU, LADY CLINTON! (Sorry to overlook you in credits.)Kia may receive the second mention in the Hyundai Kia Automotive Group, but this once very plain Korean brand is anything but boring, especially with the products it has been serving up in recent years. Indeed, nearly every model put forth by Kia has been lauded for its outstanding style, generous standard equipment, and superior build quality. No wonder Kia has received high marks in surveys conducted by J.D. Power and Strategic Vision.
Kia’s utility vehicle offerings are thin, at least compared to Nissan, Chevrolet, Toyota, and Ford, to name a few. Even so, the manufacturer makes good use of the products it does offer, including the compact Sportage and the midsize Sorento. Kia also sells the Sedona minivan, staying in a segment long abandoned by Ford and Chevrolet.
A 2016 Kia Sorento EX AWD (all-wheel drive) model was a recent weekly test drive subject. This model is all new and begins the third generation for this five- or seven-passenger model. Although it shares its platform with the Hyundai Santa Fe, the Sorento is sold only in a longer wheelbase configuration. You can choose two- or three-row models among the eight trim levels available.
For 2016, the Sorento gains a third engine choice — a 2.0-liter, turbocharged four-cylinder making 240 horsepower and 260 foot-pounds of torque. The new engine provides middle of the model range performance — the base 2.4-liter, four-cylinder engine makes 185 horsepower and 178 foot-pounds of torque. The V-6 delivers 290 horsepower and 252 foot-pounds of torque. As tested, the EX edition came with the V-6 and I must say it delivers excellent performance. All models come paired with a 6-speed automatic transmission.
You’d be forgiven if the Kia looks more expensive than it is. At $37,045 delivered, the test model has a premium look, marked by its handsome tiger nose fascia along with sleek wraparound headlamps and stylish embrasures housing the available fog lamps. Approach this vehicle with the key fob on your person and the side mirrors fold out and the door handles illuminate. A very classy feature and what you would find on comparable luxury models.
Across its profile, the Sorento features character lines around the wheel wells and across its body. Body sculpting, chrome wheels, and a sloping roof line contributes to a look that is at once upscale as it is sporty. From the rear is a liftgate spoiler, wraparound combination lamps, chrome embellishments, reflectors, and an exhaust tip.
Inside, Kia does not let up on the premium look and feel. Dual stitching runs across the dashboard, on the door inlays and across the front storage console as well as on the seats. Soft touch materials, brightwork trim, leather touches and a minimal use of plastics (mostly of the hardened variety) give this model a premium look.
Only the V-6 model provides three rows of seats and each seating position is usable. Access is attainable by sliding the second row seat forward and tilting same. A better arrangement is found in the Nissan Pathfinder, as its second row seat folds and tumbles forward.
The front bucket seats are heated and ventilated in the EX and come with 14-way power for the driver and 8-way power for the front passenger. The 40-20-40 middle seat position (the outboard positions recline and are heated) is followed by a 50-50 split folding bench seat in the third row — not the most roomy area for adults, but doable for teenagers. If you need to maximize your people carrying room, then the Kia Sedona is the better choice of the two models.
The Sorento’s instrument panel features an oversized circular display dominated by the speedometer and digital driver information set within it. A “half pie” analog display to the left represents the tachometer; to the right is an additional “half pie” with a fuel oil gauge on top and the fuel gauge below that.
The most surprising and even disappointing feature is the 4.3-inch backlit display that punctuates the center console. It simply is too small for this SUV and seems out of place — where competing models have much larger displays, Kia went with the tiniest screen size possible. At least switches on either side of the screen are of a normal size and make operating the audio system and controlling the included eServices app a breeze. This system can be controlled by touch or voice activation. Navigation is extra, but it also does something that should please drivers — it brings in an 8-inch color display.
Underneath the screen are switches and knobs to manage climate control as well as for ventilation and the heated seats. At the base of the console is a large, enclosed storage area — suitable for holding your small portable device and connecting to the auxiliary input plug or USB port.
A deep storage compartment between the seats houses a removable tray and a second USB port. In addition, the transmission shifter and three switches (i.e., drive mode, AWD lock, and parking guidance) are present, along with two cup holders. The front doors come with drink holders and storage pockets; the rear doors have drink holders only. Two more drink holders and open storage compartments are found in the third row. Front seat back nets are also present.
Kia provides a USB port, a 110-volt power inverter, and a 12-volt outlet for the second row seat along with vents. The third row seats have a switch to manage climate circulation in that area.
The very rear of the vehicle comes with a nifty compartmentalized storage area located under the floor. I like these for two reasons — for squirreling away emergency kit supplies and for hiding valuables out of the sight of prying eyes. As for the spare, a full-size tire and wheel is located underneath the rear of the SUV.
This SUV shines in several areas — it is hard to know where to begin. For starters, the V-6 engine is potent and with all-wheel drive present, the Sorento has a 5,000-pound towing capacity. Moreover, adding the turbo engine brings in a level of on-the-road performance missing in the base model.
As for the V-6 it offers very good off-the-mark acceleration and is a champion on the highway. The transmission shifts smoothly through all six forward gears and all turns are accomplished without drama. Kia says the new model is stiffer with torsional rigidity increased by 14 percent over the previous model. I give this model high marks in the NVH — noise, vibration and harshness — category. You get living room comfort in a model that should give the Buick Enclave a run for the money, but at a lower price point.
Choose the $2,500 premium package and your model brings in a long list of amenities, including some that were already mentioned here. That list includes the power folding side mirrors, second row shade screens, welcome door illumination, and a “hands free” power liftgate. Blindspot detection and rear traffic alert are also included. Additional safety features, a panoramic sunroof, and HID headlights are also available, depending on the trim selected.
2016 Kia Sorento EX AWD Sticker price from $33,500
Price as tested: $37,045
Seats 7
3.3-liter V-6 gasoline engine
290 horsepower @ 6,400 RPM
252 foot-pounds of torque @ 5,300 RPM
3.62 inches bore by 3.31 inches stroke
Engine compression ratio: 11.5-to-1
Six-speed automatic transmission
Wheelbase: 109.4 inches
Length: 187.4 inches
Width: 74.4 inches
Height: 66.3 inches
Passenger volume: 154.2 cubic feet
Storage volume: 11.1/38.8/73.5 cubic feet
Towing capacity: 5,000 pounds
EPA: 18 mpg city, 26 mpg highway
Regular grade gasoline
Fuel tank: 18.8 gallons
Curb weight: From 4,343 pounds
IIHS safety rating: Top safety pick
Limited vehicle warranty: 5 years/60,000 miles
Powertrain warranty: 10 years/100,000 miles
Corrosion warranty: 5 years/100,000 miles
Vehicle assembly: West Point, Georgia
See Also — Behind the Wheel of a 2017 Kia Sorento SUVYeah, yeah, I know! More moon, more overly colorful night skies, more rooftops. I repeat myself more than a Vanilla Ice Greatest Hits compilation.Back around February, I was asked to create some images for an anti-bullying campaign. One of the ones requested was this pic I originally did for the lovely and amazing Fina Hylen-but changed around so the concept was show rivals putting their differences aside and going on a fun adventure together. As far as I know the official plans for it are scrapped, or at least languishing in Development Heck.Tonight is an annual, biggie-size community art event for Pittsburgh called Art All Night. Local artists from all around the Steel City contribute one piece of art to display for 24 hours of fun, friends, beer and...that other thing. Oh yeah, art! Since I haven't had time to put together something new from scratch this week, I decided to dust off this piece, clean it up a bit and use it for my AAN contribution.If you're in Yinzer Country and are attending Art All Night, let me know on Twitter if you spot this! Also, keep an eye out for one of Mr. Kitties' Harmony Book Boxes on display. We're going to fill it with free MLP buttons! Honestly, who doesn't like buttons? You know, except for the Pittsburgh Anti-Button League.Wal-Mart is America’s biggest employer. It’s also one of its most anti-union, and has worked hard to stop workers from organizing. In 2000, ai???when a small meatcutting department successfully organized a union at a Walmart store in Texas, Wal-Mart responded a week later by announcing the phase-out of its meatcutting departments entirely.ai??? When a branch in Quebec, Canada, voted to unionize, the company immediately shut down the store.
But you can’t keep workers down forever. Josh Eidelson at Salon reports about a huge wave of one-day strikes that have hit Wal-Mart stores and suppliers nationwide:
For the second time in five days ai??i?? and also the second time in Walmartai??i??s five decades ai??i?? workers at multiple US Walmart stores are on strike.Ai??This morning, workers walked off the job in Dallas,Ai??Texas andAi??Laurel, Maryland; Walmart store workers in additional cities are expected to join the strike in the coming hours. No end date has been announced; some plan to remain on strike at least through tomorrow, when theyai??i??ll join other Walmart workers for a demonstration outside the companyai??i??s annual investor meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas. Todayai??i??s is the latest in a unprecedented wave of Walmart supply chain strikes: From shrimp workers in Louisiana, to warehouse workers in California and Illinois, to Walmart store employees in three states ai??i?? and counting.
ai???A lot of associates, we have to use somewhat of a buddy system,ai??? Dallas worker Colby Harris said last night. ai???We loan each other money during non-paycheck weeks just to make it through to the next week when we get paid. Because we donai??i??t have enough money after paying bills to even eat lunch.ai??? Harris, whoai??i??s now on strike, said that after three years at Walmart, he makes $8.90 an hour in the produce department, and workers at his store have faced ai???constant retaliationai??? for speaking up.
The strikes, which began last Thursday, are being spearheaded by a year-old organization called OUR Walmart, which was set up by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. These work stoppages are aimed at winning better job security and benefits, and so far none of these workers have gone the further step of organizing as a formal union.
“I’m striking because I was retaliated against for speaking out,” said one Los Angeles Wal-Mart employee, Monique Velasquez, who had her hours cut from 30 a week to eight after the company discovered that she was involved in OUR Walmart activities.
These historic work stoppages and strikes may seem small, but they are the first major labor actions in Wal-Mart’s half-century long history. Let’s hope they succeed in forcing this corporate behemoth to take worker demands seriously.Winter is coming—and if you’re a motorcyclist in Russia, that means six months of the kind of cold, darkness, ice, and snow that’s legendary among military tacticians for repelling everyone from Charles XII to Napoleon. In St. Petersburg, home to photographer Valeriy Zaytsev, temperatures can drop to a horrific -4°F for months on end. For the legions of motorcyclists who can’t ride ’til spring, it results in a kind of madness Zaytsev calls mototoxemia.
“Mototoxemia has various symptoms,” Zaytsev writes. “People sing songs and write poetry about it.” There’s no easy cure for mototoxemia, but two things are often tried: “Motorcyclists can wear motor outfit and go for a city walk,” or they can settle for keeping their motorcycle as close as possible, despite a serious lack of garages. Zaytsev explains:
“Not to part with their motorcycle, motorcyclists put them inside of their apartments. This can be very difficult, because many of them live in apartment buildings without freight elevators, and stairwells in these buildings are not adjusted for lifting motorcycles to the apartments.”The Clean Air Act (42 U.S.C. § 7401) is a United States federal law designed to control air pollution on a national level.[1] It is one of the United States' first and most influential modern environmental laws, and one of the most comprehensive air quality laws in the world.[2][3] As with many other major U.S. federal environmental statutes, it is administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in coordination with state, local, and tribal governments.[4] Its implementing regulations are codified at 40 C.F.R. Sub-chapter C, Parts 50-97.
The 1955 Air Pollution Control Act was the first U.S. federal legislation that pertained to air pollution; it also provided funds for federal government research of air pollution.[4] The first federal legislation to actually pertain to "controlling" air pollution was the Clean Air Act of 1963.[5] The 1963 act accomplished this by establishing a federal program within the U.S. Public Health Service and authorizing research into techniques for monitoring and controlling air pollution.[6]
It was first amended in 1965, by the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act, which authorized the federal government to set required standards for controlling the emission of pollutants from certain automobiles, beginning with the 1968 models. A second amendment, the Air Quality Act of 1967, enabled the federal government to increase its activities to investigate enforcing interstate air pollution transport, and, for the first time, to perform far-reaching ambient monitoring studies and stationary source inspections. The 1967 act also authorized expanded studies of air pollutant emission inventories, ambient monitoring techniques, and control techniques.[7] While only six states had air pollution programs in 1960, all 50 states had air pollution programs by 1970 due to the federal funding and legislation of the 1960s.[8] Amendments approved in 1970 greatly expanded the federal mandate, requiring comprehensive federal and state regulations for both stationary (industrial) pollution sources and mobile sources. It also significantly expanded federal enforcement. Also, EPA was established on December 2, 1970 for the purpose of consolidating pertinent federal research, monitoring, standard-setting and enforcement activities into one agency that ensures environmental protection.[9][10]
Further amendments were made in 1990 to address the problems of acid rain, ozone depletion, and toxic air pollution, and to establish a national permit program for stationary sources, and increased enforcement authority. The amendments also established new auto gasoline reformulation requirements, set Reid vapor pressure (RVP) standards to control Evaporative emissions from gasoline, and mandated new gasoline formulations sold from May to September in many states. Reviewing his tenure as EPA Administrator under President George H. W. Bush, William K. Reilly characterized passage of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act as his most notable accomplishment.[11]
The Clean Air Act was the first major environmental law in the United States to include a provision for citizen suits. Numerous state and local governments have enacted similar legislation, either implementing federal programs or filling in locally important gaps in federal programs.
Summary [ edit ]
National Ambient Air Quality Standards not met as of June 2017 Counties in the United States with one or morenot met as of June 2017
Title I: Programs and Activities [ edit ]
Graph showing decreases in US air pollution concentrations during 1990 to 2015
Part A: Air Quality and Emissions Limitations [ edit ]
This section of the act declares that protecting and enhancing the nation's air quality promotes public health. The law encourages to prevent regional air pollution and control programs. It also provides technical and financial assistance for preventing air pollution at both state and local governments. Additional sub chapters cover cooperation, research, investigation, training, and other activities. Grants for air pollution planning and control programs, and interstate air quality agencies and program cost limitations are also included in this section.[12]
The act mandates air quality control regions, designated as attainment vs non-attainment. Non-attainment areas do not meet national standards for primary or secondary ambient air quality. Attainment areas meet these standards, while unclassified areas cannot be classified based on the available information.[12]
Air quality criteria, national primary and secondary ambient air quality standards, state implementation plans and performance standards for new stationary sources are covered in Part A as well. The list of hazardous air pollutants that the act establishes includes compounds of Acetaldehyde, benzene, chloroform, Phenol, and selenium. The list also includes mineral fiber emissions from manufacturing or processing glass, rock or slag fibers as well as radioactive atoms. The list can periodically be modified. The act lists unregulated radioactive pollutants such as cadmium, arsenic, and poly cyclic organic matter and it mandates listing them if they will cause or contribute to air pollution that endangers public health, under section 7408 or 7412.[12]
The remaining sub-chapters cover smokestack heights, state plan adequacy, and estimating emissions of carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and oxides of nitrogen from area and mobile sources. Measures to prevent unemployment or other economic disruption include using local coal or coal derivatives to comply with implementation requirements. The final sub chapter in this act focuses on land use authority.[12]
Part B: Ozone Protection [ edit ]
Because of advances in the atmospheric chemistry, this section was replaced by Title VI when the law was amended in 1990.[13]
This change in the law reflected significant changes in scientific understanding of ozone formation and depletion. Ozone absorbs UVC light and shorter wave UVB, and lets through UVA, which is largely harmless to people. Ozone exists naturally in the stratosphere, not the troposphere. It is laterally distributed because it is destroyed by strong sunlight, so there is more ozone at the poles. Ozone is created when O 2 comes in contact with photons from solar radiation. Therefore, a decrease in the intensity of solar radiation also results in a decrease in the formation of ozone in the stratosphere. This exchange is known as the Chapman mechanism:
O 2 + UV photon → 2 O (note that atmospheric oxygen as O is highly unstable)
O + O 2 + M → O 3 (O 3 is Ozone) + M
M represents a third molecule, needed to carry off the excess energy of the collision of O + O 2.
Atmospheric freon and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) contribute to ozone depletion (Chlorine is a catalytic agent in ozone destruction). Following discovery of the ozone hole in 1985, the 1987 Montreal Protocol successfully implemented a plan to replace CFCs and was viewed by some environmentalists as an example of what is possible for the future of environmental issues, if the political will is present.
Part C - Prevention of Significant Deterioration of Air Quality [ edit ]
The Clean Air Act requires permits to build or add to major stationary sources of air pollution. This permitting process, known as New Source Review (NSR), applies to sources in areas that meet air quality standards as well as areas that are unclassified.[14] Permits in attainment or unclassified areas are referred to as Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permits, while permits for sources located in nonattainment areas are referred to as non attainment area (NAA) permits.[15]
The fundamental goals of the PSD program are to:
prevent new non-attainment areas by ensuring economic growth in harmony with existing clean air; protect public health and welfare from any adverse effects; preserve and enhance the air quality in national parks and other areas of special natural recreational, scenic, or historic value.[15]: 3
Part D: Plan Requirements for Non-attainment Areas [ edit ]
Under the Clean Air Act states are required to submit a plan for non-attainment areas to reach attainment status as soon as possible but in no more than five years, based on the severity of the air pollution and the difficulty posed by obtaining cleaner air.
The plan must include:
an inventory of all pollutants
permits
control measures, means and techniques to reach standard qualifications
contingency measures
The plan must be approved or revised if required for approval, and specify whether local governments or the state will implement and enforce the various changes. Achieving attainment status makes a request for reevaluation possible. It must include a plan for maintenance of air quality.
Title II: Emission Standards for Moving Sources [ edit ]
Graph showing decreases in US air pollution emissions from transportation sources during 1980-2015, while US population and economic activity increased.
Part A: Motor Vehicle Emission and Fuel Standards [ edit ]
Sub-chapters of Title II cover state standards and grants, prohibited acts and actions to restrain violations, as well as a study of emissions from non road vehicles (other than locomotives) to determine whether they cause or contribute to air pollution. Motorcycles are treated in the same way as automobiles under the emission standards for new motor vehicles or motor vehicle engines. The last few sub chapters deal with high altitude performance adjustments, motor vehicle compliance program fees, prohibition on production of engines requiring leaded gasoline and urban bus standards.[16]
This part of the bill was extremely controversial the time it was passed. The automobile industry argued that it could not meet the new standards[8]. Senators expressed concern about impact on the economy. However the stricter standards led to the creation of the catalytic converter, which was a revolutionary development. (Coincidentally, these converters didn't work well with leaded gas, which contributed to the swift removal of lead from gasoline that was also recognized for having adverse health effects.)[8] Specific new emissions standards for moving sources passed years later.
Part B: Aircraft Emission Standards [ edit ]
Many volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted over airports and affect the air quality in the region. VOCs include benzene, formaldehyde and butadienes which are known to cause health problems such as birth defects, cancer and skin irritation. Hundreds of tons of emissions from aircraft, ground support equipment, heating systems, and shuttles and passenger vehicles are released into the air, causing smog. Therefore, major cities such as Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco require a Climate Action Plan as well as a greenhouse gas inventory. Additionally, federal programs such as the Voluntary Airport Low Emissions Program (VALE) are working to offset costs for programs that reduce emissions.[17]
Title II sets emission standards for airlines and aircraft engines and adopts standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). However aircraft carbon dioxide emission standards have not been established by either ICAO nor the EPA.[18] It is the responsibility of the Secretary of Transportation, after consultation with the Administrator, to prescribe regulations that comply with 42 U.S. Code § 7571 (Establishment of standards) and ensure the necessary inspections take place.[19]
Part C: Clean Fuel Vehicles [ edit ]
Trucks and automobiles play a large role in deleterious air quality. Harmful chemicals such as nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide are released from motor vehicles. Some of these also react with sunlight to produce Photochemical.[20] These harmful substances change the climate, alter ocean pH and include toxins that may cause cancer, birth defects or respiratory illness. Motor vehicles increased in the 1990s since approximately 58 percent of households owned two or more vehicles.[20] The Clean Fuel Vehicle programs focused on alternative fuel use and petroleum fuels that met low emission vehicle (LEV) levels. Compressed natural gas, ethanol,[21] methanol,[22] liquefied petroleum gas and electricity are examples of cleaner alternative fuel. Programs such as the California Clean Fuels Program and pilot program are increasing demand that for new fuels to be developed to reduce harmful emissions.[20]
The California pilot program incorporated under this section focuses on pollution control in ozone non-attainment areas. The provisions apply to light-duty trucks and light-duty vehicles in California. The state also requires that clean alternative fuels for sale at numerous locations with sufficient geographic distribution for convenience. Production of clean-fuel vehicles isn't mandated except as part of the California pilot program.[12]
Title III: General Provisions [ edit ]
Under the law prior to 1990, EPA was required to construct a list of Hazardous Air Pollutants as well as health-based standards for each one. There were 187 air pollutants listed and the source from which they came. The EPA was given ten years to generate technology-based emission standards. Title III is considered a second phase, allowing the EPA to assess lingering risks after the enactment of the first phase of emission standards. Title III also enacts new standards with regard to the protection of public health.[23]
A citizen may file a lawsuit to obtain compliance with an emission standard issued by the EPA or by a state, unless there is an ongoing enforcement action being pursued by EPA or the appropriate state agency.[24]
Title IV: Noise Pollution |
…up to you, but I didn’t syn the bread as I used it as a healthy extra!
top tips: this looks like quite an expensive meal to make, given the amount of meat, but you can nearly always buy the mince on a deal. I don’t recommend making it all from beef because it doesn’t have quite the same texture, but you could try it. You can freeze it too. Plus, this makes a BIG loaf. YOU’LL be making a big loaf afterwards, I can assure you. Enjoy!
J
Advertisements"In our community college system (state) cuts have reduced funding per student by $1,908."
Terry McAuliffe says students at Virginia’s 23 community colleges have taken a hit from state budget cuts.
"In our community college system, cuts have reduced funding per student by $1,908," the Democratic gubernatorial nominee says on his campaign website.
We wondered whether McAuliffe’s figure is correct.
McAuliffe’s website says state funding per community college student fell from $4,418 in 2008 to $2,510 in 2012 -- a $1,908 drop.
Josh Schwerin, a McAuliffe campaign spokesman, told us the numbers came from State Council on Higher Education for Virginia figures on instructional spending and the campaign adjusted them to 2012 dollars. The numbers reflect the amount spent per in-state community college student from Virginia’s general fund, which is raised from taxes.
We found two glitches in McAuliffe’s calculation. First, his figures include Richard Bland College, a two-year institution that’s not part of the 23-school community college system.
The second problem was that we could not reproduce McAuliffe’s calculations when we did our own math with SCHEV data. That’s because not all of McAuliffe’s numbers were adjusted to 2012 dollars, as Schwerin said. We learned that the campaign adjusted some of the data to 2014 dollars.
So what are the real numbers? We got our own data from SCHEV and set all the figures in 2012 dollars. We found that adjusted general fund spending was about $4,275 per in-state community college student during the 2007-08 school year and $2,583 during the 2011-12 year.
That’s a decline of $1,692 per student -- somewhat shy of McAuliffe’s $1,908 figure.
Another part of McAuliffe’s statement also needs examination. He attributes the reduction to budget cuts, but that’s not the entire reason.
State lawmakers, seeking to keep the budget balanced during and after the Great Recession, cut all major services supported by the general fund: education, health and public service. Appropriations for the community college system for instructional programs fell from $372.5 million for the 2007-08 school year to $316.2 million in 2011-12.
During the same span, the number of people attending community colleges sharply rose -- from
101,889 full-time equivalent students during 2007-08 to 129,652 in 2011-12, according to figures from the Virginia Community College System. About 95 percent of the students were Virginia residents, according to Jeffrey Kraus, a spokesman for the system. Much of the increase, he said, was driven by the recession as workers entered community colleges to train for second careers and younger students sought a more affordable higher education than attending a four-year college.
So state funding was falling while the student population was rising. The community colleges addressed the strain by raising tuition -- from an average of $2,390 for an in-state student during the 2007-08 school year to $3,556 in 2011-12.
Finally, we should note that 2011-12 is the latest school year for which SCHEV has firm numbers for the number of people attending community colleges and the state’s support for each student.
Our ruling
McAuliffe said budget cuts reduced state spending per in-state community college student by $1,908 between 2008 and 2012.
There are mistakes in his calculation that inflate his figure. The actual decline was just shy of $1,700 per student.
McAuliffe’s statement attributed the reduction to state budget cuts. That’s a plausible contention because the General Assembly, combating an economic turndown, slashed community college funding by 15 percent during the years in question. But that’s not the entire story. What McAuliffe didn’t mention is that the budget cuts were compounded by a 27 percent increase in enrollment in community colleges and those two events combined to cause the steep drop in per-student funding.
So McAuliffe’s statement needs clarifications but his gist -- that during an era of budget cutting, state funding per community college student significantly shrank -- holds up. We rate his claim Mostly True.We expect the costumed characters who roam the grounds at Disney theme parks to be nothing less than kind and cuddly all the time. Even the not-so-cute “evil” characters (e.g., Jafar, Captain Hook) are supposed to exhibit nothing but boundless patience and good cheer in accommodating guests and posing for endless streams of souvenir photographs, however much they may be pushed, pulled, punched, taunted, or otherwise abused by some of Disney’s less well-behaved clientele. It’s all too easy for some park visitors to lose themselves in the fantasy and forget that those figures are not really indestructible cartoon characters but flesh-and-blood people laboring inside of hot, heavy, cumbersome costumes. These cast members generally exhibit nothing but good cheer while working under difficult circumstances for relatively little pay, but should any of them ever lapse and momentarily display the very human reactions of frustration or exasperation, you can bet that someone will complain about it.
Sometimes the complaints lodged are quite serious, with guests maintaining that a costumed cast member was not just rude or uncooperative, but acting in a hostile and physically abusive manner — to the extent that some complaints have resulted in civil or criminal proceedings. In most cases, though, the defense that character costumes so limit cast members’ peripheral vision and body movements that the alleged actions would be impossible or extremely difficult to perform intentionally wins out.
In 1981, for example, Disneyland was the target of a lawsuit alleging that, three years earlier, a nine-year-old girl had received a beating delivered by one Winnie-the-Pooh. The lovable bear had supposedly slapped her in the face, resulting in bruising, recurring headaches, and possible brain damage. As writer David Koenig described the ensuing trial:
[Disney attorney W. Mike] McCray’s first witness was Robert Hill, the actor who portrayed Pooh bear at the park that day. Hill testified that while in costume, his vision and movements are severely restricted. The girl, then nine years old, was tugging at him from behind and, in turning to see who it was, he accidentally struck her with an ear. “We’re trained not to retaliate,” he said. McCray then asked for a brief recess. After jurors returned to their seats, Hill reentered the courtroom in costume. Taking the witness stand, Pooh answered the lawyer’s questions by nodding his head and stomping his feet. “What do you do at Disneyland?” McCray asked. Pooh got up and did a jig down the aisle. The courtroom audience burst into laughter. “Have the record show that he’s doing a two-step,” noted the judge. By calling Pooh to the stand the attorney was able to present a lovable, sympathetic witness who wouldn’t — and couldn’t — hurt anyone. The bear demonstrated that he couldn’t have slapped the girl in the face as she claimed. The costume’s arms were too low to the ground. The jury took just 21 minutes to acquit Pooh on all charges.
In another civil case, in 1976 a woman filed a lawsuit against Disneyland and sought $150,000 in damages for assault and battery, false imprisonment, and humiliation, asserting that a park employee wearing a pig costume had run up to her near the “It’s a Small World” attraction, grabbed her, and fondled her breasts while squealing “Mommy! Mommy!” — an experience that had supposedly left her so upset that she gained 50 pounds. That complaint never saw the inside of a courtroom, as the plaintiff dropped her case after Disney’s showed her a photo of the pig costume which revealed that the outfit had no operable arms, only stubs.
In 2004, a Disney cast member was actually prosecuted on criminal charges. Michael C. Chartrand, a Walt Disney World employee who worked inside a Tigger costume, was the subject of a police investigation after a 13-year-old girl complained that he had fondled her breast while she posed for a photo with him and her mother in WDW’s Magic Kingdom park on 21 February 2004. (The girl’s mother maintained that she had been similarly fondled, but her allegation was not an element of the criminal case.) Mr. Chartrand was arrested in April 2004 and charged with lewd and lascivious molestation of a child and simple battery; by the following week 24 more complaints about him had been lodged with authorities. (All of the other complainants either lacked sufficient evidence to press charges or were unwilling to do so, however.)Oracle received a public slap on the wrist from the US Federal Trade Commission over Java SE, the desktop runtime for Java. The FTC announced today that it had reached a settlement with Oracle Corporation over a complaint not about the security of Java itself, but about Oracle's patching process—and how it unintentionally left consumers to believe that the patches themselves were enough.
Java has been a source of perpetual security sorrow due to the number of exploitable flaws that have been discovered in various versions of Java SE. That's partially due to its huge installed base—over 850 million PCs are estimated to have Java SE installed on them, and it isn't always the most recent version. Older versions of Java create a major security risk—even when newer versions have been installed.
And there lies the rub of the FTC's complaint. Since at least 2010, Java SE updates have not done a thorough job of cleaning up the insecure versions—and, the FTC contends, Oracle failed to advise consumers doing the updating that the job was only half done.
"Oracle failed to disclose, or failed to disclose adequately, that, in numerous instances, updating Java SE would not delete or replace all older iterations of Java SE on a consumer’s computer, and as a result, a consumer’s computer could still have iterations of Java SE installed that are vulnerable to security risks," the FTC stated in its complaint. "This fact would be material to consumers’ decisions whether to take further action after 'updating' Java SE to protect their computers."
Because malware writers and cybercriminals closely monitor Oracle's Java security updates, they are able to relatively quickly develop exploits of recently deprecated versions of Java SE. Late in 2010, Oracle was aware that "at least 44 Java SE vulnerabilities were publicly available," the FTC noted in its complaint. "For example, attackers have used known exploit kits targeting Java SE vulnerabilities to install key loggers that would capture consumers’ usernames and passwords, which could be used to log into a consumer’s PayPal, bank, and credit card accounts."
But Java SE updates, when they were issued, only removed the latest version of Java prior to the update. Anything released before Java SE 6.10 was left completely alone by the update process because these versions were installed in different directories on PCs and not in the default location used by the new updater. Oracle explained that customers might have multiple old versions left on their computers—but the company did so on a "separate FAQ page of Oracle's website," the FTC complaint noted, not on the Java update page or in the updater software itself. And Oracle failed to link to the FAQ from the update page as well.
Oracle even knew that this was a problem, noting in internal documents that vulnerable versions of Java were still being targeted successfully by malware after updates were pushed out. Oracle executives admitted internally that the "Java update mechanism is not aggressive enough or is simply not working." But the company never did anything about informing customers about this, and continued to follow the same update process for Java SE 7 and 8—continuing to leave many customers vulnerable to malware.
This failure to disclose was cited by the FTC as a "deceptive act or process" in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act. In its proposed settlement with the FTC over the issue, Oracle has posted a Java Uninstall tool on its website, and has agreed to notify consumers directly of the security threat posed by old versions of Java.
Oracle's failure to fully inform consumers will likely not come as a surprise to many in the security field. Oracle has taken a famously combative stance on security with even its enterprise customers, and especially with the security research community. In August, Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson wrote a (quickly removed) blog post excoriating customers who hunt for bugs in Oracle's code, calling it "reverse engineering" and a violation of Oracle's software license. "If we determine as part of our analysis that scan results could only have come from reverse engineering (in at least one case, because the report said, cleverly enough, “static analysis of Oracle XXXXXX”)," wrote Davidson, "we send a letter to the sinning customer, and a different letter to the sinning consultant-acting-on-customer’s behalf—reminding them of the terms of the Oracle license agreement that preclude reverse engineering, So Please Stop It Already."
Oracle's executive vice president and chief corporate architect Edward Screven told Ars at the time that Davidson's post was removed because "it does not reflect our beliefs or our relationship with our customers."Imagine waking up to see operating room lights and doctors standing over you, armed with scalpels and other operating tools.
That’s exactly what happened to 41-year-old Colleen Burns, who had arrived at the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, N.Y., over a week earlier suffering from a drug overdose, Counsel and Heal reported. Mistakenly believing Burns to be dead, doctors at the center were about to harvest the woman’s organs for transplant, before she opened her eyes.
The 2009 incident is detailed in a recently revealed report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which also lists the series of mistakes by doctors that led to the terrible event.
Burns had been found unresponsive, likely due to an overdose of Xanax and Benadryl. According to the report, hospital specialists recommended treating her with activated charcoals in order to stop the drugs from being absorbed into her stomach and intestines – but the staff failed to follow through with this recommendation.
Burns eventually spent over a week at the hospital, with nothing being done to stop the drugs from being absorbed into her system. She started to suffer from seizures, though CT scans revealed her brain was normal.
Allegedly, nurses had also indicated improvement in Burns’ condition, noting that she was capable of curling her toes when touched. She could also move her mouth and tongue, as well as flare her nose, according to Counsel and Heal. And despite being on a respirator, Burns was starting to breathe on her own, the report said.
However, doctors still misdiagnosed Burns with irreversible brain damage. Believing her to be beyond help, Burns’ family decided to take her off life support and donate her organs to patients in need.
The report maintained that not enough tests and brain scans were performed before the diagnosis.
"The patient did not suffer a cardiopulmonary arrest [as documented] and did not have irreversible brain damage," the report revealed. "The patient did not meet criteria for withdrawal of care."
Just before doctors were about to cut into her, Burns awoke, saving her own life. However, Burns went on to commit suicide in 2011, and no one has ever filed charges against the hospital for the critical mistakes the doctors made.
After a review of the incident, the hospital was fined $6,000.
Click for more from Counsel and Heal.In a disappointing 23-14 loss to the Arizona Cardinals, the San Francisco 49ers’ offense showed something that we had never seen under Jim Harbaugh: five wide receivers on the field at once.
According to Pro Football Focus, the 49ers sent five receivers on to the field for 14 snaps against the Cardinals with an additional 14 snaps having at least four wide outs on the field. San Francisco spent the majority of two possessions operating out of an empty backfield formation with those five receivers spread across the field in a look that seemed to go against everything we’ve come to know about Harbaugh’s offense.
With tight ends Vernon Davis and Vance McDonald unavailable for the game, using all those receivers was partially out of necessity. Third-stringer Derek Carrier has shown some flashes in limited action so far this season, but it would be hard to argue that he should be getting snaps over the likes of Stevie Johnson or Bruce Ellington. But what started as necessity might have turned into the beginning of a trend we’re likely to see continue throughout the rest of the season.
Combined with the no-huddle — though not really up-tempo — the 49ers had a lot of success operating out of this five-wide, empty-backfield set. Let’s roll the film and take a closer look at the newest package in the 49ers’ offense.
Smash
It’s no surprise that the 49ers favorite passing concept would find its way into their latest offensive wrinkle. As Harbaugh and Roman love to do, San Francisco’s top passing options (Michael Crabtree, Anquan Boldin, Stevie Johnson) are all aligned to the inside of the formation in an attempt to get them matched up on Arizona’s weaker pass defenders.
On this play the Cardinals choose to rush five and play Cover 1 behind them, giving them man coverage across the board with a single safety deep in the middle of the field. This would typically be a situation in which Colin Kaepernick would choose a side of the field to work the smash combination based on his preferred match-up on the corner routes. Instead, he looks to the middle of the field to Johnson.
Johnson is matched up on rookie safety Deone Bucannon, a mismatch heavily favoring the 49ers. Man coverage on the inside is not Bucannon’s strong suit and so far this season the Cardinals have mostly used him as a de facto linebacker in their sub-packages. Asking him to cover a shifty route runner like Johnson in space is rarely going to end well. Johnson runs what’s commonly referred to as a "jerk" route. The jerk route is basically a shallow crossing route in which the receiver fakes as if he’s going to settle in the middle — causing the defender to hesitate — before continuing across the field.
The results are predictable. Johnson gets quick separation over the middle and gives Kaepernick an easy completion. Better ball placement potentially gives Johnson an opportunity to do more after the catch, but he moves the chains and converts the third down nonetheless.
Stick-Levels
A couple of plays later, Kaepernick was again presented with a mismatch on one of his slot receivers. From the Cardinals’ pre-snap alignment, Kaepernick has a good indication that Arizona is going to be in zone coverage. The secondary — sans Patrick Peterson at the bottom of the image — is in off coverage with their eyes in the backfield and neither Michael Crabtree nor Johnson has a defender directly over them.
Rather than the mirrored concept (same routes to each side of the field) we saw in the first play, Roman has packaged two different passing concepts on the same play giving Kaepernick a three-step route combination (stick) to one side of the field and a five-step combo (levels) to the other. From there, it’s on Kaepernick to choose which side of the field he’s going to work based on his read of the defense.
It’s an easy choice as Kaepernick sees veteran linebacker Larry Foote as the nearest defender to his best receiver, Crabtree. Remember all that stuff I said about Bucannon in pass coverage? Now imagine a much slower, 34-year-old linebacker version of that and you basically have Foote.
Kaepernick has another easy completion, giving the 49ers another easy first down. The spread formation, the alignment of personnel, and the no-huddle all contribute to getting the Cardinals in a vanilla coverage with an aging, run-stuffing linebacker matched up on the 49ers' best pass target.
Hi-Lo
Following that initial drive, the 49ers would possess the ball just two more times in the first half, neither of which saw the no-huddle, empty-backfield look that dominated the opening possession. After a couple of quick drives to start the second half, San Francisco would go back to it late in the third quarter, looking to jump start their offense.
The 49ers have a hi-lo concept in the middle of the field, something they also ran on the first drive of the game and came back to here. Johnson and Anquan Boldin are both running hitch routes (low) — with the option to work outside towards the sideline depending on the coverage — with Crabtree on the dig route behind them (high).
After finding Johnson on the underneath route earlier in the game, Kaepernick opts to throw over — or between in this case I suppose — the second level of the defense to Crabtree. Johnson’s hitch is able to hold the linebackers just enough — Foote actually looks to jump Johnson’s route rather than Crabtree’s once Kaepernick begins to throw — to create space for Crabtree’s dig route.
It’s a fantastic anticipation throw by Kaepernick, something he still needs to do more consistently. As you can see in the shot above, Kaepernick has started his throwing motion before Crabtree has cleared the first linebacker and gotten into the passing window in the middle of the field.
The 49ers’ passing offense has primarily focused on the sidelines when throwing the ball down the field. But with the increased space in the middle as a result of the spread formations, Kaepernick attacked the middle more frequently against Arizona than any other game I can remember.
Slant-Flat
While the 49ers were predominantly able to get the Cardinals in more simplistic defenses when going with their empty package, Arizona has the blitz call on here. With both linebackers up at the line of scrimmage in the A-gaps, the Cardinals’ secondary is left in man coverage without safety help, or Cover 0. And the 49ers are in a great call to beat it.
To the wide side of the field, San Francisco has one of the most common quick-passing game concepts dialed up: slant-flat. The two outermost receivers, Brandon Lloyd and Crabtree, both run slant routes with the inside receiver, Johnson, running directly to the flat.
This combination creates a natural rub on the defenders and frees up the flat route to the outside. Even though Arizona has an unblocked rusher off the edge, Kaepernick is able to get the ball out quickly to a wide open Stevie Johnson. With no third-level defenders, Johnson has loads of green grass in front him and picks up 32 yards before being forced out of bounds.
★★★
With all of the success San Francisco had in this package, many have posited the question, why not keep going back to it? The run it ’til they stop it approach sounds good in theory, but is rarely a good idea. Put simply, NFL defenses are really good. If you continue to show them the same looks over and over, eventually they’re going to find a way to stop it. At least part of the reason the 49ers were so successful in this package was because it was only part of the gameplan.
One thing seems certain, we’re likely to see more of this empty, no-huddle package from San Francisco’s offense going forward. Kaepernick looked incredibly comfortable operating with his receivers spread across the field and consistently made good decisions on where to go with the football. The 49ers’ offense is evolving and this is just the beginning.A Pakistani teenager moved a translator to tears on Capitol Hill as he spoke of the moment his grandmother was killed in a US drone strike.
Zubair ur Rehman, 13, who attended the event with his father Rafiq and his sister Nabila, aged nine, described how Momina Bibi, 67, was out picking okra when a drone fired several missiles at an unknown targets near his compound.
He said he first heard the drone hovering overhead but was not concerned because neither he nor his grandmother were militants.
“When the drone fired the first time, the whole ground shook and black smoke rose up. The air smelled poisonous. We ran, but several minutes later the drone fired again,” he said at the congressional briefing.
“People from the village came to our aid and took us to hospital. We spent the night in great agony in at the hospital and the next morning I was operated on. That is how we spent Eid.
“Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don’t fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear. Children don’t play so often now, and have stopped going to school. Education isn’t possible as long as the drones circle overhead.”
His sister, Nabila, who held up a picture she drew depicting the strike above her village, told the various members of Congress who attended the event: “Everything was dark and I couldn’t see anything. I heard a scream. I think it was my grandmother but I couldn’t see her.
His father told various members of Congress who attended the event that nobody had ever told him why his mother was targeted on October 24, 2012, in Pakistan’s North Waziristan province.
“Some media outlets reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother’s house. Others reported that the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All of them reported that three, four, five militants were killed,” he said.
The use of drones to fight the war on terror has intensified markedly under Barack Obama as the number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas has been scaled back prior to a complete drawdown in 2014.
It remains a major source of tension between the US and Pakistan, with Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, calling for an end to US drone strikes during his first meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House last week.
Mr Sharif was elected over the summer on a promise to halt America’s drone campaign, which a report by Amnesty International estimated has killed 900 civilians in Pakistan – a figure that is disputed by the US government
The story of the Rehman family is featured in a new film on the human cost of drones strikes, “Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars”, by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation which is released on Wednesday.4. Paul Thomson having a look at the crux moves on Atoms in Action
6. Cam Brensinger climbs a route called the Rigid Designator near Vail, Colorado
8. Andy Richardson on his latest project on Mr Wall, Diamond Falls
9. Mauricio Huerta sending El Jibarito in Actopan, Mexico.
11. Photo taken of a skilled climber at Red Rock Canyon in Nevada
12. White Lines V8 Boulder at Donner Summit near Lake Tahoe CA right as a spring snow storm rolls in
14. This is a 3 sided permanent ice tower that has a variety of ice climbing in varying degrees of difficulty
16. Climbing on a giant rock (tree), this brave girl finds her way to the top
Mountain climbing or mountaineering is the sport, profession or hobby of skiing, hiking and climbing mountains. It is also the set of techniques, knowledge and skills aimed at achieving the goal. Mountaineering is a sport, but those who practice it believe it is much more than that, as it is a lifestyle and see the world around them.Photographers also play a main role to catch them through their cameras. So, in order to appreciate these photographers, I have compiled a list of breathtaking photos of people climbing over the mountains. Have a look and be happy.Lower East Side based psycho hillbilly stomp rock, Meet – Coach N’ Commando
I think you’ll agree with me that Coach N’ Commando are hitting that sweet spot somewhere between The Cramps and The Legendary Shack Shakers. Think Seasick Steve playing a little more on the rockabilly side. Or a Hasil Adkins you can understand. Now that the picture is starting to come in a little more clear let me just say, I love this stuff it’s the kind of music I would head out of the house to watch live so I hope these guys plan on a trip to Florida. So, please do yourself a favor and give Coach N’ Commando a listen to, today….
Meet : Coach N’ Commando
For those unfamiliar with your bands history, can you tell us all how you all met up and decided to start a band?
1. Swayne and i met in New Brunswick a while back. He was playing in a metal band at the time and I was playin some type of anti-folk/story-tellin stuff on my own. Soon we were playin in like 3 bands together and one of the bands got some traction. We signed with Atlantic and toured a whole bunch until the bottom fell out of that and we started a garage band Chainsaw III. I think there was Death Threat Radio somewhere in between that and maybe something else i can’t remember the name of. All the while we were playin in all those different bands we were always playing this style on the side. Eventually we split up for a year or so and i started playin with Texas Clamp from Deek Jenkins. Him and I started out doin some carl perkins and Hank and Coe covers and thats what morphed into Coach N’ Commando. Eventually I wrote a whole bunch of originals and we got on the Frankie Wood circuit-Ottos shrunken Head, Hanks saloon,Bowery electric etc. and a cpl Hells Angels benefits. Texas left to play with Snake Canyon and Swayne and i picked up where we left off. Now here we are.
Who would you list as your musical influence?
2.influences…hmm…
Merle Travis, Evil Dead II, Chet, Lemmy, Charlie Feathers, Clutch, Rev. Horton Heat, Mississippi John Hurt, Rev Gary Davis, Jerry Reed, Hank, Dead Moon, Waits, Duane Eddy, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Bo Carter, Blind Blake, Cash, John Prine, The Who, Jorma, Earl Scruggs, Webb Pierce, Jessie Fuller, Elizabeth Cotton, Cramps, Dylan-oh man theres a fuckin million…
Whats the coolest thing that’s happened to you as a band since you started up?
3...It was pretty fuckin cool opening for The Legendary Shack Shakers. Those guys rip. Mick Jagger don’t have fuckin shit on J.D Wilkes-one of my favorite frontmen.
What are your hopes and dreams as a band for the next few years.
4.We’d like what probably all bands want. Bigger crowds. Bigger tours etc.
What are some of your favorite albums from the past few years?
5. Scott H. Biram-SomethingsWrong/Lost forever, Seasick Steve-Sonic Soul Surfer, Clutch-Psychic warfare. (Thats just me. i can’t speak for swayne)
Do you see any real use for social media, or is it all just a pain in the ass to keep with?
6.Social Media is pretty damn important. unfortunately, we suck at it.
Do you pay attention to reviews or comments from people about your music or do you just turn that noise off.
7. I pay attention for the most part. Especially if its constructive criticism. I know that not everyones gonna dig the style of music we play so i always take that into account. Internets a little weird. the anonymity gives anyone a voice and people like to fuck with other people. You’ll go on youtube and read some of the comments and sometimes they don’t even have anything to do with the band. It’s just people angry and bored startin trouble on a comment feed, arguing amongst themselves.
If you could tour anywhere in the world, where would you want to go?
8 Europe, Japan, Australia… Hell we’d tour anywhere
Can music save the mortal soul or is just a good backbeat to your life?
9 Music itself can save the soul…but the business part can sink it.
Any last thoughts for your fans?
10. Yea man, buy our new record out on King Pizza Records- FBP!K!K! Its only $5. Then come see us go ape shit on stage
Coach N’ Commando:
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Buy FBP!K!K! here from King Pizza RecordsMarch is officially here which means the Madness is just around the corner. And no, I’m not talking about shoveling out from another blizzard, I’m talking about the NCAA Tournament! And aside from Selection Sunday, today represents one of the most exciting days at AA HQ – the release of the announcing pairings for the tournament. And although we tried our best to project who might be paired together in a season with an unusual amount of turnover, we have to admit that we’re stunned at the massive changes up and down the lineup.
In fact, CBS and Turner will debut eight out of eight all new announcing teams for the 2015 NCAA Tournament. CBS especially is known for their conservative approach to sports broadcasting and consistency in announcing assignments so it comes as a major surprise.
Of course, some of those changes are enforced. With Steve Kerr now coaching the NBA’s best team and Greg Anthony, well, not a part of the broadcast for wildly different reasons, CBS/Turner already announced their new lead broadcast booth of Jim Nantz, Bill Raftery, and Grant Hill for the Final Four.
Rounding out the lineup, Chris Webber (who appears to be the favorite as TNT’s new lead NBA analyst) will join Marv Albert. This is noteworthy because Webber has kept his distance from CBS/Turner’s joint coverage of the tournament in years past as we all know about his strained relationship with the University of Michigan. But that’s not all. Veteran analyst Len Elmore will join Albert and Webber in a three man booth, which was hinted at when Albert and Elmore worked together this past weekend. And perhaps in the best news of all, Craig Sager will be on the sidelines with the group as well.
With Bill Raftery now on the #1 team, Verne Lundquist then needed a new partner. That man is the highly underrated Jim Spanarkel, who leaves his longtime partnership with Ian Eagle. Thus starts a domino effect seen throughout the rest of the CBS/Turner lineup. The Bird will then be joined by Doug Gottlieb, who had worked past tournaments with Spero Dedes. Dedes’ partner for this year’s tourney will be Mike Gminski, who called last year’s action with Andrew Catalon, whose new partner for 2015 is CBS Sports Network’s Steve Lappas.
Crystal clear, right?
The final changes come in Dan Bonner joining Kevin Harlan and Reggie Miller for a new three man booth while Steve Smith moves up from the studio to the broadcast booth to work alongside Turner colleague Brian Anderson.
With that, here’s the full commentator lineup for the 2015 tournament including the sideline reporters for each broadcasting team. Given studio analyst assignments, it’s a safe bet that the first four teams listed will be the ones to call Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games as well:
1) Jim Nantz / Bill Raftery / Grant Hill // Tracy Wolfson*
2) Marv Albert / Chris Webber / Len Elmore // Craig Sager*
3) Verne Lundquist / Jim Spanarkel // Allie LaForce*
4) Kevin Harlan / Reggie Miller / Dan Bonner // Rachel Nichols*
5) Ian Eagle / Doug Gottlieb // Evan Washburn
6) Brian Anderson / Steve Smith // Lewis Johnson
7) Spero Dedes / Mike Gminski // Jaime Maggio
8) Andrew Catalon / Steve Lappas // Jamie Erdahl
CBS and Turner will once again go with two studio teams in New York and Atlanta up until the Final Four. The New York team includes Ernie Johnson and Greg Gumbel as hosts with analysts Clark Kellogg, Charles Barkley, and Kenny Smith. No surprises there. Those gentlemen will also be the lead studio crew for the Final Four and National Championship Game, joined by Reggie Miller, Steve Smith, and Seth Davis. (Johnson will be the lead host in Indianapolis.) Matt Winer will host from Atlanta during the first week of the tournament with Davis and former Spartan Mateen Cleaves. For the second week, Johnson moves to Atlanta to host while Gottlieb goes to the New York studio and Steve Smith goes to Atlanta.
The NCAA Tournament begins with the First Four in Dayton. Anderson and Smith will call the Tuesday games while Eagle and Gottlieb will call the Wednesday games.
That should cover it all. Whew. What are your thoughts on all these changes to the announcing lineup for March Madness 2015?Photo by Bigstock photo
Whenever you try to deepen your guitar knowledge and you buy a guitar music theory book or look up something on the internet you keep bumping into the CAGED system.
There comes a point when it’s unavoidable, that means it’s time and probably something worth knowing about.
Let me rephrase that “definitely something worth knowing about”.
So then, what’s all the fuzz about the CAGED system?
Well, if you want to be serious about guitar playing and you want to understand how the guitar in relation to the fretboard works, the CAGED system is an absolute valuable tool. Let’s take a good look and see what this is all about.
The CAGED system gives you a logic overview of the fretboard. It makes it much easier to find your way around the neck and understand how chords, chord shapes and scales are related to each other as well as a lot of other things on the guitar. (arpeggios, triads, licks, etc.)
The CAGED system is derived from the five open major chord shapes: C, A, G, E and D. Each chord shape can be moved up on the fretboard. To do so we first have to take the 5 open chord shapes and turn them into closed chord shapes. That means there are no open strings in the chord. By barring the fret and then playing the shape next to it you can easily move the chord up and down the neck and play each shape in all 12 keys.
See the three diagrams below how you can move the C major chord up the fretboard. In the first diagram you play a “C” chord. In the second diagram you bar the strings on the first fret with your index finger so there are no open strings left (you don’t have to bar all the strings, only the strings that are left open) and then play the C chord next to the bar with your middle, ring finger and pinky |
cher, who taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.”
Südhof later elaborated in an interview for The International Double Reed Society’s own quarterly magazine:
“[I learned ] the value of disciplined study, or repetitive learning, for creativity. You cannot be creative on a bassoon if you don’t know it inside out, and you cannot be creative in science if you don’t have a deep knowledge of the details… I learned to value traditions as a musician, but at the same time the importance of trying to transcend tradition. The tradition is the basis that allows you to progress, the starting point, but it cannot become a limitation, because then both in music and in science creativity and progress end.”
So what’s the science behind the scientist’s claims?
“A number of studies support the contention that students who participate in formal music education have higher academic achievement scores than students who do not participate in formal music education.”
This quote comes from a paper titled The Impact of Music Education on Academic Achievement by Donald A. Hodges and Debra S. O’Connell of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In it, Hodges and O’Connell reference no fewer than 14 supporting studies before they delve more deeply into some individual examples. Such as:
“A two-year study by Gardiner et al. (1996) investigated the effects of a music and visual-arts curriculum on the academic achievement of first-graders. Students who participated in the arts curriculum had test scores below those of the non-arts curriculum students at the beginning of the school year; however, after seven months the arts curriculum students had higher scores on mathematics achievement. After a second year of treatment, the arts-curriculum students continued to have higher mathematics achievement scores.”
And:
“Whitehead (2001) examined the effect of music instruction…on math scores of middle and high school students. Subjects were randomly placed into three groups: full treatment (which received music instruction for 50 minutes five times per week), limited treatment (which received 50 minutes of instruction once a week), and no treatment (which received no music instruction). After twenty weeks, the full treatment group showed a higher level of significant gain in mathematics than the other two groups. The limited treatment group showed limited mathematics improvement and the no treatment group had the lowest gain in mathematics improvement.”
In a 1999 bulletin for the National Association of Secondary School Principals James R. Ponter makes the same connection.
Citing a 1988 study of 17 countries for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, Ponter singles out the 3 best-performing nations—Japan, The Netherlands, and Hungary—for their emphasis on musical education. He notes that in each country, music education is not only offered at an early age, it is mandated by the state.
With this in mind, it’s ironic that so many American school administrators see music programs as dead weight that divert from their focus on raising test scores, when increasing their emphasis on music education might have led to the desired result instead.
We could debate the value of narrow, standards-based education until the fat lady sings, but what if it turned out that learning music actually makes students better at passing math and reading tests?
Music Study Improves General Cognition
Research suggests that music training exercises so many different functions within the brain, that it’s kind of hard to engage with it fully and stay dumb for very long.
When a musician first learns to read music, she develops a process of recognizing and decoding a complex system of symbols. The musician then translates those symbols into appropriate motor actions that use both hands, and confirms the accuracy of her actions through multisensory feedback (both sight and sound). In addition, musicians practice motor skills in the pursuit of metric precision, they exercise memory functions in the absence of written music, and create new combinations on the fly through improvisation.
To its credit, The VH1 Save the Music Foundation website does contain several pages of citations of academic papers, articles on current research, and quotes from medical professionals that suggest music improves brain function and cognition (Don’t bury the lead, people!)
A sample quote from John J. Ratey, MD’s A User’s Guide to the Brain:
“The musician is constantly adjusting decisions on tempo, tone, style, rhythm, phrasing, and feeling – training the brain to become incredibly good at organizing and conducting numerous activities at once. Dedicated practice of this orchestration can have a great payoff for lifelong attention skills, intelligence, and an ability for self-knowledge and expression.”
Music education seems to benefit children across the board. And it turns out that the least privileged among them may be the ones who benefit from it the most.
Arts Education in General Significantly Benefits Disadvantaged Youth
In 2012, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings From Four Longitudinal Studies. It made the case for arts and music education, using more than twenty years’ worth of academic results.
Focusing specifically on children from lower socioeconomic status or “low-SES” backgrounds, the researchers found that the more arts education these children received, the better their life prospects seemed to get:
“According to the data, 71 percent of low-SES students with arts-rich experiences attended some sort of college after high school. Only 48 percent of the low-arts, low-SES group attended any sort of college. And more than twice as many high-arts students from the low-SES group, compared with low-arts students in that group, attended a four-year college (39 percent versus 17 percent).
This also translated to degree attainment: 24% of children from a high-arts, low-SES background were able to attain associate’s degrees, versus 10% of low-arts low-SES children. 18% of high-arts low-SES children attained bachelor’s degrees versus 6% of low-arts low-SES children. The NEA report also cites higher rates of volunteerism and general civic engagement in both high- and low-SES children.
Unfortunately, these studies mostly stop following the students’ progress by the time they reach their early to mid-20s, providing little information on long-term career prospects. Given the links between college education and employment/earnings however, it seems reasonable to ask if arts education in general should now be a part of the larger conversation about income equality.
If You Practice Regularly and Often, You WILL Get Really Good At It
A recent nationwide survey of 5,000 musicians by Peter C. Dicola of Northwestern University School of Law offered a glimpse into the different revenue streams of musicians in the United States. The top four reported earning categories in his survey were: Touring/shows/live performances/fees (28%), teaching (22%), salary as an employee of a symphony, band or ensemble (19%) and session musician earnings (10%). No other category eclipsed 7%.
It seems that if you are ever really going to try and make a go of it in the music business, it helps to be very good much more than it helps to have a distinctive style or cool-looking t-shirts. When it comes to playing in a symphony, doing session work, or teaching others the language of music, there simply aren’t many places to hide a deficiency in musical knowledge or ability.
Being incredibly good at something is a pretty valuable trait, almost regardless of the context. And if you want to be very good at something, the earlier you start, the better.
Words of Caution (and all that touchy-feely stuff, too)
To be fair, both the UNC Greensboro paper and the National Endowment for the Arts report stop just shy of claiming a direct causal relationship between music education and smarter, more successful students; each claims that more research is still needed.
This sort of scientific hedging is appropriate when we’re dealing with such broad, varied, and incomplete sets of data. We can prove that musically educated students generally do better in school, but we can’t prove that a semester of bassoon classes will turn your B in calculus into an A.
It’s at this point that we can finally feel free to fall back on all our choir-preaching and arguments for the intangible benefits of music, and its ability to enrich our lives beyond the confines of a test.
As a musician myself, I’m certainly not immune to this language. At its best, music is a sort of alchemy—a translation of abstract thought and emotion into something concrete that people outside your own head can consume, understand, and enjoy.
But by that same token, musicians, educators, and concerned parents must learn to translate their abstract feelings and emotions about music into something more than just glib bumper sticker sales pitches. Instead of trying to appeal to risk-averse lawmakers, bean counters, and even wealthy benefactors with Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul-style stories of personal fulfillment through music, we could give them hard facts and good evidence to digest:
You want higher test scores in math and science? Music education will help. You want children with higher mental faculty? Music education will help. You want to keep kids out of trouble and on-track towards college and future employment? Music education will help.
There isn’t nearly as much scientific evidence showing that assigning The Great Gatsby or Beowulf will help with any of these goals, yet a debate over the general merits of teaching those books or the funding of those classes isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Public music education is ready to earn back its place at the table. Even if you don’t end up a musician, an early and intense study of music could lead to you becoming an award-winning scientist, an educator with a sustainable career, or even Chairman of the Federal Reserve. At worst, you could end up a pretty decent bassoonist.
Blake Madden is a writer and musician who lives in Seattle.On August 9th, 1988 the Edmonton Oilers held a press conference to make an announcement that would change the landscape of hockey in North America. Hockey had existed for years in the southern states but it wouldn’t be until after the “Trade of the Century”, which would land the game’s greatest player ever in Southern California, that the game would really take root in the southern parts of the US. In the decade or so after the Wayne Gretzky deal, eight new NHL franchises popped up in the Southern belt of the US and dozens of minor league teams would follow, winding up in cities like Pensacola, Biloxi, Shreveport, Waco, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Bakersfield and Long Beach.
Owners and visionaries like Bruce McNall who had a passion for hockey finally saw a window to try and grow the game and capitalize at the same time. Why not open up these markets to a new, fast and exciting game. A game filled with violence and grace all mixed into one fast-paced drama. With hockey’s biggest name playing in a southern city and his face plastered on every billboard, this was the time to make a push for hockey in the south.
Hockey couldn’t just be brought to these new markets without some frills to help entice fans to come and spend good money on an experiment. Hockey had to be packaged and sold to fans who didn’t know what they were buying. There had to be fireworks and spectacles. Just like any sport, you weren’t really selling a game, you were selling entertainment.
I spent three seasons in the Southern US in Augusta, Georgia; Amarillo, Texas; and a very brief stay in Shreveport, Louisiana. In Augusta, we played in the southern division of the ECHL and traveled around to cities like Charlotte, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; Pensacola, Florida; Fort Myers, Florida; Biloxi, Mississippi; Beaumont, Texas; Gwinnett, Georgia; and Columbia, South Carolina. Before I played in Augusta I had never been more south in the US than Princeton, New Jersey. I was interested to see how the game had grown in these southern cities.
One of the biggest differences I noticed about hockey in the southern states was that it was more of a circus with regards to the atmosphere and frills between whistles than a hockey game. Firstly, our team had cheerleaders who would entertain fans throughout the game doing routines in the aisles. I think a lot of our male patrons came to the games more to see them than us. Also, we had a team mascot, “Louey the Lynx” who would skate around before the game and taunt the other team.
During TV timeouts, there were also some games being played with an announcer and a fan in the stands that would be broadcast over the big screens and they were always giving away prizes. Between periods the cheerleaders would perform a dance routine on the ice and a big truck with a T-shirt gun attached to it would launch a dozen t-shirts out to screaming fans. There was always “Chuck a Puck” and another game where fans had to race around on the ice in their shoes, sliding everywhere, trying to pick up items in an obstacle course.
A few times they brought in the “Zooperstars” who were large inflated zoo characters, wearing Joe Sakic and Wayne Gretzky jerseys with a person in the bottom of it running all over the ice falling down and banging into each other. There were chances to win free dinners, a year-long raffle for a Harley Davidson Fat Boy and two-for-one beers at the games on Thursday nights and dollar beer Tuesdays. After the game, the three stars of the game would be named and each Lynx player who was named a star would come out and throw t-shirts into the stands and wave.
Before games there would be a fireworks display when we would enter the ice and at a lot of rinks the players would enter through a large inflatable entrance congruent with the theme of their team accompanied by a smoke show and lasers. In Amarillo, after we scored a goal, the fans would rain down rubber bananas onto the ice because we were the “Gorillas”. The fans could buy these bananas for a dollar at the game and then they would be tossed onto the ice after a goal and scooped up and resold. This was just another way to squeeze out a few bucks and entertain the fans.
One of the strangest differences between hockey in the north and hockey down south was that in addition to the national anthem, players had to stand and wait on the blue lines while a prayer was read out aloud just before the anthem. Sometimes these prayers would drag on to three minutes. Just before a hockey game when your adrenaline is flying, three minutes is a lifetime. Religion was a big part of life in the south and hockey was no exception to that.
The biggest change from hockey in the north, other than all the bells and whistles, was the way the game was viewed from a fans perspective. In the south, hockey is a distant fourth to sport lovers behind NASCAR, football and baseball. It’s probably actually more like fifth if you count throw in basketball in some areas. People in the south were just being introduced to hockey and really didn’t understand what the game was all about or any of the finer points that Canadians celebrated and cherished. It wasn’t that they were ignorant or anything, they were just new to the sport and were being given a crash course from a bunch of money-hungry owners.
I remember meeting a first-time fan after a game one night in Augusta. It was “Military Night” and there were probably 6,000 fans at the game and we were playing Mississippi, a team we usually had a pretty physical affair with. There ended up being four or five fights that night and this fan who had just witnessed his first hockey game said to me, “The game was OK, I mean ya’ll won and all but I thought there would be more fights. There weren’t really many fights!” I just laughed. In that game we fought more than we had all year and here was this guy who was disappointed because he was expecting a royal rumble of some sort.
That’s just how people viewed hockey in the south. They were usually more excited by fights and huge hits than goals or big saves. When a fight would start, the arena staff would play “Eye of the Tiger” over the sound system. Everyone in the place would be on their feet screaming and cheering with every haymaker and uppercut.
On most teams in North America, the team heavyweight is a player that has limited skill, a large frame, lots of strength and toughness and acts as a judge, jury and executioner on the ice. This is a job that isn’t necessarily a coveted position but sometimes guys have to do what it takes to play pro and make it to the next level. For every Wayne Gretzky there is a Dave Semenko; for every Steve Yzerman there is a Bob Probert and Joey Kocur. In hockey whether people want to admit it or acknowledge it, fighters do exist and serve an important purpose.
When I played, I used to like to play on the edge and sometimes if I would see an opportunity to catch a guy with his head down or in a bad position, I would take it. It’s the competitiveness that gets into your blood, when you see a player that you hate you want to inflict damage when you can. You try and hit to hurt. Not to injure per se, but to hurt so that they know it was you and that you’re coming all night.
When teams had a known heavyweight like a Peter Worrell, who played in Charlotte, or a Nate Kiser or Grant McNeill, who both played in South Carolina, you were less enthusiastic to take those liberties on players on the other team. I used to get matched up against Travis Morin’s line when we played against South Carolina and he used to chirp me and get under my skin. Travis Morin ended up making his NHL debut during the 2010-2011 season with the Dallas Stars. All I wanted to do was catch him coming across the middle, admiring a pass and send him into next week, but I knew that if I played too hard on Morin, I would have to answer the bell at the hands of Kiser or McNeill.
One thing a fight can do is give a team momentum. The last thing you want to do is get embarrassed at the hands of Kiser or McNeill and give South Carolina momentum. Coaches really hate untimely fights. Now that I coach I always tell our players there are two types of fights: team fights and individual fights. A team fight is when a player answers the bell for a team mate after a cheap shot or if you want to slow or change momentum in a game. This is a fight that benefits the team. An individual fight is when a player wants to fight to promote their own glory. This may be picking on a smaller player to guarantee a win or trying to prove yourself by fighting a tough guy to impress your team when it’s a close game or you have a one-goal lead. All this does is risk giving the other team momentum. Team fights you will support, individual fights you don’t.
As much as people say, you don’t need a fighter on a team and it’s a waste of a position. Enforcers serve a huge purpose on the team and keep the dirty play to a minimum. I really feel that if there weren’t people to answer to on the ice, cheap shots and stick work would escalate to a dangerous level in hockey. I know from my own experiences, if it weren’t for guys like Worrell, Kiser, and McNeill, I may have let my temper get the better of me and done some regrettable things in the heat of the moment. When there was the threat of impending doom looming on the other bench, you always kept a better check on your actions.
Off the ice, the team enforcer was usually the nicest guy on the team. On our team we had Will Bodine. Bodine was a 6’5, 235 lbs teddy bear. He was the nicest guy I think I’ve ever met over all my years playing hockey. He was the kind of guy that would wake up at four in the morning if you called to come and pick you up an hour away. He would do anything for his team mates, and on the ice that was his job.
When Will put his gear on, there was a level of focus that came over his eyes. Will knew he had a job to do, he took it seriously and he instantly became a warrior when he put on that sweater. During our one season together I saw Will in some epic bouts against some of the scariest figures in minor pro hockey. I saw Will break his nose sideways on the first punch of a fight against Phil Oreskovic of Columbia only to continue on for another 40 seconds in that fight. The next period after having his nose reset and his eyes blackened, Will challenged Oreskovic to a rematch and won.
One time in South Carolina, Will and Grant McNeill had a spectacular toe-to-toe battle. After the center-ice affair, Will skated to the box and was handed his gloves by the referee. When he tried to put on his right glove he couldn’t. His pinkie finger was broken completely sideways and he had torn every tendon. He was so focused and adrenaline-pumped that he didn’t even realize the injury.
Will had the toughest job in hockey in my opinion and I had the utmost respect for him. I knew that if things got heavy on the ice, Will was going to be the first guy at my side to keep things equal. As tough as these guys were, I never once saw an enforcer take any liberties on a skilled player or lesser combatant. They never went out of their way to attack players or act like idiots, but rather were there to protect the team’s assets and to fight equal combatants when the timing was right.
There are different times in a game when the timing is right for a fight. Obviously when a liberty or cheap shot is taken, the offender will usually have to pay the piper. There are other times however when a fight is beneficial to a team. If a team scores two or three quick goals back-to-back, a fight can be used to help slow or change momentum. A fight can charge up a team and can also get the fans involved in the game. Sometimes when two known heavyweights are playing against each other and the score won’t be affected, the two combatants will square off to establish themselves in a ranking amongst league enforcers.
Players always like to debate over who is the toughest in the league and who can beat who. Even though the enforcers all share a bond of burden in their duties on the team, they also are competitive and would all like to be known as the league’s toughest player. A lot is riding on how heavyweights fare in fights just as it is for skilled players to produce. The NHL and AHL are always looking for guys to come up and protect the next Crosby or Ovechkin, so there is a lot of honour on the line when it comes to performing and keeping your rank amongst league heavyweights.
Being a fighter in hockey doesn’t come with anywhere near the recognition and praise the role deserves. In the NHL, there is the “Hart Trophy” for the league’s most valuable player, the “Norris Trophy” for the league’s best defenseman, even the “Lady Byng Trophy” for the league’s most sportsmanlike player. There is no “Shultz Trophy” for the league’s toughest player or “Probert Memorial Award” for the protector of the year. Being a fighter is a tough job and at the end of the day, people like to whine and criticize that they don’t want fighting in hockey and that these guys are just no-talent goons.
In the south, however, the team enforcer is the “Toast of the Town”. After games, fans wait anxiously for the team heavyweight to duck into the room to sign autographs and pose for pictures. They account for the most jersey sales, public appearance requests and autograph requests. During jersey auctions, the team enforcer’s jersey usually sells for two or three times the amount of the team’s leading scorer. It’s the only time when everyone “wants a piece” of the fighter.
When I was out with a knee injury, I joined the team on the road one trip to participate in morning skates as part of my rehab. We had a three-game set in Beaumont, Texas against the Wildcatters and I remember during one of the intermissions they had four kids on the ice participating in a relay race. Once the race was over, the announcer asked each youngster who his favorite hockey player was and each kid said, “Riley Emmerson”, who was the Wildcatters’ 6’7, 260 lbs enforcer at the time.
In the south they celebrated the rougher side of hockey and they embraced the glorification of the heavyweight fighter. There would be more fans at the games where there was a chance for a fight between the league’s toughest players than any game seven of the playoffs. The enforcers reigned supreme below the Mason-Dixon Line. The toughest job in hockey was finally being celebrated and appreciated.
Growing up playing hockey you learn how to multitask and about time management. In minor hockey you are going to school, playing hockey, participating in other activities and finding time to just be a kid. In high school there is junior hockey which becomes more demanding and time consuming and school becomes more difficult also. In University, you are forced to balance two full-time jobs in school and hockey and the pressures become more intense.
Hockey at the professional level came with a lot more freedom for the players than what is experienced in major junior or college. Time management wasn’t as much of a priority as it was at the lower levels. You where there to play hockey and whatever else you did in your spare time was your business.
When I turned pro, all of a sudden I just had one full-time job and a lot of free hours in the day. In a 72-game schedule, you typically played three to four games a week, practiced two to three other days and usually had a day off on a Sunday or thereabouts. On the days you had practice it was usually a quick, hard hour and some physio treatment or a workout after. We always practiced at 9 am so I was usually out of the rink by noon. I remember at the time thinking, “what’s all this talk about 9 to 5, I’d rather work this 9 to 12 gig.”
It was quite the lifestyle to be able to live comfortable financially and only have to work three hours a day. The smart thing for players to do would probably have been to mix in another workout or put your extra time into taking online courses towards an undergrad degree or master’s degree, however there were a lot of other temptations and vices to distract you.
You see a minor pro team is made up of a variety of different players at different stages in their career and from all different backgrounds. Generally you had some “Big Club” prospects that were young and fresh out of junior. Then you had some veterans who had already played at higher levels and are on their way down the ladder. You also had some “minor pro lifers” who have seen more disappointments than anything and have come to terms with the fact that they won’t be getting “the call” anytime soon.
When you are a young prospect, you are easily swayed or tempted to be a bit careless basically because you are a hormone-raging youngster. When you are a “minor pro lifer” you are already used to the lifestyle and have already embraced it. When you are on your way down the ladder, there is a reason you are still deciding to play even if the only teams that will pay your bills are in the bus leagues. The fact of the matter is you have lots of free time, money to spend, and golf courses, bars, and women at your disposal.
Minor pro hockey isn’t the NHL, but in these small towns, it’s the closest thing to it. When you are living in a small-town and you are playing for the only professional team around, you experience the closest thing to being a big-time celebrity. You see yourself on billboards, TV commercials, and pretty much everywhere you go, people know who you are and treat you well.
When I played in Augusta, we had a golf membership through the team at two different courses, Jones Creek Golf and Country Club and The River Golf Course. These courses were the 2nd and 3rd most beautiful courses I had ever seen behind Augusta National, which our housing complex was located on the backside of, just behind the trees looming over Amen’s Corner. During my season and a half in Augusta, I golfed four times a week and trimmed my handicap by seven strokes.
A typical day in Augusta for me used to look like this, practice at 9 am, workout till noon. Go home, grab a quick lunch and jump in the car with three other guys and head to the golf course with a quick stop to grab a case of beer for the round. After golf, we’d head back to the housing complex, which was in a gated community, and fire up the barbecue and eat dinner and lounge by the pool. After dinner we would hang out by the pool and drink beer until around 10 pm when we’d head over to “The Vue” or “The Country Club”, which was a big honky-tonk bar with live bands.
The lifestyle was fast and furious and we took advantage of everything at our disposal which usually included free golf, free admissions to bars, free drinks, and fast women. Some players stayed away, but a lot of players partook in the fast life, at least for the first year or two. A lot of times the older vets would stay at home and rest their old creaky bodies while the younger bucks would go out and paint the town. The odd time the old boys would come out to show the young lads that they still had it.
We played hard and lived hard but we would only do it when it was the right time. Our Coach Bob Ferguson had played pro and had been through what we all were going through. Fergie didn’t have curfews. He gave us some rope so we made sure not to hang ourselves with it. He would always say, “I’ll give you some freedom but don’t embarrass me.” We had it pretty good so we didn’t want to disrespect Fergie. I truly believe we played harder for Fergie because we respected him.
Another rule Fergie had was to leave the bar before last call. He said, “Only trouble happens at bars past one o’clock. Have a few pops, pick out your gal and be out of there before the ugly lights come on.”
One way or another, almost all players experienced the fast life of minor pro hockey for a season or two, while some never gave it up at all. It was just the way it was, year after year. It’s not like the rookies ever really needed to be nudged, when you present a 20 or 21 year-old with freedom and vices it’s only a matter of time before they indulge.
The problem with the lifestyle of minor pro hockey was that it could easily catch up to you and with a lot of players it did. You could go out and party all you wanted, but if you couldn’t do that and perform on the ice, you weren’t going to last very long. Some guys could handle it and some guys had to make a choice before it ended their careers.
There were times to pick and choose your spots to go out. For the most part, the guys respected this and would pick nights to go out when it wouldn’t affect play on the ice the next day. Guys respected the night before a game, but it wasn’t uncommon for guys to roll into a morning practice smelling like a brewery. As long as you performed at practice and didn’t drag ass, coaches usually left it alone. If you were messing up drills and your passes were off, then the whole team would hear it and you’d face consequences.
If you wanted to live fast, you had to learn how to play hung over. The problem was, or benefit depending how you look at it, that most players who made it that far already had an extremely high tolerance for alcohol and could play hung over without much affect. I don’t know why it was that way. Maybe it was just because we had the resources, time and freedom, or maybe it was how we dealt with stress.
At the minor pro level there are a lot of stresses that can take their toll. From day to day, you never knew what could happen. There was no job security, pension or guarantees. One day you could score a hat-trick and be named 1st star of the game and the next morning you could be packing your bags because an AHL team was reassigning three players and there wasn’t enough cap space for you anymore. You were always looking over your shoulder and it became very stressful.
Whenever news came down that the Big Club had signed a new player or made a trade or someone came off the Injured Reserve, you knew the ripple effect was going to affect your team. I remember when Scott Neidermeyer decided to come out of retirement and play for the Ducks, there was a buzz about our room. Who is going to get the chop? Who is it going to be? We knew that with him coming back, someone was going to be sent down to Portland in the AHL and in turn they were going to send someone down to us. Sure enough, the next day we received Ryan Dingle from Portland (who was on an entry-level contract with the Anaheim Ducks) and my roommate Matt Johnson had to pack his bags and find a new team.
It took 24 hours for the ripple effect to hit our team, and I can tell you that everyone was on pins and needles for that day in waiting. It’s never a good feeling to think your job is in jeopardy, but we all knew it was part of the game. It would happen so many times throughout the season. You just had to find a way to deal with it.
At the end of the day, playing hockey in the “Cocktail Leagues” had its benefits and also came with some drawbacks and cons. Just like anything in life, nothing comes for free. There is always some price to pay. For minor leaguers, sometimes the price was bigger than they could have ever imagined. A lot of players lost relationships, families, and their feeling of self worth as a result of the lifestyle and stresses of the grind of minor pro hockey. For some it was like playing blackjack. You stay in for a hand or two and you might win big. Stay in for too long and you can lose everything.
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RelatedHow to do Reverse Image Search on your Mobile Phone
Know more about any photograph with Google Reverse Image Search
Google Reverse Image Search helps you quickly discover visually similar images from around the web. Upload a photograph from your desktop to Google Images and it will show you related images used on other websites and also different sizes of the same photo almost instantly.
Journalists can use the reverse search option to find the original source of an image or to know the approximate date when a picture was first published on the Internet. Photographers can use ‘search by image’ feature to know about other websites that are using their photographs.
Google’s ‘search by image’ feature is only available for desktop computers and not on mobile devices and tablets. Thus, if a friend has sent you an image on WhatsApp or Facebook that you’d like to verify, you’ll have to first transfer the photograph to a desktop and then perform a reverse search. Too much work, right?
Not anymore. Meet Reverse Photos, an online tool that lets you perform reverse image searches on mobile phones. Go to reverse.photos on your mobile phone, click the “Upload Image” button and choose an image from the photo gallery of your phone. Next click “Show Matching Images” and it will feed your photo into Google’s image database and show visually similar photos.The gun emoji available on Apple's almost-ubiquitous iPhone devices is coming under fire from activist group, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence (NYAGV), Fast Company reports. The group is trying to encourage people to take a stand against Apple's inclusion of the cartoon in its emoji library using a campaign called #DisarmTheiPhone.
NYAGV worked with advertising firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty NY's intern group, known as BBH Barn, on the campaign which includes the social initiative as well as a video, which you can watch below. The campaign is seen as a way to shine a spotlight on real gun violence and the activist group sees the emoji's removal as a "symbolic gesture," NYAGV executive director Leah Barrett told Fast Company.
Barrett believes that because of other socially-forward actions taken by the company, such as banning images of guns from its App Store, coming out strong for gay rights, and including racially and sexually diverse emojis, banning the firearm cartoon is not that farfetched. "I’d like to think that Apple would put its actions behind its rhetoric," Barrett says. "It is seen as a progressive company." Even though Apple did not invent the emoji library, it has stylized the gun cartoon for its own use.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
The video below details that by showing the support for the campaign "we'll show America wants stricter access to real guns."We don’t sneeze when we are sleeping, thanks to our brains and our location.
We actually should be more prone to sneezing during our sleep, as the mucous membranes swell when we lie down. This makes them more sensitive, but there usually isn’t as much airflow or movement to stir up irritating particles, so they aren’t as exposed to stimulants.
When we’re awake, particles, allergies or an illness can stimulate the nerve cells in the nose. The nerves then send signals to the brain in order to initiate a sneeze to get rid of whatever is irritating it.
But during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, certain neurotransmitters shut down- this state is known as REM atonia. This means that the motor neurons are not being stimulated, so they aren’t sending these signals to the brain.
In some cases, sufficient external stimulates will trigger the need to sneeze. But you will wake up to do so.
Got a burning science question?
Send us your questions to [email protected]. If we publish the answer on our website or in the next issue of Science Illustrated you could win amazing prices!Bachelor of Arts, what is it good for?
John Roskam of the Institute of Public Affairs wrote a thought-provoking opinion piece published by The Australian Financial Review that is tantalisingly titled “Arts degrees are welfare in reverse.” His argument is essentially that ungrateful arts students don’t know how lucky they are to have tax payers subsiding their useless degrees.
He wrote “It's not obvious why Australia needs more arts graduates anyway. Nearly a quarter of all students in higher education are enrolled in degrees in the field of society and culture.” He believes in the brave new world of a deregulated higher education sector, the market will decide what students want or need to study.
This is not only a terrible vocational way of looking at |
-fueled factory in plastic shipped from China, and then shipped over the ocean to countries around the world. Although shipping by ocean is a relatively environmentally friendly way to transport things, Fiji’s unique location means it has to travel farther to US consumers than water from, say, Shasta, California.
To be sure, there have been some improvements since Anna Lenzer wrote about the company’s greenwashing practices, including its forward crediting model, in her 2009 Mother Jones feature. Fiji Water’s site says the company has now planted 250 acres of trees in Fiji, which was not the case in 2009. But it’s not enough to offset the company’s operations by a long shot. Two-hundred fifty acres of rainforest stores around 400 metric tons of carbon. Fiji Water disclosed it produced 85,396 tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in 2007. Since 2007, Fiji Water sales have gone up appreciably, and in 2008 Fiji began claiming it was carbon-negative. To offset 120% of the company’s emissions for 2008, 2009, and 2010, you’d have to plant or conserve nearly 200,000 acres of rainforest. The company might have some catching up to do to match its claim that buying a 500 ml. bottle of Fiji Water removes as much carbon from the Earth as “turning off a light before you leave home for the day.” (This quote is from the now-defunct FIJIGreen.com site, which was taken down sometime during 2010.)
Fiji Water has yet to respond to the suit. Ferrell says “If this lawsuit forces Fiji Water to actually turn itself into a carbon-negative operation, we would be delighted.” As for Worthington, she’s now switched to drinking the greenest water of all: municipal tap.Virginia state officials would take over control of failing
public schools under bills that passed in each house of the General Assembly on Tuesday.
Part of Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell's education reform package, the measure would create an Opportunity Educational Institution Board to oversee
schools denied accreditation as a result of low standardized test scores and graduation rates.
The state would start taking over schools after the 2013-2014 school year if the final, reconciled measure is approved.
Four schools in the state currently have been denied accreditation, including Jefferson-Houston Elementary in Alexandria, according to Virginia Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle.
House votes to ban calculators on tests The Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill Tuesday that would prohibit the use of calculators on the state's Standards of Learning standardized tests for seventh- and eighth-grade students. The bill, sponsored by Del. David Albo, R-Fairfax, also would require the SOL tests given to fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade students to contain a number of math problems that are not allowed to be solved using calculators. "If a teacher can pass a kid through the SOLs without ever teaching him how to do math in his head, you cannot be guaranteed that that kid will ever be able to do it," Albo said. Though the bill would likely improve students' ability to perform math without a calculator, it could have unintended consequences, said Evan Glazer, principal of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a Fairfax County math-science magnet school ranked No. 2 nationally. Teachers focused on increasing test scores are going to decrease calculator-based problem solving, he said, even though those problems often require a greater level of thinking. If a question is written well, "the calculator itself isn't what is solving the problem," he said. "The student is solving the problem."
Alexandria City Public Schools are already working with a partner designated by the state to try to get Jefferson-Houston up to par, according to school system spokeswoman Kelly Alexander, who said she did not know how the new measure would affect the school.
In addition to schools that have already lost their accreditation, the board could take control of any school that has been given warnings for three consecutive years.
"It is unconscionable to stand idly by while another generation of students is forced to attend one of these failing schools," McDonnell said Tuesday after both bills passed. "A child's ZIP code should not dictate whether they receive a quality education in Virginia."
In 2007, Maryland similarly took control of four Baltimore high schools, becoming the first state in the country to take over a school under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
But Del. Robert Krupicka, D-Alexandria, expressed doubts that the new "benevolent bureaucracy" created by the bill would be more successful than previous efforts to revive Jefferson-Houston.
"My city is spending over $20,000 per pupil to help these kids. Only 10 percent of that is coming from the Commonwealth of Virginia, yet we feel here [in Richmond] that we know better," he said.
Krupicka criticized the board created by the bill as lacking accountability on a local level and for not having any obligation to give up supervision of schools it takes over. Though the bill requires the state to decide whether to continue overseeing a school before the end of five years, the state can decide to retain control "for a specified number of additional school years."
Instead of taking schools out of the hands of locals, the state should increase education funding, said Del. Kenneth Plum, D-Fairfax. "If you put the money into the schools, the schools will be successful."
The House passed its bill 66-34, while Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling broke a 20-20 tie to secure Senate passage. Though the chambers' versions are similar, they will need to be approved by the opposite houses and reconciled before going to the governor to sign.
[email protected] 10 Ska Bands
VO: Rebecca Brayton
Script written by Brandon William Peach. Originating in the late 1950s in Jamaica, ska music became a popular genre by adding jazz and R&B to Caribbean sounds. Its history is usually divided into 3 periods, the first wave during the 1960s in Jamaica, the second wave of the 1970s with the English 2 Tone ska revival and the third wave of the 1980s to the 1990s that arose in the United States. With this in mind, WatchMojo.com counts down our picks for the top 10 ska bands of all time, making sure to pick at least 3 bands per wave. Script written by Brandon William Peach. Originating in the late 1950s in Jamaica, ska music became a popular genre by adding jazz and R&B to Caribbean sounds. Its history is usually divided into 3 periods, the first wave during the 1960s in Jamaica, the second wave of the 1970s with the English 2 Tone ska revival and the third wave of the 1980s to the 1990s that arose in the United States. With this in mind, WatchMojo.com counts down our picks for the top 10 ska bands of all time, making sure to pick at least 3 bands per wave.
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Script written by Brandon William Peach.
Take some Jamaican vibes, add jazz, a dash of R&B and some attitude, and this is what you got. Welcome to WatchMojo.com, and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the top 10 ska bands of all time.
#10 – Sublime
No discussion of third-wave ska would be complete without mentioning Sublime. The Long Beach ska-punk pioneers rose to prominence in the early-‘90s with a genre-bending sound that merged influences from reggae to hip-hop. The band’s self-titled record was their most successful, but it was only released after the 1996 overdose death of singer and guitarist Bradley Nowell, meaning their accomplishment was bittersweet.
#9 – The Beat
No other band captured two-tone ska’s Jamaican influence in quite the same way. Also known as The English Beat to avoid confusion with a similarly-named American group, they gained popularity in the early-‘80s with memorable singles like “Mirror in the Bathroom.” With reggae-esque lyrical and musical themes, frontmen Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger offered hope to the United Kingdom during a period of social unrest and high unemployment.
#8 – Madness
At the height of the two-tone revival, this catchy band from Camden Town, England burst onto the scene with the bright guitars, groovy bass lines, and vibrant horns that would be adopted by many groups that followed. Their anger and politically-minded humor won over many and influenced more, and even today Madness is still going strong.
#7 – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Third-wave ska needed a jolt to make it to the American mainstream, and that jolt is exactly what The Mighty Mighty Bosstones provided. Thanks to their 1997 record Let’s Face It, and the hit single “The Impression That I Get,” the genre exploded. But commercial success didn’t come easy: before they pioneered the ska-core subgenre, the band had been releasing albums and touring since the late-‘80s.
#6 – The Wailers
It’s a near certainty that ska wouldn’t exist in the same form today without the legendary Wailers, led by a young Bob Marley. Songs rooted in political action like “Get Up, Stand Up” and “Simmer Down” became mainstays of the genre, as did the characteristic strumming pattern on the guitar’s upper strings, countering a thumping bass line. Even decades later, The Wailers’ music continues to define the genre.
#5 – Toots and the Maytals
Yet another pioneer of ska’s original wave of popularity, Toots and the Maytals were renowned for their strong vocal harmonies led by frontman and guitarist Toots Hibbert. The group’s popularity in England helped pave the way for second-wave ska in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when underground British artists began modifying their distinctively reggae sound. Their song “Pressure Drop” introduced the genre to fans outside Jamaica.
#4 – Operation Ivy
It’s appropriate that they’re named after a series of nuclear tests – after all, the explosion of the ska-punk genre owes much to this California four-piece. The band existed for only two years and released just one album, only to break up months later. Nevertheless, punk bands like Green Day and ska groups like Sublime have cited Op Ivy as a defining influence in the sounds they adopted.
#3 – The Toasters
As one of the first successful third-wave bands in America, The Toasters offered a fresh take on first wave and two-tone traditions, borrowing the Wailers’ guitar tone, Madness’ horn section, and the aesthetic of the underground British movement. The result was a poppy, rhythmic sound, with clever lyrics and delightfully catchy tunes – a recipe adopted by other bands like Less Than Jake and The Planet Smashers.
#2 – The Specials
For two-tone ska with punk-rock aggression and political themes, there’s no one like The Specials. These Brits popularized some of ska’s defining features, from tonic suits to radical social commentary. But, unlike many ska groups, success was not elusive: The Specials generated seven hit singles between 1979-1981, and later were instrumental in publicizing Nelson Mandela’s plight. After splitting to pursue political activism, the group reunited in the late-2000s to recreate their danceable sound.
#1 – The Skatalites
Ska melds various genres and traditions, but its inception can be traced to one band: The Skatalites were true originals, blending jazz, rock-and-roll, R&B, and calypso influences to form something new. Besides producing music and backing other Jamaican acts, the group mentored young artists like The Wailers. The result was a pervasive sound that travelled from Jamaica to leave an impact on the rest of the globe that is heard even today.
With upbeat rhythms and distinctive instrumentation, it’s no wonder ska music has enjoyed widespread popularity since its invention in Jamaica a half-century ago. Which of your favorite ska bands have we missed? For more top 10s, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.I had no idea what the World Cup was.
Seriously. No clue.
I was nine years old and had only been playing soccer for a couple of years in Hawaii, and I was sitting around a TV with my rec team, watching the 2002 World Cup, and I had just one thought:
What the heck is going on?
I mean, really, I just wasn’t a soccer-crazy kid. In fact, a few years earlier when my mom signed me up to play for the first time, I was pissed when I found out what she had done. I wanted to be a football player — the helmet, shoulder pads, tackling guys to the ground. All that stuff.
Playing soccer over football wasn’t about safety or money — or anything else — for my mom. What it came down to was the carpool. Yep. My mom worked a lot, and it turned out that one of the women who used to drive me to school had signed her son up to play soccer. So that meant I was playing soccer too.
And let’s just say that at my first soccer practice, it was pretty clear I had no idea what I was doing. I showed up with some $10 cleats from Sports Authority. I had those shin guards, you know the ones that go around your feet with the ankle guards? Classic rec soccer gear. And to top it all off, I didn’t have soccer socks — just regular gym socks that didn’t go all the way up over my shin guards.
I was a newbie, and I looked ridiculous.
Instagram/@bwoody22
And as bad as I looked, I didn’t play much better on the field either. So they put me between the pipes.
“Alright, Bobby, you just go in goal and we’ll take it from there,” my coach told me, waving to the other end of the pitch. Hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?
So, I just took it one day at a time.
I didn’t know all the rules, but I knew I had one job: Do not let the ball go in the goal. And you know what? I actually wasn’t that bad.
But my coach noticed something else: my speed. He tried me out at striker and for a few weeks I pulled double duty. I’d start a game on the front line and try to score a goal or two, and then switch positions to play in goal. Except I was a little better at putting the ball in the back of the net than keeping it out. So playing striker became my full-time job on the field.
At that point, there wasn’t really any strategy to my game. I just sort of ran around. Wherever the ball was, I kind of just went after it.
Like I said, you gotta start somewhere, right?
I still wasn’t a soccer-mad kid, though. Growing up in Hawaii, we didn’t get a lot of matches from Europe on TV. And trying to order and get kits mailed to the islands? Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen — too expensive. Even if I could have afforded one, I wouldn’t have known what club to get.
I didn’t even know you could play soccer as like an actual job. As far as I knew, Zidane might as well have been a tennis player. David Beckham? Who? I know it sounds crazy! I know. But, listen, I was a beach kid who kind of got thrown into all of this.
Which is why — when I was 10 years old and sitting in the living room of my buddy’s house — his mother had to explain to me what the World Cup was. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. It was probably one of the first times I’d ever actually seen soccer on the TV.
So, there’s all these countries? And they each have a team? And this is a pretty big deal, huh?
So how did a kid from Honolulu who was so clueless about soccer end up playing in the Bundesliga?
Well, that starts with my mom as well.
I still didn’t know much about soccer culture, but I was getting pretty good on the pitch. So my mom made the decision to move our family to Irvine, California. There’d be better teams for me to play on, and my sisters and I would get the opportunity to go to better schools, as well.
Instagram/@bwoody22
As for me, I wasn’t thinking about the game in those terms yet. Soccer was still just something fun. I saw the move as an adventure.
But once I got to California and started playing for a club in Irvine, something just … changed. Soccer became more than just a hobby, or something that I was sort of good at. It became competitive. And all of a sudden, that part of it — that part of me — just took over. I didn’t just want to play for fun anymore. I wanted to be the best.
We got Fox Soccer Channel when we moved and I started watching Premier League matches on the weekend. Most of the time, I’d get up early to watch Arsenal and Thierry Henry. I don’t know what it was about Henry — maybe it was because he was a striker, too — but the way he moved on the pitch just mesmerized me. He sort of just … glided. There were no tricks or anything to his game, and the way he scored goals was so pure. It was amazing to see.
I soon found out that California was sort of the breeding ground for top soccer talent in the U.S. I wasn’t nearly the best player on the team, like I had been in Hawaii. I never got picked for the Olympic Development Program. I never got picked for a national team either.
Which is why when my club coach came up to me one day after practice to talk about playing in Europe, I didn’t really get it at first. Honestly, I didn’t think I deserved it. I didn’t think it was fair to the other guys I was playing with.
“Going to Germany, you will be among the best in Europe,” he told me. “You will get there, but you need to train in Europe.”
Play in Europe? I’d never even been to Europe.
But my coach saw something in me, and for whatever reason, I was getting this opportunity to go to Germany and train with 1860 Munich. My mom and I talked it over, and just like with California, I sort of saw it as another adventure. If it didn’t work out, I’d just come back. What did I have to lose?
Of course, there was one thing I needed to get before I left. A real winter coat.
Again, I was a kid who’d only ever lived in Hawaii and Southern California. Shorts were sort of a staple in my closet, and you never needed more than a hoodie. Buying winter clothes was a whole new experience. Winter boots. Long pants. A giant puffer jacket. This is going to sound stupid, but I didn’t even know they made jackets like that. Like I said, I was a pure beach kid.
Imago/ZUMA Wire
I’ll never forget arriving in Munich and really seeing snow for the first time. I’d seen flakes here and there when we visited my grandparents in Japan, but this was on a different level.
For the first week, it was so cool. Then it got old. Fast. Especially when I found out that, unlike in California, where we often postponed matches because of rain or whatever, soccer didn’t stop for anything in Germany. Just toss out the yellow footballs so we could see them and we were good. We would train outside no matter the weather. Wind. Rain. And yes, snow.
So it lost its appeal pretty quickly.
After a couple of weeks, I learned that there were a lot of other things that were different about playing in Germany.
The academies in Europe — I’m not going to lie — are pretty cutthroat. We were only 14 years old, but boys got sent home because the coaches thought that they just weren’t good enough. This wasn’t like in the U.S., where everyone plays to have fun and gets a participation trophy at the end of the season. I was expected to be a professional — training and playing seven days a week in hopes of the slight chance that I would make the first team at some point.
And being the American coming in? I felt like an outsider. I could sense that the other guys weren’t happy about the new kid from California coming in a maybe taking a spot. And I knew that I was going to have to prove myself that much more. It felt like a shadow that was constantly hanging over me.
It also didn’t help that on my first day of practice, I was dressed like a n00b. My big, red jacket looked pretty ridiculous. I had my snow boots on. And I couldn’t speak the language. It just made me feel that much more … well … lonely.
It doesn’t really matter what country you’re in, I think. Kids are always going to find little things to pick on. I’d go to the cafeteria and sit down at a table and they’d just look at me. I didn’t speak German, but the feeling of someone talking about you is universal. Yeah. So it was a little like that. Plus, when I sat down, they made it pretty clear too.
dark
“We don’t want you here,” one kid told me.
That happened a lot, actually. And on the pitch, I got yelled at in German when I would make a mistake. It’d be the same mistakes others would make. But when you’re different, well, that’s all the reason they need.
I think I Skyped my mom everyday. She’d send care packages of bagels and Fruit Gushers (still my favorite snack, by the way). Of course, there were times when I thought that maybe I should just go home. I missed my friends. I missed my school. I missed my club teammates. Back in California, those guys were my best friends — and all these years later, they still are. At 1860 though there was a language barrier. And I was getting bullied and I didn’t know how to stand up for myself.
And then I made a decision.
One day at a time.
That was it. I was thinking too much about what was going on and I wasn’t focusing on my game. I was thinking so much about all the things I missed that I had forgotten why I was there. I was there to play soccer. So I was just going to play one day at a time.
I learned to let everything else go. It wasn’t easy, but every day I just showed up for practice. I showed up for matches. I controlled the only thing I could: What I did on the pitch.
My coaches started to see my potential. Eventually, after three years at the academy, I earned a spot on the second team. But that didn’t go quite as I had planned. A month after I moved up to the second team, I had my first meniscus surgery. I’d been playing through the pain in my knee for a pretty long time, but it had gotten so bad that I couldn’t even walk. I rehabbed for months, got back into training, got back on the pitch. But three weeks later, it tore again.
I didn’t know what my future was going to be at 1860. My contract was running out, and I hadn’t made it to the first team yet. Honestly, I didn’t know what my future was going to be in soccer at all. I thought I was going to have to to quit and go home. After having spent years away from my family and friends, after everything I had gone through, I didn’t want it to just end. But the club was hesitant to re-sign me with all the problems I had with my knee.
And then, I got a little bit of luck.
Imago/ZUMA Press
One of my coaches from the youth academy was named the second-team coach and he pulled me aside.
“Just stay one more year and get your knee healthy,” he told me. “I believe in you.”
And he really did. He was one of the few people I felt I had in my corner. So I stayed and I worked on my knee for a year and got back onto the second team. And by the end of the season? Well, my coach was named manager of the first team and he brought me along with him.
I signed my first professional contract with a club.
The moment I signed it, I just thought, You’re really making it. After being there for so long — through injuries, through loneliness — I was just really proud of myself.
One day at a time.
It’s crazy to think about how everything’s sort of turned out: going from playing on the beaches in Honolulu to signing with Hamburg last year.
To play in the Bundesliga … you can’t really describe it. Walking onto the pitch in front of thousands of screaming fans every weekend — it’s unlike anything I ever could have imagined. I think back to that day when I was 10 and watching the World Cup with my friends … everyone in their kits, faces painted, just pouring their hearts out. I didn’t understand it at the time. I didn’t understand what this sport means to people. Or, really, what it could mean to me.
I get it now.
I get it every time I score a goal. In an instant, you can make 50,000 people happy.
I don’t know how to put the feeling that gives me into words. But I’ll never forget my first Bundesliga goal. It was in my debut last August against FC Ingolstadt.
I don’t think I’d ever jumped so high. Everything I felt in that moment, the days training, then wondering if I’d ever play again, they were with me in that moment, along with all the joy and pride I was feeling. It was a realization that I belonged, Yes. You’re here. You can do this.
And playing for a club like Hamburg it’s different. It hasn’t been easy, but even when we’ve been in last place, our fans have been there. Fifty-thousand people fill up the stadium. Every week. That doesn’t happen everywhere, you know? That’s special. So every time I put my Hamburg shirt on I feel it. I look at the clock when we walk out to matches. It counts every second that the club has been in the top flight of the Bundesliga since the league was founded, nearly 54 years ago.
I feel the tradition that’s all around this club and what it means to the city.
I want to do a lot for this club. And as an American, I want to do a lot in this league. And right now, that means fighting with Hamburg to survive in the Bundesliga, to keep the clock running forever.
One day at a time.Having found himself pushed to the very final round of 2017 by an unexpected challenge from Andrea Dovizioso, Marc Marquez is keeping an open mind on his likely 2018 MotoGP rivals.
But the Spaniard does name Johann Zarco, looking to build on a stellar rookie season, and triple MotoGP champion Jorge Lorenzo, starting his second year at Ducati, alongside this year's race winners on his 2018 watchlist.
"I cannot say one name because one of the things that I learned this season is that you need to consider all the riders in the same way, the same level," Marquez told the official MotoGP website.
"I didn't expect Dovizioso like this, so next year I will keep focus a little bit more on for example Dovizioso, Valentino, Vinales, Pedrosa - but also I think Zarco and Lorenzo can be very fast too."
Like all of the riders he named, Marquez is out of contract at the end of 2018.
While nothing is certain until a new contract is signed, it seems unlikely that Marquez will leave Honda at this stage, where he has won four titles in five years and is surrounded by a hand-picked group of loyal team members.
"My contract finishes at the end of 2018. So it will be time to negotiate your contract, speak with the team, with manufacturers…
"But of course always I never forget that Honda gave me the opportunity to be in the world championship and Honda give me the feeling that I need at the moment.
"So we will see, but at the moment I feel really good [at Honda]."Rookie blue-liner proving to be a big surprise
Jalen Chatfield had plenty to chat about Monday.
There was his strong showing in Calgary and Edmonton last week — two goals and three assists by the undrafted defenceman in the National Hockey League pre-season outings — and a belief within the Vancouver Canucks organization that they may have something special in the late-blooming blue-liner.
Chatfield is also a huge National Football League fan. And because the 21-year-old native of Ypsilanti, Mich. is the product of biracial parents — his father is white, his mother is black — his take on anthem protests by NFL players was another talking point following a practice at Rogers Arena.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that NFL owners should respond in the following manner to players who kneel, sit or ignore the anthem: “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he’s fired. He’s fired.”
It created a firestorm of response from the NFL, its players and supporters of the right to protest, and it obviously resonated with Chatfield.
“I’ve been seeing that (protests) because I watch a lot of football,” said Chatfield. “It’s just their (players’) opinion and the way they express themselves. And for me, they have the right to protest. Personally, I’m neutral in the situation and they can do whatever they want.
“I’ve been living in Canada the last few years and it’s pretty good living here. I see a lot of stuff going on in this world and, at the end of the day, we’ve got to be united as one.”
Pretty good stuff from a guy who has had his own challenges to carve out a hockey career.
Passed over in the OHL and NHL drafts only heightened Chatfield’s resolve to silence his critics and make some noise with a game that features strong skating, a two-way awareness and offensive potential.
This week on The Patcast, Jeff and Botch reconvene after a week off and cover all the pressing issues from Canucks camp, including who has stood out in the preseason and the team’s trip to China. Listen here:
With the Canucks’ back end looking virtually set with the pairings of Alex Edler and Chris Tanev, Ben Hutton and Troy Stecher and Michael Del Zotto and Erik Gudbranson, getting another pre-season start Thursday or Saturday before being dispatched to the Utica Comets would only further Chatfield’s learning curve.
“It’s been a fun camp and I’ve been catching up on the pace,” said Chatfield. “I’ve been learning a lot and I’m just trying to play my game and battle hard. I’m trying to show them something every time I’m on the ice and I’m just going to keep doing that.”
A cheeky backhand goal to the far side off a pinch against the Flames is what excites the Canucks. Production from the back end has been on the wane and there may be potential in Chatfield. He never lit it up in Windsor — eight goals last season with the Memorial Cup-champion Spitfires — but his game is only starting to come around after he was overlooked by so many teams.
“It’s just part of life,” said the six-foot, 188-pound Chatfield. “Some get the easier path and some take the longer road and I’ve always been taking the longer one.
“But it has made me who I am today. I think I can play a two-way game and just as hard defensively as I play offensively. I went through a lot of adversity in my hockey career and I’ve just stuck with my game plan.”
Part of the plan was to enjoy sports and not get jaded early by the pressure to become somebody special. His dad played basketball and his sister played soccer, but just playing outside was all Chatfield ever wanted to do. It included biking, rollerblading, skateboarding and baseball.
“That really helped my athleticism,” he said. “And I watched a lot of hockey. I watch how a guy might play a 1-on-1 and I don’t really focus on any player. I just focus on being a pro. Here, I watch Tanev a lot and try to do some things he does in practice.”
Canucks general manager Jim Benning believed Chatfield was worth signing to a three-year, entry-level deal in March because of his natural ability.
“I thought he was excellent in both (Alberta) games,” said Benning. “He’s very mobile and he’s competitive in the puck battles. But it’s his ability to skate the puck up ice and jump up and get his shot through. Of the guys we had in those games, he was a bit of a surprise.
“Sometimes players develop later and he has the skating and competitiveness to make himself into a player. And he doesn’t give up. What stood out for us is he just loves playing the game and he’s serious, but it always looks like he’s having fun with it and that contagious.”
OVERTIME — Brock Boeser skated with Henrik and Daniel Sedin on Monday and with four goals in his three pre-season outings, there’s a chance the right-winger could get a look with the twins on Thursday against Calgary at Rogers Arena. “It was my first time practising with them and honestly it’s an honour to play on their wing and make the most of it,” said Boeser. “This whole camp is to make the most of it and this is a big one to contribute and gain some chemistry with them.” Bo Horvat (shoulder) is expected to skate Wednesday after being injured by a Drew Doughty hit Thursday. Cole Cassels (upper body injury) and Ryan White (concussion) remain sidelined while winger Reid Boucher was placed on waivers Monday.
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Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email [email protected]’s box office told only one tale over the past week – the blistering pace of “Fast and Furious 7,” which broke records and left all competing titles standing.
The past seven days saw the film add $186 million to its huge first-day score, bringing the eight-day total to $250 million, according to Chinese data service Ent Group. The film was watched by some 29 million Chinese spectators, who paid an average of $6.3 per ticket for the privilege.
While the cinema owners and fans may have been cheering, the massive score sent shivers around other sections of the industry. Chinese filmmaker Feng Xiaogang, speaking at the Chinese directors awards a week ago, said that it sets the bar ever higher for the locals to compete.
And many in the industry have been wondering if “Furious 7” will at some stage be removed from screens by regulators who judge that it has taken enough money and should leave some on the table for other movies. The unofficial, but widely understood, policy is that SARFT and the Film Bureau will make use of release dates and import selections in order to deliver an end of year result in which local titles have a majority of the box office.
Some observers noted the film’s Sunday release as a sign that Chinese regulators may have tried to hobble the picture. If so the tactic failed. And with no blockbuster releases on the immediate horizon, either from Hollywood or among Chinese productions, it is not easy to see “Furious 7” being given less than its standard 28-day theatrical run.
Second-placed film in the chart was local romance “Ever Since We Love,” which stars Fan Bingbing. It collected $11.6 million in three days. In third place was Chinese war actioner “Wolf Warriors,” which added $8.66 million to produce an 18-day cume of $87 million.
Johnny Depp-Gwyneth Paltrow comedy “Mordecai” limped onto the Chinese chart with just $2.09 million in three days, giving it the fourth place. In fifth was “The Queens,” with Shawn Dou and Korean actress Song Hye Kyo, who is a regular on Chinese screens. The film managed $1.9 million in five days.When I was but an intern reporter at a daily newspaper, I got an assignment I'll never forget. Due to a lack of drainage in the South Valley, even a little bit of precipitation sent rivers of rainwater up to and beyond doorsteps. A big rain for one of my eventual sources meant moving the kids out to the camper to sleep because the water level in his house was higher than the electrical outlets.
I say he was an "eventual" source because it was damn hard for me to coax anyone into talking about it. I'd interviewed the public officials and maintenance guys who were responsible for sucking the water out of the streets after a storm. But the last narrative component, a South Valley resident besieged by rainwater in the desert, was a far greater challenge.
One lady even cracked a smile and said something like: "The newspaper? What are you doing down here?"
I drove down to the most affected neighborhood and parked my crappy, one-eyed Kia. I pounded the dusty non-sidewalk and knocked on doors. Some people were home and yelled through the door that they "didn't want any." Some came out to chat, gave excellent quotes and then said they didn't want to be in any newspaper. Still more often, I would explain who I was and what I was doing, and people would shut the door in my still talking face with a polite, "No, thank you." One lady even cracked a smile and said something like: "The newspaper? What are you doing down here?"
It takes a certain mindset to believe that what's happening to you is a) wrong, b) someone's fault and c) something other people should know about.
It was a long few hours. I got bit by a dog.
But it wasn't the mild canine attack that caused that hot, dusty day to bind to my memory. Rather, it was the extreme reluctance of anyone I spoke with to trust me or, in a larger sense, the media.
I can't guess at what all those people were thinking or why they were thinking it. But I can tell you that I've never dealt with so many who wanted absolutely nothing to do with being in a newspaper. And I'm willing to wager that even in the Land of Enchantment, race and class have something to do with that distrust.
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were full of Enya and Sarah Mclachlan and in the 2000s onward we heard Neko Case, Stars, Metric, Mates of State, Feist and many others.
I’m not sure how aware he was of Kate’s music, but part of the reason I think he would have liked her music is she wields this monstrous variety of sounds to create a sort of controlled mess, not totally unlike Brian Wilson in his more amibitious Beach Boys and solo work.
What strikes me most about Kate’s music, as I listen, is that it’s just bursting forth with creative expression. It’s got an infectious joy. I’m not normally inclined to some of the ways she uses her voice, or how she uses keyboard samples (synthesized bagpipes and pitch bending bass anyone?), but in context it matches the sonic palette she has set up, the audio world you’re invited into.
I’ll be spending more time in her oeuvre, hoping to discover more wonderful music.Three groups are vying to lead the designs behind the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) XS-1 Program, which aims to make a craft that can go to space and launch satellites 10 times in 10 days.
On Monday the agency set the deadline for July 22, at which point it will pick between the designs of three groups, Northrop Grumman, partnered with Virgin Galactic; Boeing, partnered with Blue Origin; and Masten Space Systems, partnered with XCOR Aerospace. The winner of the public-private partnership with be awarded $140 million in DARPA funding to build the submitted designs for the reusable rocket.
The designs of this craft must meet four goals laid out by DARPA.
Fly 10 times in a 10-day period (barring weather) to demonstrate aircraft-like access to space. Achieve flight velocity sufficiently high to enable use of a small (and therefore low-cost) expendable upper stage. Launch a 900- to 1,500-pound payload and demonstrate the ability to eventually launch 3,000+-pound payloads during future missions. Reduce the cost of flight to just $5 million per flight.
A DARPA concept video shows a concept XS-1 craft launching a satellite.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been the company at the forefront of this sort of launch so far. The Amazon and Washington Post owner has already demonstrated that his space company’s crafts are capable of launching and landing the same craft three times in a row. While these launches are lower in altitude than similar events from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, it seems DARPA is only looking to launch satellites, not deliver payloads to the International Space Station. For those purposes, Blue Origin seems like the player to beat here, especially when assisted by the folks at Boeing.
Virgin Galactic hasn’t proven itself a major player in the commercial space flight game yet, but maybe Richard Branson can take this opportunity to prove himself in a major way. Veterans from the company recently started a new company called Vector Space Systems, which aims to do many of the same things.
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The third partnership is by far the least well known, but could be a formidable underdog. Masten Space Systems focuses on entry, descent, and landing technologies (EDL) while XCOR Aerospace is developing some pretty cool looking reusable rockets. Maybe these two specialties combined can win out to beat the big dogs.Republicans continue to oppose efforts by Democrats to pass the legislation, which would provide $5 million to replace private funding that supported the program during a five-year pilot phase. The private funds run out June 30.
Republicans continue to oppose efforts by Democrats to pass the legislation, which would provide $5 million to replace private funding that supported the program during a five-year pilot phase.
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If you walk around the Colorado Capitol these days, you might see state lawmakers wearing mini intrauterine devices (IUDs)—on their ears or on their lapels.
The brightly colored IUD-shaped earrings, spotlighted in a recent Denver Post article, have become symbols of hope for a bill that would fund a pregnancy protection program that has reduced teen pregnancies by 40 percent over five years and teen abortions by 35 percent.
Republicans continue to oppose efforts by Democrats to pass the legislation, which would provide $5 million to replace private funding that supported the program during a five-year pilot phase. The private funds run out June 30.
On Tuesday, an amendment attached by House Democrats to Colorado’s budget bill was defeated in a house-senate conference committee. Colorado’s senate is controlled by Republicans, while the house is under a Democratic majority. If the conference committee deadlocks on a provision, as it did this week, it fails.
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“This is a common-sense, bipartisan program that has improved the lives of thousands of Colorado women,” state Rep. KC Becker (D-Boulder) said in a statement, adding that she was “shocked” that the Republicans could be so short-sighted. “Every dollar spent on this program has saved the state six times more in social services dollars that it didn’t have to spend dealing with the social and economic consequences of teenage pregnancy.”
Republicans oppose the bill for a variety of reasons, including their mistaken belief that IUDs cause abortions and their inaccurate view that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) already provides free contraception for all; the national health-care law does not reach all the women who are part of the program—and it doesn’t fund training for the staff involved in implementing it.
Still, state Sen. Larry Crowder (R-Alamosa) told the Colorado Springs Gazette, “So in my way of thinking, why would the state want to fund something that’s already covered in our health situation?”
A stand-alone bill to fund the pregnancy prevention program was passed by state house committees, along party lines—though one Republican, Rep. Don Coram from the southern town of Montrose, is a co-sponsor of the house legislation.
The bill is scheduled for a vote by the entire state house April 20, and it’s expected to pass, but no action is planned in the GOP-led state senate. Gov. John Hickenlooper’s office has stated that the bill is a priority.
“We will fight for this program in the house, and with our senate supporters we will do everything we can to rescue this program as it moves through the Senate,” Becker said.
The IUD jewelry remains a part of the conversation.
“It helps kind of get the conversation going, as well as alleviate fears people have when they hear the term IUD,” Larry Wolk, Colorado’s chief medical officer, told the Denver Post.
The teen pregnancy prevention program, over its five years in operation, distributed about 30,000 no- or reduced-cost IUDs or other long-acting reversible contraception in Colorado counties that account for 95 percent of the state’s population.But is angry Britain is not bombing parts of Syria where he is 'out manned'
Actor Michael Enright looks every inch the steely Hollywood tough guy, clad in combat fatigues with an AK-47 slung across his shoulder.
But this British veteran of countless movies – including Pirates Of The Caribbean alongside Johnny Depp, and Knight And Day with Tom Cruise – is no longer just playing a role as he embarks on the fight of his life.
He says he has turned his back on the glamour of Tinseltown to join the desperate fight against the terrorists of Islamic State, propelled into real-life action by their barbaric slaughter of Western hostages.
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Call of duty: Michael Enright, an actor from Manchester, has turned his back on Hollywood to join the fight against ISIS in Syria. He is pictured above in combat gear
Now, instead of mixing with A-listers such as Cruise and Anne Hathaway at Hollywood parties, 51-year-old Enright, who has no military background, sleeps in the Syrian mountains, his Kalashnikov rifle constantly at his side.
And he knows that the perilous journey he made to join the rag-tag, poorly-equipped YPG Kurdish rebels in the Sinjar mountains of northern Syria might be a one-way ticket.
His determination to try to halt the murderous march of IS across Iraq and Syria began to crystalise after the beheading of American journalist James Foley last August by the notorious British killer Jihadi John.
He is only too aware that, were he to fall into IS hands, he could suffer a similar fate to Foley and tragic British hostages David Haines and Alan Henning, who were both decapitated and had their deaths recorded in horrific videos.
In Syria, it is common knowledge that Islamic State are prepared to pay £65,000 ($100,000) for a Western hostage. However, Enright has a contingency plan, which he outlined with icy calmness: ‘If I’m about to get caught, then you know, we keep one bullet back for ourselves.’
Talking to The Mail on Sunday by mobile phone from Syria, Enright, who was born in Manchester, revealed his determination to stand up to IS. He said: ‘It’s got to a point where I just want to absolutely annihilate them, and kill them on sight.’
Celebrity lifestyle: Enrwight with Tom Cruise (above). The 51-year-old did not tell any of his famous friends he was going to Syria for fear they would try to stop him
He added: ‘IS are just an abomination. This is a call to humanity, it’s a call to everybody, to do whatever we can, in whatever way we can.’
Enright has been in Syria for more than two months, receiving basic training from the YPG after risking his life to reach them.
He wanted to join President George W Bush’s war against terror after 9/11 in 2001, and planned to enlist in the US Army back then before being talked out of it by friends.
But 14 years on, the final straw for him came in January when he saw the IS video of Jordanian pilot Muath Al-Kassasbeh being burned to death.
I sleep next to my AK-47. She's called Olga
He keeps the gruesome footage on his mobile phone and watches it whenever his zeal to fight wanes.
The actor said that he has endured punishing physical training with the YPG, as well as learning how to assemble and dismantle a Kalashnikov blindfolded, so that he can do it in the dead of night on the front line.
Like all other rebel fighters, he sleeps in full uniform on a mat on the floor with his loaded rifle next to him, in case of an attack. ‘You sleep in your uniform, you wear it 24 hours a day,’ he said. ‘You’ll sleep next to your Kalashnikov. I call mine Olga, because she’s Romanian. It’s my constant companion, so I gave her a name.’
Enright has been a journeyman actor from the age of 16. After growing up in the deprived Moss Side area of Manchester, he received his big break when he won a place in a children’s pantomime at Butlin’s in Skegness, Lincolnshire.
Deciding that acting was his future, he made two trips to the US to try out for roles and fell in love with the country. When he was 19, he moved to Hollywood permanently. His most recent screen work includes parts in the TV action series, Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D
The actor with Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway. He has been a journeyman actor from the age of 16
His most notable film role was that of a merchant seaman in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, released in 2006. He appeared in 2009 in Old Dogs, which starred the late Robin Williams and John Travolta, and has fond memories of working with both actors. ‘Robin, John and I were ad-libbing on the set all the time, you know, making everybody laugh,’ he recalled.
ISLAMIC STATE MANUAL ENDORSES CONTROVERSIAL PRESSURE GROUP CAGE A controversial British pressure group has been explicitly backed by Islamic State. The terror group has published a guide for jihadis – including tips on making bombs and committing fraud – which suggests turning to Cage for legal help. How To Survive In The West, right, advises that jihadis use Cage’s website for tips on dealing with surveillance, raids and interrogations. Cage were dubbed apologists for extremism after leader Asim Qureshi called Jihadi John a ‘beautiful young man’. It was unavailable for comment.
But in the back of his mind there was always something nagging him. He said: ‘For me, the biggest regret of my life was not going to Afghanistan when 9/11 happened. The beheading videos brought out the same kind of feelings in me, and a real sense that I had a duty to America. I really feel a debt to the country. You know, they welcomed me with open arms.
‘And then what added to it all was that it was an Englishman [Jihadi John], that he had an English accent. And I just, it just touched me personally, in a very deep way. ‘
The actor did not tell any of his Hollywood friends that he was heading to Syria as he wanted to keep it a secret, in case airport authorities were tipped off and tried to prevent him.
Nor did he tell his mother or sister, who still live in Manchester, in advance of his plans, though he has written since. He said: ‘I wrote my mother a letter. My sister just got diagnosed with cancer, she’s going through radiotherapy right now. And so I’m just hoping that we both get through it.’
He has also now revealed his ‘mission’ to friends on Facebook. One of them, Walt Becker, director of Old Dogs, called him straight away to find out if it was true. Enright recalled: ‘Walt said, “Man I’m flabbergasted.” But he added, “Bro, if anyone can make a difference, it’s you”.’
He believes most of his friends would have tried to dissuade him from going to Syria if he had told them in advance. ‘I didn’t really want to hear that negativity.
'So I just went, and then told them on Facebook. I apologised to all my friends for not being able to say a proper goodbye to them. Because, you know, I might not be coming back, I don’t know.’
Enright’s journey to Syria began when he contacted a British SAS friend of his called Rob who had served in Iraq.
Rob put him in touch with the YPG, and told him to communicate with them through a Facebook page, called Lions of Rojava.
Enright seen playing a role in the TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. He says he has wanted to join the fight against terrorism since 9/11
The actor was told by his YPG recruiters to fly to the city of Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan, via Istanbul, but he was deeply concerned when no one came to meet him from the flight as arranged, so he checked into a cheap hotel to plan his next move.
Both Rob, to whom he spoke by phone, and the hotel receptionist who befriended him, advised him not to travel any further because of the risk of unwittingly falling into the hands of IS. But he persisted and made contact with the YPG fighters through Facebook again.
‘They then put me in touch with another guy and said, yeah OK, they’d come round and pick me up.
‘At this point, I’m still pretty scared, because I don’t know the difference between a Kurd, and an IS member. The receptionist said if you don’t know them, don’t go. And I said, “well I need to go, that’s why I’ve come.” ’
He took what seems to be a far-from-foolproof precaution, arranging for the receptionist to call up to his room when the men arrived to tell him if they were Kurdish or not. He hoped this at least would give him a head-start if he had to run for his life. ‘When the Kurds came for me, I didn’t know if they were IS and they were going to kidnap me. And I was going on the word of my hotel reception guy,’ he said.
Thankfully, the welcome party was genuine and Enright was taken on a hazardous three-day journey in the back of a truck across mountains and rocky dirt track roads, before crossing the mighty Tigris river in a rubber dinghy.
Once he had reached a secret location, stationed alongside around 30 other white Westerners who had joined the YPG, Enright’s basic training began.
Apart from endless weapons drills and some rudimentary language classes, there was physical training, which he described as ‘running up and down hills, basically’.
Enright has been receiving basic training from the YPG. He sleeps in his uniform next to his AK-47, Olga
To his surprise, having trained with hundreds of Kurdish fighters at the camp, he found he was something of a crack-shot, despite only ever previously handling a gun once at a shooting range in America on the eve of his departure.
Up to now, while he awaits a major YPG offensive against IS, his most dangerous mission has been doing sentry duty on the frontline, often being woken at 2am to stand guard until daylight.
He spent almost a month on the frontline, guarding one of the border areas of YPG territory, with IS fighters only a few hundred yards away. He said the likelihood of an IS night-raid or a deadly round from a sniper is always high.
He explained: ‘When you’re on guard duty, you know the only thing between civilisation and Islamic State is you and your Kalashnikov.
‘You stay out of sight. You want to be able to see them, but you don’t want them to see you.’
He has witnessed coalition fighter jets flying over the YPG bases and firing at IS fighters.
He said: ‘When the aircraft come over your head, and they fire, it is the most incredibly, wild, bewildering sound that you’ve ever heard. And it’s the loudest noise that you’ve ever heard in your life.’
Then he hinted that things were about to get more serious. ‘Where I’m going in the next two days, say a prayer for me, because I’ll be going to a place which has a lot of action, a lot of fighting.’
Enright is angry that Britain is not bombing IS targets in Syria, concentrating instead on Iraq. He said if there were more air raids against IS, then the terror group could be defeated in months. He said: ‘We’re out gunned, and we’re out manned. We need the air support.’QUEEN'S University Belfast paid out cash to cyber hackers after its computers were targeted in a 'ransomware' attack.
The case is among dozens of cyber attacks on public institutions in the past year revealed in new records obtained by The Irish News.
Computer security experts last night described the issue as a "huge concern" and the PSNI urged victims to "contact police as soon as possible".
Ransomware is a computer virus that locks down data stored on an infected machine and demands payment before allowing the user to regain access to their information.
Queen's has suffered three ransomware attacks in the last academic year alone, details obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests reveal.
On one occasion a £400 ransom was paid after hackers targeted a PC running Windows XP and encrypted documents and images.
All encrypted files were recovered once the ransom was paid.
In its FOI response Queen's said its policy is that ransoms should not be paid, and the £400 payment was "an exception".
Ulster University has identified 22 ransomware attacks since June last year.
Systems used by individuals were affected on 18 occasions and in four instances the cyber attack affected the networked file shares used by a university department.
The university said data was normally restored through a backup service and on no occasion was ransom paid in return for the release of data.
Several councils in the north have also revealed that they have been targeted by ransomware.
Belfast City Council has been targeted twice, Lisburn and Castlereagh twice, and once in both Derry and Strabane council and Armagh Banbridge and Craigavon council.
None of the four local authorities paid the ransom demanded by the cyber criminals.
David Crozier, technical marketing manager of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies at Queen's University, said the ransomware attacks were a "huge concern".
He said the issue affects public bodies but also businesses in Northern Ireland that may be inclined to pay the ransom demanded.
"There is a huge underreporting of these types of activities. It's probably a bigger concern in Northern Ireland where you have a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises," he said.
"Unfortunately when companies pay they're put on sucker's lists so that they're repeatedly targeted.
"Our advice would be never pay the ransom and always report it to law enforcement."
Detective chief inspector Dougie Grant, from the PSNI's cyber centre, said: "We have received a significant number of reports in relation to this type of cyber crime in recent months which is reflective of what is going on nationally and internationally and I would encourage anyone who is a victim to contact police as soon as possible.
"Many of these incidents are as a result of widespread malicious communications and there are a number of steps local businesses and industry can take to protect themselves.
"The two most important things to do are to ensure your network has an effective back-up system in place and also, do not open or click on any suspicious or unexpected communications."
Mr Grant urged people to report the problem to police.
"Reporting helps us tackle these types of incident and crimes as well as identifying areas of concern and patterns of cyber incidents and may also assist in identifying and prosecuting offenders," he said.0 Shares
Simon Gotch was recently interviewed by For The Win. He spoke on a wide variety of topics about his WWE career as a member of the Vaudevillains. He also spoke about his future in wrestling after the WWE, where he will be wrestling under the name: Simon Grimm.
After his WWE release, there was a rumor floating around that Gotch was involved in an incident in catering at the Smackdown after Wrestlemania 33. Only a day later, it was announced that Gotch was released from the company.
During the interview, Gotch tells his side of what happened:
“The actual story is that it happened at WrestleMania. I was sitting in catering and the chair I was in was kinda flimsy. I go to shift in it and it just collapses underneath me. Being a ham, my immediate reaction was to demand someone pin me. ‘Someone pin me quick.’ The guy who comes over, I think he works for us. I didn’t realize he was a local technician and was not a WWE technician. He was someone who worked on the set at ‘Mania. He came to help me up and I’m like, ‘Nope, you gotta pin me. C’mon, man.’ And he’s not going along with the bit. He thinks I just fell and he’s trying to help me. I see the bit’s going nowhere so I take the chair and I just kick it off to the side, drop it like a little punt and let it lay where it lands. That was it. I saw the story online, saying that I fell in the chair and made this big scene and was yelling and screaming. No part of that is accurate.”
Gotch also shut down a rumor circulating that he was involved in an incident with his tag team partner: Aiden English.
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You can read the full interview here.In-game and online economies, and UGC sharing
This has always been a tricky topic, in any game with an economy, and not just Forza. Early games (Forza 3, at least) were a challenge to get money to buy cars. If you wanted to buy the Ferrari 250 GTO in Forza 3 (20,000,000 CR), you would need quite a lot of determination to get it done, be it through a lot of racing, or being a good tuner/painter for the Storefront and Auction House. It added a sense of accomplishment to each car one purchased though.
Forza 4 greatly relaxed these restrictions; perhaps too much. Within a few days of playing (sometimes hours, if they were good at Rivals), one could get the most expensive cars in the game, which also got their prices slashed: 10,000,000 CR could net the same 250 GTO that cost twice as much in 3. This made the process of obtaining a car no longer a challenge; there is almost no grind involved. This, coupled to easy free upgrades (minutes worth of racing nets the player 100% discount on almost all upgrades), meant that you both had less risk at trying new stuff, but the economy basically became irrelevant in the process.
With 4, micro-transactions were also introduced, in the form of tokens. Depending on the in-game price of the car, you could pay either 1, 2, or 3 tokens and get it for no in-game cost (but at the expense of real money). This concept carried over to later titles, especially 5, and wasn’t received with much acclaim, as the economy took a complete 180º turn in the process in 5, being, at the very least, a grind.
The grind introduced with 5 was later dialed back with updates, as an answer to the feedback from players. 6 took this one step further, by greatly increasing the amounts earned at each level (up to 1,000,000 CR per level in the higher levels, and sometimes as much as 50,000,000 CR in special spins), again turning the in-game economy into a non-issue.
Forza 3’s storefront.
Coupled to the in-game economy, Forza also has ways to share user-generated content (UGC), ranging from paints and vinyl groups, to tunes, either for free, or for a sum of in-game currency.
This concept was introduced in Forza 2 in the form of the Auction House, and was expanded in 3 with the introduction of the Storefront, both of which were killed in 5, being replaced with a “share and rewards” system (not to be confused with “Forza Rewards”), based on how much your items are downloaded, used, and liked, again with mixed reviews.
I am sympathetic with both sides on this case (Turn 10’s, and the players’). On one hand, having an in-game economy that spans to an online game is, essentially, heaven for cheaters. On the other, the rewards system implies that, unless you are a popular painter, you will receive little to no in-game money for your tunes, vinyl groups, and liveries.
Back to the topic of cheaters: at least in Forza 3 and 6, glitches which allowed a player to obtain great amounts of money in a short period of time were discovered (and patched relatively quickly). Now, in 3, this led to bans, but in 6 (as far as I know), the bug was patched, and that was it.
The aforementioned glitch in Forza 6.
The reason why no bans (as far as I know) were handed out in 6, is that, unlike in 2, 3, and 4, where the two economies are linked, in 6, (and in 5, for that matter), the economies are split; it doesn’t matter if I have 10,000 CR or 10,000,000 CR: I can get the same online content as anyone else. This kills the ability for cheaters to unbalance the game’s economy by inflating the amount of money flowing through the system.
Forza 2’s Auction House.
The Auction House in earlier games (2 through 4) showed this very problem. While it was a great place to sell limited edition copies of a player’s content, it was also prime territory for cheaters (or just players with lots of money) to inflate the cost of each car, effectively making it impossible for others to buy them (along other issues, such as accepting cheated money could risk you getting banned yourself as well).
Forza 5 and 6 suggests some paints before a player buys a car. However, while this system is great for a first interaction, it’s useless if one wants to find more content from the same player. It also doesn’t work with tunes (the auto-upgrade system could be revamped for this as well).
Replacing the online economy with the rewards system isn’t perfect, however. For players who don’t race often, and instead dedicate themselves to painting, it can be hard to obtain the in-game funds to buy the canvas for their next masterpiece.
I know that currently, for a tune, one earns 500 CR for each download, 100 CR for each use, and 1000 CR for each “like”, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it were to be the same for paints and vinyl groups.
I think that a hybrid system could fix this problem, however: by introducing a Forza 3-lke Storefront that allowed players to check out and download other people’s content, along with “top” content, discoverability would increase, both for tunes and for paints, but money would be kept out of the system because all content would be free.
This, coupled to the “rewards” system, could just be enough for balancing things out, without introducing a system that could be tampered, as in-game money wouldn’t be used to get the contents from the Storefront.
The rewards system could also be tied to in-game XP, which would then mean that the player could level up (and earn more CR in the process), just by sharing their paints, tunes, vinyl groups, pictures and replays, instead of just being earned by doing races.
Another thing that took a hit during the transition from 4 to 5 was the ability to share cars, tunes, vinyl groups, and liveries. Again, this is to deter cheaters and scammers, but in the process, the ability to make co-ops disappeared.
A possible solution to this would be to implement a simplified version of Creative Commons. Now, I don’t suggest that licensing should be introduced (that would be a nightmare), but, at least for layer groups, I would like to have the ability to share them in such a way that others could re-use my work in the process, by allowing others to share a livery that has my vinyl groups.
This could replace the binary “locked” or “unlocked” content system. I could share them in such a way that they are uneditable (as they are right now), but still be able to receive credit and rewards for people using them, and would open up the game for co-ops again. Of course, one could always choose to keep the content 100% locked as well.
I think that, in the end, the current online sharing system’s problems are the result of Turn 10’s overreaction to the exploits of the old system, but the resulting system is crippled, and can be improved.San Francisco authorities want thieves to steal their bikes. The New York Times reports that expensive "bait bikes" equipped with GPS devices have been installed throughout the city in the hope that someone will try to steal them. Should that happen, the on-board tracking systems will then allow the police to locate, apprehend, and tweet about those responsible. Aside from posting images of arrestees and suspects, Officer Matt Friedman, who heads the de facto anti bike-theft unit in Park Station, uses Twitter to educate and talk to the public. San Francisco's anti-theft program isn't a new concept, however. Similar systems have been effectively utilized on college campuses and in cities like Vancouver and Sacramento.
Normally when I see this I would feel sorry for the owner. Not this time. #thankYou4TakingOurBaitBike pic.twitter.com/MhcpkbC4UP — SFPD Anti Bike Theft (@SFPDBikeTheft) April 30, 2014Millions of Americans who have been labelled overweight or obese based on their body mass index (BMI) are in actual fact perfectly healthy, according to a new study.
Scientists in California say that 34.4 million Americans considered technically overweight due to their BMI are actually healthy based on a range of cardiometabolic health markers, as are some 19.8 million 'obese' people. The massive misclassification isn't just about which words we use, either, say the researchers, since the flawed BMI's usage in the health insurance industry unfairly penalises some, while rewarding others.
"In the overweight BMI category, 47 percent are perfectly healthy," said researcher Jeffrey Hunger from the University of California, Santa Barbara. "So to be using BMI as a health proxy – particularly for everyone within that category – is simply incorrect. Our study should be the final nail in the coffin for BMI."
The researchers looked at data from the most recent US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to analyse the link between BMI – a measure calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms by the square of their height in metres – with a range of specific health markers. These cardiometabolic assessments included blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol, among others.
What they found was that BMI incorrectly pegs people's health at both ends of the weight scale.
"Not only does BMI mislabel 54 million heavier individuals as unhealthy, it actually overlooks a large group of individuals considered to have a 'healthy' BMI who are actually unhealthy when you look at underlying clinical indicators," said Hunger. "We used a fairly strict definition of health. You had to be at clinically healthy levels on four out of the five health indicators assessed."
A good example of how BMI can offer skewed results is when it is used to calculate the health of athletic individuals. While these people can be incredibly fit, under BMI their heavier muscle tone can mistakenly lead to them being classified as overweight or obese.
The discrepancy is at its most apparent when looking at the BMI of some famous (and clearly not unhealthy) athletes. For example, according to an analysis early last year, NFL player Tom Brady is obese, and Olympic athletes Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps just narrowly miss the 'overweight' camp.
The findings, reported in the International Journal of Obesity, are important, because while BMI has long been noted for its limitations and flaws, the measure is nonetheless in wide use by US companies to determine their employee's health insurance costs.
Also, a new rule proposed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) could penalise people with BMIs higher than 25 – the upper limit of the 'healthy' range – by making them pay higher premiums.
"We need to move away from trying to find a single metric on which to penalise or incentivise people and instead focus on finding effective ways to improve behaviours known to have positive outcomes over time," said Hunger.
But if BMI is such an inaccurate way of gauging people's health, why does it remain in such common usage? The answer, according to the researchers, lies in its simplicity.
"The reason I think people rely on BMI is because it's easy; if you know someone's weight and you know someone's height, then out pops this magical number," A. Janet Tomiyama, one of the researchers, told Amina Khan at the Los Angeles Times.
"But getting blood pressure is pretty easy too. It takes maybe 20 seconds if you have the machine. And so I really think focusing on better health markers like blood pressure is a better way to go about it – particularly when we're talking about financial penalties."Home In-Depth Reporting The lawyer who took down Lance Armstrong…
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The lawyer who took down Lance Armstrong is on a mission to end the culture of cheating
Photo of Travis Tygart by Michael Friberg
Lance Armstrong on the cover of Sports Illustrated, 2002. Photo by Jonas Karlsson/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images.
NOSE TO NOSE
Travis Tygart in Paris last year on the way to an anti-doping inquiry by the French government. AP Photo/Francois Mori
THE ANTI-DOPING CRUSADE
Floyd Landis testifies at a 2007 arbitration hearing. Photo by Reuters/Max Morse.
THINGS GET OFFICIAL
During his tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey in January 2013, Armstrong admitted it was "dumb" to tweet an image of himself lounging near his Tour de France jerseys after USADA stripped him of his titles. Photo courtesy of @LanceArmstrong/Twitter.
A LEGAL BRAWL
Correction
Travis Tygart walked into his office at the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in the fall of 2002 for the first time as the nonprofit's new legal director.On the wall, he noticed a poster of Lance Armstrong on his bike with a quote: "What am I on? I'm on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?"Tygart appreciated Armstrong's message about hard work and the encouragement the cyclist had given millions of cancer victims."Lance was a true hero to so many people," Tygart says. "He had beaten cancer, won seven times at the Tour de France, dated Sheryl Crow and had become an American icon. His story was such an inspirational story to so many people, including me."Little did Tygart know at the time how intertwined his life would become with Armstrong's. During the past decade, the two men have battled mightily.They accused each other of lying and cheating. They threatened each other's financial future. Diehard advocates of Armstrong's innocence threatened Tygart.Today, everyone knows Lance Armstrong doped in order to win.Travis Tygart is the reason they know it.Tygart has become America's evangelist of ethics. His sermons advocate playing by the rules and proclaim the pitfalls of cheating. He preaches around the country like Billy Graham and Billy Sunday. His congregations are bar associations, law firm retreats, investment banking seminars, law school lectures, general counsel conferences and corporate compliance events."Cheating is cheating, whether you are practicing law or selling mortgage-backed securities," Tygart says. "We have lost our way in this country. It started with sports and trying to give kids and young adults a little bit of an advantage, and it ends with hedge fund managers going to prison for insider trading."Tygart's sermons are packed with personal anecdotes, accompanied by a PowerPoint that flashes photographs of Floyd Landis, Marion Jones, Kelli White and Barry Bonds.Tygart has been near or at the heart of nearly every major doping investigation during the past decade.He played a key role in the 2002 investigations into BALCO, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. The San Francisco business is alleged to have provided performance-enhancing drugs to sprinters Jones and Tim Montgomery and to baseball players Bonds and Jason Giambi.Five years later, Tygart was instrumental in Operation Raw Deal, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's probe into 30 Chinese companies that shipped 11. |
fiction shows on television (long an annoyance in the many "Star Trek" series) was over. These shows each featured dozens of dedicated themes for specific characters, events, and locations, allowing them to mature and intermingle as the series progressed. As such, they are not much unlike a really long single film score, a major appeal alone but one also built upon by a dynamic instrumental palette in both cases. For Giacchino and "Lost," the performing ensemble never wavered. It always consisted of strings, trombones, and percussion players of the Hollywood Studio Symphony, conducted by Tim Simonec. An emphasis on harp and solos for strings and piano are constants, with the only deviations coming in the form of stereotypical tropical elements (including acoustic guitar) in early seasons. Giacchino's usual instrumental creativity is limited to the percussion section, which included the banging of airplane wreckage for some recorded samples. That said, the use of a bloated trombone section to represent the only brass in the series is creative in and of itself; the composer utilizes all the capabilities of that instrument through the show, including the trademark glissandos that slur their way to suspense more often than not. Whereas the strings, harps, and piano often handle the duty of carrying character sensitivity, the trombones are a tool of brutality for the action scenes and muscle for occasional majesty, joining with electronic accents and percussion to lend a unique sound to the concept's darker leanings.
Interestingly, however, the same consistency in instrumentation that is such a tremendous asset to "Lost" in context presents some challenges on its soundtrack albums, where the lack of diversity does cause some of the multitude of themes to lose distinctiveness in later seasons. The amount of fully developed themes and lesser motifs in "Lost" is breathtaking, numbering over 40 in the first category and over 150 in the latter. These range from flowing dramatic themes with long lines to unique little stingers and other short phrases that are faithfully applied in carefully placed synchronization points in the show. True fans of "Lost" have tracked these applications and published them in incredible detail online. This review isn't meant to verify or challenge such representations, because the purpose here is to recommend the albums rather than identify every wink and nod to a idea with which Giacchino saturates his music. These same fans have also noticed the inevitable disparity between what you hear on the seven albums and the final mix in the show, and while there were plenty of instances in which the mixing crew dialed out Giacchino's score for a portion of a scene, the composer's music is generally well treated in "Lost." As with the albums for "Battlestar Galactica" or even their peer (in terms of complexity of constructs) in the feature film world, Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the "Lost" albums also have two potential audiences. Those who love and embrace the "Lost" concept and lived and died with the series should have no qualms about picking up each successive album of Giacchino's music for the series. This review is aimed more at those who have either only a casual interest in the series or no knowledge of it whatsoever, because such consumers can't be expected to purchase seven albums of music and sift through all of that material for the highlights. Like any series, you can take an hour or so of fantastic album highlights from these "Lost" CDs and form a superior compilation. The most surprising thing about "Lost," however, is that Giacchino's achievement really doesn't translate well onto album in many cases. There is no doubt that his attention to detail in the actual compositions is worthy of the highest rating available in this review, but it's important to note that there really is no five-star album among those released. Thus, to find the best material from "Lost" to place on your own five-star compilation, continue reading. Also contained hereafter will be notation about important observations about each album, including some of the inevitable low points that exist in any show's music.
Before diving into Giacchino's music on the season-specific albums, it should be mentioned that Abrams wrote the short title theme for "Lost." Unfortunately, it's just as electronically ambient and forgettable as what he wrote for the title of "Alias" and it appears on the first three albums of "Lost" music. Giacchino's application of his suspense and mystery material for the "End Title" is heard on the second and third seasons' albums, and while it's at least connected to the fabric of the rest of the scores, it's not worth the trouble either. Several general observations about Giacchino's handling of the whole concept can be made from the Season One album, despite the fact that it starts extremely slowly, with much texture and electronic thumping early. The first note to make is the fact that Giacchino often betrays his inspirations in this music, often making references to the styles of John Williams, John Barry, and Bernard Herrmann throughout the run of the series (though lessening to an extent in the later seasons). Another point of interest comes in the composer's usual construction of themes using repeating phrases of an identical number of notes, whether it's two notes for the "Life and Death" theme, three for the main theme, four for the "Man in Black" theme, or five for the freighter theme, among others. He also has a habit of starting and stopping his softer dramatic development, unafraid of utilizing near silence or actual pauses during such sequences. As such, this music appropriately looks backward to Alan Silvestri's Cast Away and foreshadows Giacchino's own Up. The composer also commonly uses rising bass string figures as counterpoint to his themes, a technique that would grace his Star Trek score, from which the Vulcan material would be hinted at in several places in the "Lost" score's character themes. For the suspense and action of "Lost," Giacchino utilizes single or double synthetic and percussive pulses, aided by a common trombone glissando that often symbolizes the mind-numbing twists of reality in the plot. Aside from these general techniques, Giacchino not surprisingly introduces most of the series' major recurring themes in Season One, and almost all of these receive some air time on the corresponding CD release. The primary theme of the show consists of a hopeful three note phrase repeated several times on different keys, presented clearly in "Credit Where Credit is Due." Equally important to the series is the "Life and Death" theme, which is almost always conveyed by piano or cello solos and is one of the major sources of comparison to the later Vulcan music. Its usage in Season One is best heard in the respites from the action in "Win One for the Reaper," "Life and Death," and "Oceanic 815."
Read More... Raiders of the Lost Ark; it is summarized on the first album in the latter half of "Hollywood and Vines." The Rescue theme that brings the season to a close is a heartfelt, yearning, and dramatic string idea in "Parting Words" that would eventually be referenced in an unusual way later in the series; it's possible that this one cue led to the fantastic awards and popular reception that this season's music received. Important to the album's presentation is the Revelation motif, a stinger consisting of a trombone glissando that closes out "Locke'd Out Again" and "Life and Death" consecutively, as well as "Oceanic 815" at the end of the product. It's a basically effective but truly obnoxious tool of suspense that frankly ruins some of the album's best dramatic music. The series kicks off its multitude of individual character themes almost immediately, and in Season One, two of them for vital characters stand out. First is Locke's theme, a rising figure dominated by low strings that also foreshadows Giacchino's later Vulcan theme. More shameful is the extreme Bernard Herrmann/Psycho rip-off for "Kate's Motel." Obviously, by the composer's usual playful track title, he acknowledges the inspiration, though it seems a bit out of place for the Kate character in relation to the other, less awkwardly different thematic representations in the series. That said, Giacchino executes the Herrmann technique quite well. Fortunately, the Season One album proved to be much more coherent than the Season Two follow-up, arguably the weakest entry in the entire series. Although Giacchino continues to use his previously established themes from the first season in his second year of writing for the concept, not much satisfying development of the primary ideas is exhibited on the Season Two album. One major exception is a reprise of the Rescue theme heard in full in "The Gathering." Otherwise, plenty of unremarkable cues plague this product, including the (literally) minutes of subtle harp plucking in "The Hunt" and, as mentioned before, the percussive suspense rhythm in "End Title." Among the notable character themes introduced in Season Two are Hurley's array of affable ideas (led by the 2-note phrases of innocence in "Hurley's Handouts"), Eko's theme of pleasant, extremely slow piano and strings in "All's Forgiven... Except Charlie," and Rose and Bernard's similar theme of arguably redundant style in "Rose and Bernard."
Rising above the rest of the character-specific ideas for Season Two is Desmond's theme, a strikingly dramatic string melody that is a highlight of the year. Unfortunately, its limiting to a fragment in "Bon Voyage, Traitor" (compared to capitulations in later years) is a major detriment to this product. Due to the length of the third season, Varèse Sarabande offered a 2-CD set of music from that year, and it fares a bit better than the previous entry despite a number of considerable flaws. First, Season Three opens with a couple of truly terrible tracks, and subsequent cues like "Storming Monster," with its choppy strings, stingers, and dissonant undertones, are impossible to enjoy. Additionally, the second CD simply cannot maintain interest due to too much lengthy absence of volume, including a substantial amount of filler music in the eight tracks from the episode "Greatest Hits." Only three new themes are heard in this year, all of them for central characters. The highlight among them belongs to Juliet, with a statement at the end of "Ocean's Apart" not to be missed. Less interesting are the new identities for Jack and Ben, the latter containing ominous chord progressions masked in a pretty piano package and taken through several emotional variants in "Dharmacide." Joining these ideas on the superior first CD of the Season Three set are reprises of Eko's theme ("Church of Eko's" and "Leggo My Eko"), Kate's theme (the Herrmann sensibilities return in "Under the Knife"), Desmond's theme (finally expressed fully in "Distraught Desmond"), and Hurley's various lighter identities, heard in "The Lone Hugo" in the same piano form and receiving much album time thereafter. More interesting is a continuation of the Life and Death theme at the end of "Here Today, Gone to Maui," development of a theme for the island (a slow five note rhythmic figure under a broad four note brass motif that seems inspired by James Horner), and a sort of action theme for the Others that is a forcefully ominous, nasty chopping and brass series of bursts in the remarkable "Rushin' the Russian." The second, weaker CD of music in the Season Three set distracts with familiar suspense and action motifs in the "Paddle Jumper" tracks. The only true highlights of this CD are the Life and Death theme's statement in "Ta-Ta Charlie," a Hurley theme in "Hurley's Helping Hand," and some substantial usage of the Traveling theme in "The Good Shepherd," "An Other Dark Agenda," "The Only Pebble in the Jungle," and "Jack FM." Thankfully, the absence of a significant number of highlights from either the Season Two or Season Three products is compensated for by a much more engaging Season Four album.
Despite its return to a single CD form (in conjunction with a much shorter season for the show), the Season Four album was easily the best product of the first four to be released. It has fantastic individual highlights such as the "C4-Titude" cue (a powerhouse with the main theme joined with the new Freighter theme) and a sense of cohesive flow in the action cue of "There's No Place Like Home," a trait not really exhibited thus far by the more rowdy selections. Of the four new themes introduced in this year, two of them make a significant impact. The most lasting impression is made by the Oceanic Six theme, which accompanies a return to civilization with an easily digestible identity that would be reprised commonly by Giacchino in the later seasons. It's a rather obvious reference to John Barry's broad strokes of dramatic strings and lots of flowing counterpoint with the trombones (finally!) in a supporting role. Not surprisingly, it's often paired with the Life and Death theme, and from its tortured, agonizing development in "Of Mice and Ben," it steals the show in its major performance in "Landing Party." The other dominant new identity in Season Four belongs to the Freighter theme. Figuring heavily in the "There's No Place Like Home" episodes and in the cues "Time and Time Again" and (at the end of) "Locke-About," this large-scale new idea features five muscular notes from ominous brass in fanfare mode. It's a shame that the musical idea was as short-lived as the role of the freighter itself. Also beginning in this season is the rollout of the alternate character themes, including a "flashforward" identity for Hurley that is expressed with slow, somber strings in "Giving Up the Ghost" (a cue unfortunately interrupted by dissonant crescendo of suspense). Returning themes of notable impact in Season Four include the Life and Death theme reprised nicely in "Locke'ing Horns" and "Ji Yeon," Desmond's theme finally fleshed out in full in "The Constant" and "Lying for the Island," the Traveling theme churning full blooded action propulsion in "Timecrunch," and the dreaded continuation of the Revelation motif to end the album in "Hoffs-Drawlar." The scores for the Fifth Season of "Lost" are good, and they well represent part of a general maturation of Giacchino's ideas as a whole, but they're not as strong as those for Season Four or Season Six. The opening tracks on the corresponding single-CD album highlight bass string variations on existing themes ("Making Up For Lost Time," "The Swinging Bendulum," and "Locke's Excellent Adventure"), and the material for Locke understandably receives significantly weightier exploration in subsequent cues. A fresh love theme in "La Fleur" and "Sawyer Jones and the Temple of Boom" returns to softer romantic elements from earlier in the series.
The Fifth Season cue "Follow the Leader" is a point of interest as it expertly juggles more than half a dozen themes; such quick maneuvers would become more common in Season Six. The action core of the latter half of the season conveys more impressive muscularity, eventually merged very effectively with the Juliet and Life and Death themes in "The Incident." Of the four new themes in Season Five, only one is truly important to the rest of the series. This identity for the protector of the island, Jacob, is a heavily downbeat, extremely slow waltz-like theme for strings that initially lacks much gravity. Fuller renditions in "Blessings and Bombs" yield to diluted performances in "Jacobs Stabber." A Destiny theme is also new, employed as a harmonic momentum builder in "Sawyer Jones and the Temple of Boom." The Oceanic Six theme and main theme are the notable veterans on the album, the former given full treatment at the end of "Together or Not Together" and the latter really worked well into the action and suspense material in "Crash and Yearn" before its three-note phrases are twisted around in "Jacks Swan Song" and "Dharma vs. Lostaways." The Sixth Season is where Giacchino really starts intertwining the themes with expert detail, with several tracks parading out ideas (or merging them) at will. The overall package of many of the cues became more listenable on album in this final year as well, leading to the understandable emphasis by Varèse Sarabande on expanding upon their offering of "Lost" albums to take advantage of not only this increase of superior music but also the height of interest still lingering from the show's finale in 2010. A double CD set of music from Season Six originally perturbed fans by excluding music from the final handful of episodes, though it was widely guessed that the label made this move with the understanding that a selection of music from the last four episodes would occupy its own set to be released later the same year. That second product for Season Six, titled "The Last Episodes," was released as part of Varèse's series of limited pressings of current releases, though thankfully at a quantity of 5,000 albums instead of the customary 1,000. The first, unlimited set of music representing Season Six stands well even without the emotional tour-de-force that closes out "The Last Episodes." While intriguing to devoted "Lost" followers, the influx of alternate character themes do begin to muddy the waters, despite the fact that the concentration on narrowing down the original character themes (as heard in "Temple and Spring") appropriately mirrors the narrowing of candidates to replace the protector of the island in the plot. One fleeting hint of the lighter percussive tone of early seasons closes out such material in "Door Jammer."
Giacchino didn't stop producing new themes in the Sixth Season, in fact introducing eight new ideas, some of which spectacular. The villainous Man in Black theme is about as treacherous as these scores get, reportedly derived from the Sarasangi scale of South Indian classical music and consisting of eight notes from deep in the piano's lowest registers. It clearly steps forth at the start of "Jacob's Ladders" and "The Substitute," takes command late in "Catch a Falling Star," and is reprised on the second CD with bass strings in "Dead Man Talking." Also to be reckoned with is the new theme for the Temple, its prickly, plucked minor third rhythm introduced in "Coffin Calamity" and "Lie Thou There" before the full melody explodes in "Death Springs Eternal" and "The Rockets' Red Glare." This theme is also reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark (mainly the Ark material) and is joined with the Life and Death theme in "Death Springs Eternal" and mingles with Jacob's established theme in "Sundown." A purgatory theme to summarize the sideways movements in the plot is developed beautifully on piano/violins throughout the "LA X" episodes. An alternate theme for Locke and his physical redemption features great cello solos in "Helen of Joy." On the second CD of the initial Season Six set is another intoxicating new theme that reminds of Giacchino's Vulcan theme, representing Richard, introduced in "None the Richard" and used frequently to great effect in the "Ab Aeterno" episode. Among the returning identities in Season Six, none is as important as Jacob's theme. Hints of it appear at start of "Doing Jacob's Work" and a fuller, even slower version in "Trouble is My First Name" eventually builds to a grandiose performance in the very engaging "The Lighthouse." The main theme is given a twist of Jerry Goldsmith's The Twilight Zone style in "A Sunken Feeling" and finally espouses cautious but flighty optimism in "Sunny Outlook." The Oceanic Six theme returns longingly in latter half of "Karma Has No Price." Juliet's lovely theme has a faint reprise in first half of "Smokey and the Bandits." Desmond's theme, along with his alternate motif, grace "None the Nurse" and "Happily Ever After." Hurley's various initial identities receive a rare reprise among alternate material in "Hugo Reyes of Light" and "A Memorable Kiss." A recurring element not heard often on the albums is Giacchino's adaptation of the 1957 song "Catch a Falling Star," though this recurring theme for Claire experiences an eerie vocal version here. In general, the second CD in this set opens with two cues from the episode "Recon" that skirt unsatisfactorily between lesser motifs, but the cues "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and especially "Jacob's Advocate" alternate well between the scores' better themes (Jacob, Richard, Man in Black, etc).
The final two tracks on the second CD representing the first half of Season Six are bonus previews of material from "The End," all of which redundant if you own the seventh and final album offering. On that product, a significant amount of music from that finale occupies the second CD alone while the three previous episodes each receive lengthy treatment on the first CD. The action music in the episode "The Candidate" is generally too skittish and switches too fast between themes and motifs to function well on album, whereas "Across the Sea" presents the most compelling new theme of these last episodes. The episode "What They Died For" is more cohesive in its rotation between major themes in light drama mode. The first CD ends well, with "Get Out of Jail Free Card" a very engaging, aggressively rhythmic combination of the Desmond and Hurley themes (though a percussive shaker mixed too much in the forefront at the climax is distracting). The application of the trombones to the three-note monster motif on this CD is especially intense, too. Highlighting the thematic usage from these three episodes is the aforementioned addition of a new identity for the Mother and, alternatively, the Light. This elusive, uneasy, slightly sinister but enticing string theme is introduced in "Across the Sea" but flourishes in its full ensemble performance in "Don't Look at the Light." Used throughout the rest of the "Across the Sea" episode, it often mingles with the Jacob and Man in Black themes as expected. Jacob's returning theme is subjected to rather a drab sense of resignation in "Walk and Talk and Aah!" before achieving some hope through its new meaning in "Jack's Cup Runneth Over." Also challenged at this point is the main theme, which likewise suffers from some exhaustion. Among the many alternate character themes in the Sixth Season, the one for Locke continues to stand out, delicately plucked in "Flew the Coup" before returning to its prior beauty on cello solo. The music from "The End" on the second CD in the final set is dominated early by pleasant alternate reality themes, meant by Giacchino as sentimental closure for the majority of the characters. Individual character themes often overlap to reach their final forms, both in drama and action environments, and some of these interactions become outwardly melodramatic in their harmonic expressions. There is no doubt that Giacchino was going for the tear jerking effect in these cues, and he is mostly successful. The "Parallelocam" montage consists of a bittersweet but undeniably attractive variation on Life and Death theme. The cue "The Long Kiss Goodbye" is alone a spectacle of rotating ideas, followed by "The Hole Shabang" in Giacchino's best adventure mode of the entire series (it's a fantastic action finale and resolution cue, presented in full here as opposed to a slightly abridged version on the previous Season Six set).
As one could predict, Giacchino sends off the audience with one last reminder of potentially lingering dark forces at the end of "Aloha." Some might consider this something of a cliche, but it's one of those irresistible moves by any screenwriter and composer. The trio of cues from "Closure" to "Moving On" was meant to be the emotional core of the show's final twenty minutes, though while the cues are basically effective, he really tones back the depth of his contribution in these important moments. Compared to cues earlier in this episode, "Closure" underdelivers in its somber character interactions. Likewise, "Moving On," which appropriately reverts to the Life and Death and main themes, clearly tries to capture the same heart in its piano solos as the famous score for Up, but the same level of touching sadness is not achieved because of the extremely slow tempi and a return to the use of frequent pauses to try to denote finality. The listening experience is a bit jolted at the very end by the bonus inclusion of the rock and piano rendition of the Rescue theme from the First Season that was earlier performed as source material on screen. To his credit, Giacchino never stopped creating new themes all the way up to the final episodes, and his last new identity was provided in the form of the Heart theme. Introduced in "The Well of Holes" and integrated often thereafter, it's even more tragic than usual for the dramatic themes from "Lost." Receiving more development is the Mother/Light theme, heard over percussive rhythms in "The Well of Holes" and "Pulling Out All the Stops." Notable final tributes to existing themes exist for the assertive Traveling theme (with sudden reminders of its Williams mannerisms at the ends of "The Stick With Me Speech" and "Fly by Dire"), Juliet's great theme (with full expression of the pain of remembrance in "We Can Go Dutch"), the Oceanic Six theme (tenderly accompanying the memories in "Jumping Jack's Flash"), and the main theme, which receives a great harmonious statement of redemption in "Aloha" before finally resolving lingering issues in subsequent tracks. For enthusiasts of the show, the second CD in this final set will be a heartbreaking highlight of the entire series, allowing Giacchino to finally convey his themes in the flowing context of longer cues (which translate into the longest tracks of any of the album releases as well). In the end, there are two general ways of looking at Giacchino's music for "Lost" from the point of view of a consumer exploring all the album releases. First, you have the devoted fans of the show versus those who appreciate the composer's film music but have no interest in "Lost." For the former group of "Losties," there is no doubt an advantage to knowing the action on screen so that you can fully grasp where and how Giacchino is applying his thematic identities.
Conversely, for a non-fan of the "Lost" concept, Giacchino's themes will tend to bleed together after a while, a circumstance exacerbated by the limited instrumentation employed. The albums are well arranged to address the major needs for enthusiasts of the show, especially in Season Six. Don't be surprised, however, if the other crowd finds the majority of the music on these albums to be less than stellar. There is indeed quite a bit of obnoxious suspense material to be heard, especially in earlier seasons, and the lack of any true dominance of the main theme or Life and Death theme (not to mention Abrams' terrible main title and a boring end title from Giacchino) with which to identify the whole series under one easily recognizable (or catchy) idea is a major detriment. Also a lingering problem for casual listeners will be Giacchino's continued reliance on emulating other composers. Granted, the John Williams references aren't as blatant here as they are in the original "Medal of Honor" video game score (sidenote: Giacchino does pull his submarine theme from that concept for a few cameos in "Lost"), but they, along with the Herrmann and Barry influences, will distract some film score collectors. The second way of looking at the album situation for "Lost" is to simply compare each product as a standalone listening experience, regardless of your interest in the show. Not until Season Six do you hear any hint of the source songs employed throughout the series, so they're not really a factor. Giacchino never shook his addiction to ridiculous cue titles throughout the years, either, endearing at the start but irritatingly silly by the end (seriously, as mentioned in other reviews, the composer needs to spend more time worrying about the music and less time being linguistically clever). In terms of quality album presentations, disregard Season Two immediately. Start your "Lost" album collection with the two Season Six sets and especially the more cost effective Season Four album. Season One is a generally safe bet, followed by Season Three and then Season Five. In comparison to Bear McCreary's similar coordination efforts for "Battlestar Galactica," Giacchino's music is more technically adept and arguably superior in its highlights. But if you were to make a compilation of the best listening experiences from both series, don't be surprised if "Battlestar Galactica" makes for a more consistent and palatable presentation. That said, Giacchino's achievement for "Lost" is more impressive from a neutral standpoint because he restricted himself to a very confined set of instruments with which to operate. Ultimately, these products are all squarely aimed at concept fans, and the wealth of albums available for both series just begs for "best of" compilations to someday be pressed, much like the highlights from Christopher Franke's "Babylon 5" once served a much wider audience than its episodic CDs. In the case of "Lost," let the Season Four album serve as your first taste of one of the most outstanding overall achievements in the history of television music. @Amazon.com: CD or Download
Music as Written for the Series: *****
Music as Heard on the Seasons Four and Six Albums: ****
Music as Heard on the Seasons One, Three, and Five Albums: ***
Music as Heard on the Season Two Album: **
Overall: ****
Bias Check: For Michael Giacchino reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.48 (in 35 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.24 (in 17,673 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars. Amongst the establishment of the two most significant themes in the first season of "Lost" (the main theme and "Life and Death"), Giacchino introduces some worthy supporting ideas. The foremost of these is the Traveling theme, a jaunty tribute to vintage John Williams on aggressive strings that almost resembles the seldom referenced Nazi motif from; it is summarized on the first album in the latter half of "Hollywood and Vines." The Rescue theme that brings the season to a close is a heartfelt, yearning, and dramatic string idea in "Parting Words" that would eventually be referenced in an unusual way later in the series; it's possible that this one cue led to the fantastic awards and popular reception that this season's music received. Important to the album's presentation is the Revelation motif, a stinger consisting of a trombone glissando that closes out "Locke'd Out Again" and "Life and Death" consecutively, as well as "Oceanic 815" at the end of the product. It's a basically effective but truly obnoxious tool of suspense that frankly ruins some of the album's best dramatic music. The series kicks off its multitude of individual character themes almost immediately, and in Season One, two of them for vital characters stand out. First is Locke's theme, a rising figure dominated by low strings that also foreshadows Giacchino's later Vulcan theme. More shameful is the extreme Bernard Herrmann/rip-off for "Kate's Motel." Obviously, by the composer's usual playful track title, he acknowledges the inspiration, though it seems a bit out of place for the Kate character in relation to the other, less awkwardly different thematic representations in the series. That said, Giacchino executes the Herrmann technique quite well. Fortunately, the Season One album proved to be much more coherent than the Season Two follow-up, arguably the weakest entry in the entire series. Although Giacchino continues to use his previously established themes from the first season in his second year of writing for the concept, not much satisfying development of the primary ideas is exhibited on the Season Two album. One major exception is a reprise of the Rescue theme heard in full in "The Gathering." Otherwise, plenty of unremarkable cues plague this product, including the (literally) minutes of subtle harp plucking in "The Hunt" and, as mentioned before, the percussive suspense rhythm in "End Title." Among the notable character themes introduced in Season Two are Hurley's array of affable ideas (led by the 2-note phrases of innocence in "Hurley's Handouts"), Eko's theme of pleasant, extremely slow piano and strings in "All's Forgiven... Except Charlie," and Rose and Bernard's similar theme of arguably redundant style in "Rose and Bernard."Rising above the rest of the character-specific ideas for Season Two is Desmond's theme, a strikingly dramatic string melody that is a highlight of the year. Unfortunately, its limiting to a fragment in "Bon Voyage, Traitor" (compared to capitulations in later years) is a major detriment to this product. Due to the length of the third season, Varèse Sarabande offered a 2-CD set of music from that year, and it fares a bit better than the previous entry despite a number of considerable flaws. First, Season Three opens with a couple of truly terrible tracks, and subsequent cues like "Storming Monster," with its choppy strings, stingers, and dissonant undertones, are impossible to enjoy. Additionally, the second CD simply cannot maintain interest due to too much lengthy absence of volume, including a substantial amount of filler music in the eight tracks from the episode "Greatest Hits." Only three new themes are heard in this year, all of them for central characters. The highlight among them belongs to Juliet, with a statement at the end of "Ocean's Apart" not to be missed. Less interesting are the new identities for Jack and Ben, the latter containing ominous chord progressions masked in a pretty piano package and taken through several emotional variants in "Dharmacide." Joining these ideas on the superior first CD of the Season Three set are reprises of Eko's theme ("Church of Eko's" and "Leggo My Eko"), Kate's theme (the Herrmann sensibilities return in "Under the Knife"), Desmond's theme (finally expressed fully in "Distraught Desmond"), and Hurley's various lighter identities, heard in "The Lone Hugo" in the same piano form and receiving much album time thereafter. More interesting is a continuation of the Life and Death theme at the end of "Here Today, Gone to Maui," development of a theme for the island (a slow five note rhythmic figure under a broad four note brass motif that seems inspired by James Horner), and a sort of action theme for the Others that is a forcefully ominous, nasty chopping and brass series of bursts in the remarkable "Rushin' the Russian." The second, weaker CD of music in the Season Three set distracts with familiar suspense and action motifs in the "Paddle Jumper" tracks. The only true highlights of this CD are the Life and Death theme's statement in "Ta-Ta Charlie," a Hurley theme in "Hurley's Helping Hand," and some substantial usage of the Traveling theme in "The Good Shepherd," "An Other Dark Agenda," "The Only Pebble in the Jungle," and "Jack FM." Thankfully, the absence of a significant number of highlights from either the Season Two or Season Three products is compensated for by a much more engaging Season Four album.Despite its return to a single CD form (in conjunction with a much shorter season for the show), the Season Four album was easily the best product of the first four to be released. It has fantastic individual highlights such as the "C4-Titude" cue (a powerhouse with the main theme joined with the new Freighter theme) and a sense of cohesive flow in the action cue of "There's No Place Like Home," a trait not really exhibited thus far by the more rowdy selections. Of the four new themes introduced in this year, two of them make a significant impact. The most lasting impression is made by the Oceanic Six theme, which accompanies a return to civilization with an easily digestible identity that would be reprised commonly by Giacchino in the later seasons. It's a rather obvious reference to John Barry's broad strokes of dramatic strings and lots of flowing counterpoint with the trombones (finally!) in a supporting role. Not surprisingly, it's often paired with the Life and Death theme, and from its tortured, agonizing development in "Of Mice and Ben," it steals the show in its major performance in "Landing Party." The other dominant new identity in Season Four belongs to the Freighter theme. Figuring heavily in the "There's No Place Like Home" episodes and in the cues "Time and Time Again" and (at the end of) "Locke-About," this large-scale new idea features five muscular notes from ominous brass in fanfare mode. It's a shame that the musical idea was as short-lived as the role of the freighter itself. Also beginning in this season is the rollout of the alternate character themes, including a "flashforward" identity for Hurley that is expressed with slow, somber strings in "Giving Up the Ghost" (a cue unfortunately interrupted by dissonant crescendo of suspense). Returning themes of notable impact in Season Four include the Life and Death theme reprised nicely in "Locke'ing Horns" and "Ji Yeon," Desmond's theme finally fleshed out in full in "The Constant" and "Lying for the Island," the Traveling theme churning full blooded action propulsion in "Timecrunch," and the dreaded continuation of the Revelation motif to end the album in "Hoffs-Drawlar." The scores for the Fifth Season of "Lost" are good, and they well represent part of a general maturation of Giacchino's ideas as a whole, but they're not as strong as those for Season Four or Season Six. The opening tracks on the corresponding single-CD album highlight bass string variations on existing themes ("Making Up For Lost Time," "The Swinging Bendulum," and "Locke's Excellent Adventure"), and the material for Locke understandably receives significantly weightier exploration in subsequent cues. A fresh love theme in "La Fleur" and "Sawyer Jones and the Temple of Boom" returns to softer romantic elements from earlier in the series.The Fifth Season cue "Follow the Leader" is a point of interest as it expertly juggles more than half a dozen themes; such quick maneuvers would become more common in Season Six. The action core of the latter half of the season conveys more impressive muscularity, eventually merged very effectively with the Juliet and Life and Death themes in "The Incident." Of the four new themes in Season Five, only one is truly important to the rest of the series. This identity for the protector of the island, Jacob, is a heavily downbeat, extremely slow waltz-like theme for strings that initially lacks much gravity. Fuller renditions in "Blessings and Bombs" yield to diluted performances in "Jacobs Stabber." A Destiny theme is |
VEGAS >> The nearly three-hour drive left Tarik Black with plenty of time both to count his blessings and future riches. Unlike the countless tourists that trek from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Black did not need to spend that time envisioning a hefty pay-day at the casino.
Black already took care of that by agreeing to a two-year, $13 million deal last week with the Lakers. The third-year NBA forward then joined the countless Lakers fans that drove to Sin City to watch the Lakers’ summer league team on Monday against Golden State at the Thomas & Mack Center.
As much as he waxed nostalgia about being part of the Lakers’ young role, however, Black maintained a stronger influence convinced him to etch his future with a purple and gold pen. Black spoke with Lakers coach Luke Walton to “solidify” an issue that would determine his future.
“‘I don’t ask to be given anything. I just ask for a fair shot,’” Black recalled of the conversation. “‘If I earn something, give it to me.’”
Black cemented “a relationship that had already been good” with Walton, who had been an assistant coach with the University of Memphis when Black played for the Tigers during the 2011 NBA lockout. Since then, Black said “we always kept in touch.”
So when he brought up his concerns, Black said that Walton told him: “‘I respect that, appreciate that and will honor that.’”
Black then agreed to the deal, which includes a team option on his second season.
Black hardly had the same relationship with Lakers coach Byron Scott. Black averaged 3.4 points and 4.0 rebounds in 12.7 minutes through 39 appearances, something Scott attributed toward his belief that Black lacked consistent hustle. Plenty both inside and outside Lakers believed otherwise.
“You can look at the negatives. You can look at the positives. I choose to look at the positives from every situation,” Black said about his diminished role last season. “The positives of that was it built my character.”
Black then expressed gratitude for a number of things. The undrafted rookie still wore a Lakers uniform. He was one of Kobe Bryant’s teammates during his 20th and final NBA season. And Black played in varying roles at power forward and center during his rare appearances.
“It taught me so much and prepared me to be the player I’m going to be moving forward,” Black said. “I definitely learned patience and perseverance. It’s tough mentally to still work hard in all situations. Throughout the season, I continued to work and always stayed competitive when I got on the floor.”
Black could still face some hurdles. He represents part of a loaded frontcourt that includes Julius Randle, Larry Nance Jr. and Luol Deng. Though Black is listed at 6-foot-9 at 250 pounds, he expressed confidence he could provide minutes at a center spot currently populated by Timofey Mozgov and rookie Ivica Zubac.
A frustrating season, however, left Black feeling more confident about his skills. An extended conversation with Walton left Black feeling more inspired about his role.
“I see a world of potential for myself,” Black said. “I can’t wait to get back in the gym and get back to work. It’s going to be a whole lot of fun.”
Black made the three-hour drive back to Los Angeles on Tuesday, leaving the Lakers’ forward excited about the road ahead.
Stop this
Second-year forward Anthony Brown conveyed his confidence in a matter-of-fact tone.
“I’m the best defender on the team, obviously,” Brown said.
As for his offense? Anthony felt “stuck in mud” the first two summer league games after not playing since an injury to his right foot that kept him sidelined since March. Brown has averaged 6 points on a 38.9 percent clip through three summer league games.
“Defensively, I’m feeling pretty good,” Brown said. “Offensively, I’m still getting used to being in a reactive state, moving and shifting guys.”Cholera Deaths Top 1,500 In Zimbabwe
UN MEDICAL SUPPLIES ARRIVE IN ZIMBABWE AS CHOLERA DEATHS TOP 1,500
New York, Dec 26 2008 12:10PM
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is providing local hospitals in Zimbabwe with critical medical supplies and money to treat pregnant women, amid a collapsing health system and the worst cholera outbreak in the sub-Saharan African country’s history which has now claimed over 1,500 lives.
Over the past week, UNFPA, in partnership with the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Welfare, has delivered emergency reproductive health kits, medicine and surgical supplies to the maternity care units of Zimbabwe’s central hospitals – many of which are on the verge of collapse.
“The total consignment can meet the needs of a population of about 900,000 for at least three months,” UNFPA announced in a statement.
The agency has also handed out enough drugs to prevent pregnancy-related complications such as haemorrhaging and eclampsia throughout the country for the next six months, as well as pay incentives to maternity care medics, many of whom have gone without salaries and cannot report to work.
The moves are intended to throw a life-line to maternity units suffering from severe shortages of staff and supplies that have put the lives of thousands of pregnant women at risk.
The Government has declared the cholera outbreak a national emergency, but the healthcare situation remains dire – with many families unable to afford treatment – and may worsen during the current rainy season.
As of 25 December, 1,518 people have died from cholera and another 26,497 cases are suspected, according to the UN World Health Organization (WHO).
Large numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs), ex-farm workers and the poor have lost their livelihoods, leaving them cut off from basic social and healthcare services and dependent on humanitarian aid.
The HIV and AIDS pandemics are compounding the problem. UNFPA said that more than one million Zimbabweans – an estimated 15.6 per cent of the population – are living with those killer diseases. HIV prevention and access to safe delivery, including emergency obstetric care services, are critical to their survival.
During a ceremony to hand over emergency kits at Harare-based Parirenyatwa General Hospital, Zimbabwe’s largest hospital, Gift Malunga, UNFPA’s Assistant Representative there, urged the Government, donors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and others to urgently support medical staff.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has already flow in intravenous fluids, drip equipment, essential drugs, midwifery and obstetrics kits to boost the Government’s cholera response.
On 22 December, four independent UN human rights experts called on Zimbabwe’s Government and the international community to do more to rebuild the country’s health system, end the cholera epidemic and ensure adequate food for all people.
Dec 26 2008 12:10PM
© Scoop MediaJosé Aldo Rebelo Figueiredo (born 23 February 1956 in Viçosa) is a Brazilian politician, member of the Solidariedade (SD) and a federal deputy elected by the state of São Paulo. He was President of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil from 2005 to 2007.
With President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Venezuela and Vice President José Alencar undergoing medical tests in the United States, Rebelo became the first communist to assume the duties of acting president of Brazil on November 12, 2006. His brief period in office lapsed the next day upon Lula's return.[1]
He was the main author of a controversial project to change Brazil's Forest Code introduced in the 1960s. Those changes, lobbied by Brazilian farmers, aimed to extend the areas that can be legally deforested. Although President Rousseff vetoed some parts of the law drafted under Rebelo’s leadership and finally passed in May 2012, critics such as the WWF saw the law as a catastrophe for the Amazon forest.[2][3]
Rebelo was the Minister of Sports from 27 October 2011 until 1 January 2015. He was the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation from 1 January 2015 to 1 October 2015.[4] He was the Minister of Defense in the cabinet of President Dilma Rousseff from 1 October 2015 to 12 May 2016, when he was replaced by the acting president Michel Temer.[5] He left the Communist Party in August, but then joined the Brazilian Socialist Party in September[6]
References [ edit ]Altuve won a batting title, led the AL in steals and belted 47 doubles, second most in the league. Stacy Revere/Getty Images
Editor's Note: Offense might be at its lowest point in nearly 35 years, but a small subset of hitters continues to thrive. They've achieved solid results and, in some cases, have even improved their numbers. In an era of pitching dominance, what could other hitters learn from their offensive excellence? We focus on four exemplary hitters -- Jose Abreu, Jose Altuve, Victor Martinez and Andrew McCutchen -- as they talk about their successful approaches at the plate.
In this Q&A, Jayson Stark talks with Altuve, the Houston Astros' All-Star second baseman.
What's your daily routine as a hitter?
I come to the ballpark around 6:30 a.m., sometimes before, every morning. I get my breakfast. I go to the gym, just to prepare my body for the day. I do a little warm-up there, some abs or something that gets me ready to swing the bat. Then I go straight to the cage.
That's the right time to worry about my mechanics, my swing and where I want to hit the ball, what spot I want the ball thrown. I spend a little bit of time there, then I come back to the gym and do my normal workout for another hour. Then we go out to practice, and I take my BP.
In spring training, I just try to spread everything out so I can be 100 percent before the season starts. I don't want to start feeling like I don't get it once the season starts. I want to be 100 percent on Opening Day. And after BP's done, I come back inside, take lunch. Then I go back to the cage to get ready for the game.
During the season, it's a little different. You can't go to the cage and do 1,000 swings and then come back and do another 500, because everybody knows that it's a long season. So what I do is pretty much the same. I go to the gym first. Warm up. Then I go to the cage. But I spend half of the time there that I spend in spring training.
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES By cutting down on his strikeouts and hitting for more power, Altuve had a breakout season in 2014. He became the first Astros player to win a batting crown and led the majors in hits, with 225. 2013 2014 AVG.283.341 OBP.316.377 SLG.363.453 DOUBLES 31 47 STRIKEOUTS 85 53
In spring training, I'm trying to get ready. During the season, I just try to maintain what I'm doing. So I go to the cage. [Hit a] couple balls away, [then a] couple balls inside. Try to swing easy, but execute every swing I make. Try to be perfect. Then I go take BP and try do the same -- get ready for the game and execute every ball I hit. I go to the cage about 20 minutes before the game, just to hit like 10 balls, but at game speed. I don't try to worry too much about mechanics. I just try to swing at the ball at game speed. So that way I can be ready to go in my first at-bat, and won't be like, 'Oh, I don't feel really good now.' I just go to the cage, take 10 to 15 swings at 100 percent, as hard as I can. That way, in my first at-bat, I'm ready.
Just to be clear: You don't really take 1,000 swings in the cage, do you?
Oh, no no no no no! That was just a number. I take a lot of swings, but it's actually probably between 60-100. Depends on the day. I go tee, then soft toss, then front toss, then side. And even at the end of the spring, I have to be smart. I know that I'm close to the season, so I try to save my swing a little bit and do more quality than quantity.
What do you think the key is to your swing being effective?
I don't think too much about mechanics. I just like to go up there and swing. It's more than my swing, though. It's my mindset. I always go to home plate with a plan. [I had] 660 at-bats last year, and at least 659 times I went to home plate with a plan.
So there was one time you didn't?
Maybe. I don't know. But every time I do that, I feel great. I think that's the most important thing. I know every single ballplayer in the big leagues has a plan when they go to the home plate. So that's what I do. And it's been working for me.
How do you mentally prepare to hit?
For me, that's the biggest part of the game. As soon as I wake up, I start thinking about today. It depends on who we're playing. I start thinking how I do against that team? If I hit the ball away good against that team, I start thinking, "OK, they might change a little bit. So let's think about new pitches. Let's adjust to what they're doing." And if they're throwing too many breaking balls to me and I've been hitting good, I'll say, "OK, maybe they're going to change." But if I'm not doing really good against breaking balls, as soon as I wake up, I say, "OK, I think that's it, they might throw it again." So you've got to show them you can hit the breaking ball....
It's a long process during the day. Then I go to the cage. Everything I do, every one of my swings, I'm thinking of the game already. I say, "OK, this is your first at-bat." Even in BP, sometimes I'll say to the hitting coach, "OK, this is what I'm going to do in my first at-bat." If I get a line drive, he's happy. If I roll over, he'll say, "Hey, hey, try to change that."
But everything I do, I'm trying to do 100 percent, trying to do it pretending I'm playing. I don't overthink it. But you have to think, "OK, they're doing this to you." That's part of your plan. That's part of what you're going to take to home plate. You can't take too many things in your head, like, "Oh no, he's going to throw a curveball or breaking ball." I'm going up there ready to swing. I try to just simplify all the information I have, try to be aware of breaking balls, but try to keep [to] my plan.
What's the biggest adjustment you've had to make as a major league hitter?
The biggest adjustment? I think it's to be consistent. I played good ball in the minor leagues, and that's why they called me up to the major leagues. But I made a lot of mistakes hitting. I missed too many balls right there that you need to hit, but then maybe you get another one. In the big leagues, if you see a fastball right in the middle and you miss it, it's almost like you are out already. So I'm trying to learn to be consistent. If they throw you a fastball and you hit it good, then if they throw you a fastball again next at-bat, you've got to hit it, too. Be consistent, every day. At-bat by at-bat. Day by day. And that's how you become a consistent player....
It's not all about mechanics. If you think too much about mechanics, that's going to blow your mind up a little bit. I'm more like, "OK, just try to hit the ball this way, try to look for this pitch and just swing the bat." I don't think too much, like, "Don't go around. Don't do this." No. I just swing the bat. Have a plan. Look for one pitch.
I mean, every single ballplayer, they switch the pitch, like mixing up the pitch. So sometimes you're going to look for breaking balls. Sometimes you're going to look for change-ups. Sometimes you're going to look for a fastball. But if you look for something, just try to keep with that. Like if you're looking for a fastball and they throw you a curveball, just let it go. You've got another pitch. That's what I mean by being consistent. That's what it means for me, to be consistent and have a plan.
When you're in a slump, what typically is the cause of the slump?
For me, slumps are something... in your mind. The pitchers might be doing the same things that they've been doing all year to you. But you are doing something different. It's a long season. That's going to happen.
I haven't met anybody who gets a base hit every single day. It's too hard. So you can be in a short slump, a long slump, a regular slump. But you've got to be smart and see what you're doing. If you're hitting the ball in front, in front, in front, just give yourself one at-bat and try to stay back, and try to make an out but different from what you're doing.
"I don't think too much about mechanics. I just like to go up there and swing. It's more than my swing, though. It's my mindset. I always go to home plate with a plan. [I had] 660 at-bats last year, and at least 659 times I went to home plate with a plan." Jose Altuve
If I'm hitting too many ground balls to shortstop, what I do is, my first at-bat, say, "OK, I'm going to be an out, but I'm going to be an out the other way." And maybe, in that at-bat, I'm going to get a hit. Then, OK, you start getting the feeling. And that's how you come back.
Something that helps me a lot, too, is my speed. Sometimes I'm not hitting the ball well, but I hit a high chopper or a ground ball between third and shortstop, sometimes in the hole, and there's not going to be a chance to throw me out at first. That helps me, because a slump is more in your mind than in your body. So when I'm not doing really good, I tell myself, "OK, let's put the ball in play." I get a high chopper. I get a ground ball to shortstop. I'm safe at first base. And I'm like, "OK, I'm back."
I think I led the league in infield hits last year. So that's a big part of my game. And that's not something that everybody can do. Like Miggy, Miguel Cabrera. If Miguel Cabrera hits a ground ball in the hole, he's going to be out at first base. And that's why I give him more credit, because he hits so much for average that he has to hit almost every ball hard. He has to hit the ball outside the infield for it to be a base hit. I don't have to do that. I don't need to do that. I can get a ground ball in the shortstop hole, and I'm going to be safe. So I really admire those guys who are not very fast and still hit.330,.340, like Miggy.
How much video do you watch, either of yourself or the pitchers?
Not too much, because when I see videos, I think, "What am I doing with my life? I'm standing too close to the [plate]. I'm trying to go back." I don't [watch] pitchers too much because we are human beings. So I might see a video of Justin Verlander, and see that he threw a really good change-up that day. But let's say the next time, against the Astros, he doesn't feel good about his change-up, so he's going to change everything up. He's going to start to throw more curveballs and fastballs, and I've got the change-up on my mind and he never throws it. So that's why I don't see videos too much. I'm trying to keep my plan, keep what is working for me.
Do you watch videos of yourself when you're doing well?
I don't do that. The only thing I watch is how close [to the plate] I am in the box. You know, sometimes I get too close. And I think the fastball in the middle is inside. And the fastball in, I just take it, and they call it a strike. So I've got to watch the video when I'm hitting pretty good, just to see, "Where is my step to the home plate?"
How much do you use scouting reports?
Not too much. But it just depends. Like I said, if they say that pitcher has a good slider, obviously... I start to see if the slider is working good that day and I start thinking about it. But it just depends on the day. I try to give [the pitcher] some pitches to see how he's doing. Then my second at-bat, I have a plan for where I want to hit the ball and what pitch I want to look for....
This year is going to be my fifth in the big leagues, so I'm pretty good at remembering pitchers. Most of the time, I know already what they throw. So I might need a little reminder. Or maybe if it's a new guy coming up from Triple-A. I go to the hitting coach and say, "Hey, do you know what he throws?" I think that's very important.
What is the best hitting advice you ever got? Who gave it to you, and when?
I'm pretty close to Miguel Cabrera. We are such different hitters, but at the same time we're pretty close, because we both like to hit the ball middle-away. Everybody knows he's the best in baseball, better than everybody else. No disrespect for anybody, but he does everything really good. So if it works for him, it works for somebody else.
He told me one day to hit the ball up the middle, and middle-away. And he said, "Just react," and I think that helped me a lot. I think that was the first time we played each other, in 2013 in Houston.
I'm very open to advice. Another guy who I talk to a lot is Adrian Beltre. We play the Texas Rangers a lot so I always ask him something. And he tells me what I'm doing. Last year, even when I had a good year, there was one time during the season when I wasn't hitting the ball very good. And he came to me and said, "Just let the ball travel and do what you know how to do. Like hit the ball up the middle." That was like a reminder of Miggy's advice. And after that, after [Beltre] said that, I started hitting the ball hard again and everything came back.
What individual stat means the most to you?
"Wins" was my first thought, because that's the most important stat in the game right now. But individual stat? I think if I say RBIs, that means you get runs and somebody has to score the runs. So I would say RBIs and runs scored. But for that, you need to get on base. So that's a hard question.... I think RBIs, because I've got so many good guys behind me, like George Springer, Chris Carter, Jason Castro. Now I have Evan Gattis, Colby Rasmus, Luis Valbuena. If they get a lot of RBIs, that's going to be a big part of our [success]. If I get on base and they don't drive me in, then there's no run scored and there's no RBI. So I think RBIs and runs scored, one of those two.
I think I know the answer, but who's your favorite hitter to watch?
Oh, Miggy. Ever since he got to the big leagues 11 or 12 years ago. He's just so good. He hits for average, for power, and there's not too many guys that can do that. He's a big guy with bat control. He hits [for] average. He hits line drives. He hits homers. He hits every pitch.Yesterday, amid a rally that pushed Bitcoin to all-time highs globally, the price of a single Bitcoin broke 1,000,000 yen. While Westerners eye the sensational $10,000 level, Japan has seen their biggest psychological price barrier shattered. This is fitting, since there’s reason to believe that Japan started the massive Bitcoin rally to begin with.
Granted, Bitcoin’s price has been steadily rising since the fall of 2016, but April’s news that Japan had formally recognized Bitcoin as a legal currency certainly helped propel the currency to new heights. By exempting the currency from an 8% consumption tax, Japan further increased citizens’ desire to own Bitcoin.
Increasing adoption, growing volumes
Bitcoin’s rising price has been attributed to increasing adoption and continuing integration into mainstream financial markets. In Japan, good news continues to come to the fore, with major conglomerates becoming involved with Bitcoin, and trading volume from shuttered Chinese exchanges coming to Japan’s markets due to favorable regulations.
In fact, China’s ban on Bitcoin exchanges pushed Japan to the forefront of the world’s Bitcoin markets. Beginning in September, and continuing to the present time, the majority of Bitcoin trading has been denominated in Japanese yen. At press time, the yen is responsible for an impressive 59.6% of all Bitcoin trades worldwide.
While China dominated the Bitcoin trade for years, it’s clear that the crown has passed to the island nation of Japan. What happens on Japanese markets has powerful ripple effects throughout the global Bitcoin economy. Japan’s continued bullishness, indicated by Bitcoin’s current price of 1,084,000 yen, makes an assault on the West’s $10,000 level nearly inevitable.I felt a profound sense of frustration when I read Saturday's Guardian account of another "police racism" allegation against the Metropolitan police. The circumstances of the case, in which an officer is apparently recorded racially abusing a man he's just arrested – are still the subject of investigation. But as someone who spent most of his adult life in policing, two issues are as plain as a pikestaff. First, yet again, there seems to have been an almost total absence of leadership and supervision of junior officers; second, the impact on "real" policing will be profound.
Last Thursday, in Tottenham, I gave the 2012 Bernie Grant Memorial Lecture. To an audience still shell-shocked by the damage to their homes and livelihoods wrought by the riots and failure of policing last August, my theme was the urgent need for the police, particularly in urban communities, to rediscover a service ethos that had been sacrificed on the altar of so-called management efficiency over the past 15 years. In any liberal democracy, policing must be by consent, and you lose that consent immediately if you alienate the community and treat them as the enemy.
Confrontational – yet frightened and defensive – officers are nowadays trained to see the public as a threat to their very existence. Preventive patrolling has been abandoned – notwithstanding the soothing and wholly false spin of the Met, which continually we still have "bobbies on the beat". Few such officers have been deployed for at least 10 years, and their barely visible replacement – comprised largely of police community support officers, are but a pale imitation of what people expect and deserve.
From Stephen Lawrence to Mark Duggan; from the kettling of peaceful protesters, to the riots of last year; from the manifest incompetence of the first phone-hacking inquiry to allegations of corruption at the Leveson inquiry – a path has been beaten towards the edge of a precipice, and it is time for those concerned about the vital role of policing to challenge what is happening.
In some respects we only have ourselves to blame. People too often accept what they are told by police leaders and politicians, and seldom demand policing be accountable at all times and at every level of interaction. Senior officers continually tell us policing is a complex, dangerous occupation, requiring an almost priest-like sense of vocation and superhuman courage. Hence the pseudo-military terminology applied to most activity, with reference to the "frontline", as if officers spent all their working hours in an environment comparable to the first world war trenches.
But what is missing from an environment where the police regard themselves almost as an army of occupation is any sense of community, any sense that they are part of us. This fundamental attitudinal change is a comparatively recent feature of policing and has undermined the trusted model of policing in our communities developed over many decades. Something has to change – and quickly.
For what is beyond doubt is that the people who suffer most at the hands of drug-dealers, knife crime and "gangsta" gunmen are those at the bottom of the social pyramid. Most are decent people who just want to work, bring up their children, and live their lives unmolested; yet they are regarded by the police as a dangerous underclass who can only be dealt with aggressively.
What incentive will there be for any black British mother on a sink estate to search out her local police to express concern about her son or his friends? Who can be surprised at any hard-working black member of our society taking the view that an organisation that allegedly views him or her as a "n****r" isn't worth their trust? I hope the Met commissioner has this incident at the top of his agenda as his management board meets on Monday.
• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfreeThe first results in a groundbreaking project to discover the real roots of Yorkshire are in and according to Alistair Moffat they might just rewrite history.
Yorkshire is different. More than an instinct, a boast from the terracing, or even a more measured cultural observation, Yorkshire is very definitely different. It’s official. DNA ancestry testing has proved it.
Since the Yorkshire’s DNA project began five weeks ago in partnership with the Yorkshire Post, we have tested more than 200 people. Preliminary results for 140 are about to be sent out and they show something remarkable and unambiguous. Yorkshire’s ancestral makeup is markedly different from the rest of Britain.
By far the largest Y chromosome lineage, what men pass on down the generations to their sons, is labelled R1b-S145 by geneticists. We have named it Pretani, the earliest recorded name for the British.
Across Britain, the Pretani is the dominant lineage present in just under a third of males. In Yorkshire it is not. In fact, it’s present in only 16 per cent of those tested so far. What this means is something fascinating, nothing less than an alternative history.
During the last ice age, Britain was a pitiless landscape, a place where nothing could live. When the ice melted and the weather began to warm around 9,600BC, those who had sheltered from the bitter winds and freezing temperatures for hundreds of generations left the sanctuary of ice age refuges in northern Spain and south west France and began to move north, probably in pursuit of migrating herds of reindeer.
The journey was so rapid that the cave painters’ habit of making figurative art soon arrived on the southern borders of Yorkshire. At Cresswell Crags, not far from Sheffield, archaeologists have found engravings of the outlines of animals on the rock walls.
The Pretani migrated north over many millennia, but while Celtic kings ruled in Elmet, the western Dales and in the Pennines as late as the 7th-century, their genetic legacy is not as strong as elsewhere in Britain.
Instead Yorkshire is dominated by the ancestry that has it roots across the North Sea. Groups we have called Germanic, Teutonic, Saxon, Alpine, Scandinavian and Norse Viking make up 52 per cent of Yorkshire’s Y chromosome, compared to 28 per cent across the whole of the rest of Britain.
Geology and politics can supply some answers to Yorkshire’s unique make-up. For about 4,000 years following the end of the last ice age, migrants could walk to Britain. Many who carried what are called Germanic, Teutonic, Saxon, Alpine and Scandinavian markers travelled to Yorkshire across a vast, low-lying, densely wooded landmass before the crust of the Earth eventually corrected and Doggerland finally sank beneath the waves around 4,000BC.
Later in the 5th-century AD, Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes and other Germanic peoples beached their boats on the shores of the decaying Roman province of Britannia. And still they came. Between the 9th and 11th-centuries, the kingdom of York became a political centre of the Danelaw, the eastern half of England that stretched in a diagonal from London to Chester, where so many settled that a separate set of laws and customs were installed in place of native English equivalents.
Over an immense span of time, many men from north-western Europe and southern Scandinavia settled in the hills and dales and now their Y chromosome lineages dominate.
But they do not tell the whole story. Yorkshire is also tremendously diverse. So far Yorkshire’s DNA has discovered 23 male lineages and some are very rare. One man carries a marker called Thracian that came from the shores of the Black Sea and another can trace his ancestors back to the Ural Mountains.
These results ask more questions than they answer, and the story of Yorkshire’s women appears to be equally fascinating. In Last of the Summer Wine, Clegg, Compo and Foggy lived in abject terror of women, Yorkshire women in particular and it turns out that the caricature might not be too wide of the mark.
The women of Yorkshire could claim that they do own the place. They have squatters’ rights – because most of them have been here for much longer than the men.
Women pass on mitochondrial DNA to their children but only their daughters can, in turn, pass it to their children. Men have it but it dies with them. What that means is that everyone so far tested in the Yorkshire’s DNA project has mtDNA and it can tell us a great deal about ancient ancestry.
A staggering 62 per cent of mtDNA lineages began to arrive in Yorkshire very early, as soon as the last ice age ended, some time around 9,600BC. And it seems that they came from the same direction, from the Iberian Peninsula and south-western France.
On either side of the Pyrenees were a series of natural caves, many of them occurring in steep-sided limestone gorges and they were the places where our species, in very small communities, overwintered the storms and plummeting temperatures of the ice age.
Many were close to the spring and autumn migration routes of herds of reindeer, wild horses and other prey animals. And where the way was narrow or the thundering herds needed to cross a river, the ancestors of most of Yorkshire’s women waited for the kill. One of the most famous prehistoric sites in Britain is at Starr Carr, not far from Scarborough, where the women of the ice age refuges probably fished in the now disappeared lake and made spear-points from antlers as they sat in the evening sun talking, telling stories, exchanging opinions and wondering about the future.
What is striking is the chronological gap between the arrivals of the male and female ancestors of the bulk of Yorkshire’s people. While many of the mtDNA lineages began to settle early, most of the dominant male lineages came later.
The overwhelmingly Germanic and Scandinavian origins of Yorkshire’s men probably means that they arrived after approximately 3,000BC, while many of the ancestors of women had been here for some time before that. But how did that happen? What became of the male partners of those original female pioneers? The answer lies in the soil.
The centuries either side of 3,000BC were a watershed in British history, a time of unprecedented change. From across the North Sea came new people and a revolutionary idea. Farming and its techniques changed utterly the way lives were lived because it altered food production radically.
Instead of depending entirely on a wild harvest of fruits, roots and berries or trapping birds and animals, communities began to plant crops and domesticate animals. This tied people to the land, fostered a new sense of ownership – and thanks to the invention of porridge caused the population to explode.
In the previous hunter-gatherer societies, infants were almost certainly breast fed for as long as four or five years. During that time mothers will have been unable to conceive. And since prehistoric people died younger, the hunter-gatherer population grew very slowly.
However, when the new farming communities began to mash cereals into a nourishing paste with water or the milk of goats, ewes or cows, this early baby food meant women breast fed for a much shorter period of time and could conceive for much longer.
As farming crossed the North Sea in the centuries around 3,000BC and men arrived with bags of seed corn and domesticated animals, they began to clear the land, lay out small fields and pens, and change the landscape utterly.
And because these farming communities grew very fast, the Y chromosome DNA of the first farmers, the men from northern Europe, also multiplied very fast and widely. Many will have taken native partners whose mtDNA survived to show up in the modern population.
It is this revolution in human society and the speed with which it spread that explains the dichotomy between Yorkshire’s male and female DNA markers.
However, our early testing has also shown that not all Yorkshire’s women got their hands dirty tilling the soil and milking the animals.
Two Yorkshire women (and there will be more) have so far been found to have Sheban DNA. The land of the Queen of Sheba lay on either side of the Red Sea and if the gold and other luxuries that she brought to the court of King Solomon are to be believed, it was a rich and fertile realm. Norah Batty and her battleship friends may not look as though the blood of the Queen of Sheba courses through their veins – but it just might.
As Yorkshire’s DNA continues to test, we will discover more and more about a place people thought they knew well.
A hidden history will come to light, one that |
optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.” Obama’s science czar John P. Holdren: From Ecoscience “It is easier to kill a million people rather than trying to control a million people… people are fighting back…our capacity to impose control over humanity is at an historical low…” Zbignew Brzezinsk
One percent of the population is sociopathic. Here are two clear markers for Sociopaths, discoverable in their behavior patterns: 1) Sociopaths have no conscience. Hence, 2) Sociopaths cannot feel guilt nor remorse, like ordinary people can.
These are evil people, very evil people. Superficially charming, they are selfish, greedy, unemphathetic, manipulative, and prone to violence and abuse. They steal, cheat, vandalize others property, swindle, and they are pathological liars. They are unconcerned with the feelings of other humans, who are mere objects to be used, and have little or no conscience
A recent book, authored by Martha Stout, in which the material came from released government documents CEO’s are three times more likely to be a sociopath than the general population. Politicians are four times more likely to be sociopathic than you and I. These are the people who seek power and once they obtain that power, the seek absolute power, much to detriment of the soon-to-be extinct members of human race.
What Is Humanity To Do?
If humanity is to preserve itself in its present form, it will be necessary to educate the masses as to the planned perils which lie ahead. The pro-human preservation movement needs bodies, billions and billions of bodies. Yet, the very victims of the coming planned genocide are dumbed down by various federal education programs and propagandized into a false sense of security by the mainstream media which is owned by six global elite corporations who also want you gone.
Judge a Man by What He Does, Not What He Says
As you attempt to educate your fellow man, you will, no doubt, be asked the question as to how the elite are attempting to accomplish their depopulation agenda. The true weapons of mass destruction include some of the following:
1. Aluminum based vaccines.
2. Chemtrails laced with barium and aluminum.
3. Fifty percent of “rushed to market” pharmaceuticals.
4. Hospitals are replete with virulent and deadly staff infections.
5. Cancer-causing GMO’s.
6. The hording of food.
7. The hording of water.
8. Unabated and deliberate exposure to Fukushima radiation.
9. The specter of World War III, complete with nuclear weapons, breaking out in Ukraine.
10. Democide (death by government) killed 260 million people in the 20th century and many feel that the globalists are just getting armed up.
11. The anesthetization of America through deliberately dumbing down of the citizens.
12. The United States, alone, has enough chemical, biological and nuclear weapons to destroy the world 100 times over.How Neil Gaiman Inadvertently Gave Me Some Great Advice On Polyamory
(NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 6.03% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)
When you go to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, you are given a challenge: write a story a week, for six weeks. This would be difficult under the best of circumstances, but Clarion is not the best of circumstances: your fellow students, all seventeen of them, are *also* attempting to write a story a week, and if they complete their story then you must read and critique it for them.
The problem is that your classmates are all brilliant.
Clarion’s a lot like Juilliard in that even getting admitted into the program means you have great skill, so everyone there is a helluva writer. And you could be excused for thinking that we were all in some reality show competition, trying to outwrite each other to devise ZOMG THE BEST STORY THAT WINS THIS WEEK.
…that didn’t really happen, though.
And when Neil Gaiman came for his week to teach us, he sent us off with words that summed up why this head-to-head conflict had never emerged.
“There’s eighteen of you,” he said, amazed, “And none of you are even fishing in the same pond.”
Which was true. I liked writing comic-booky melodramas, which I think I did pretty well when I wrote my books Flex and The Flux. But Kat Howard was far more influenced by Shakespeare and Tam Lin, and her precise prose sits quite at home in her upcoming novel Roses and Rot. And Monica Byrne had this madly vibrant mash of world cultures and sex-positive fucking which she distilled into The Girl In The Road.
What Neil was pointing out was how we all had different writing styles – and if we perfected them, we’d never be in competition with each other. What we’d have to say would be such a unique experience that we would be the only provider.
Now, it’s common to think that, say, STAR WARS is somehow in competition with THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION – and on some accountant’s balance sheet somewhere, yes, I suppose that’s true. But the real competition is “Can I tell a story that’s better than falling asleep in a warm bed on an autumn night? Can I tell a story that’s unique enough that you need to go back to it again and again?”
And if you tell the story that’s yours, and tell it right, people will make time to listen.
So many movies failed because they thought they were competing with STAR WARS, and they weren’t – they were competing with themselves to find something interesting that a thousand other movies weren’t already saying.
I can’t best Monica’s grasp of melting-pot cultures – and it’d be foolish for me to try, she travels to Iran and other foreign countries, that’s her strength. I can’t beat Kat’s grasp of poetry; she bathes in fine words on a daily basis, you can see her whole body light up when she fits the correct word into place.
But I can be me. I can unearth my quirky humor and my deep love of weird characters, and I can make something so uniquely a function of me that you can’t get anything like this anywhere else. Maybe you like Flex, maybe you don’t, but what’s there is unlike any other author.
And that’s the way polyamory works, too. You see people getting concerned about what their lovers’ lovers do – is he better in bed? Does she like more outdoorsy activities than I do? They’re smarter, they know more about politics, I don’t read the New York Times.
Like Neil said: none of you are even fishing in the same pond. Yes, what your lover often likes about their other paramours are qualities that you do not possess. This is standard. Your lovers are stocked full of you, in all your you-ness abundance; if they dated a partner who was exactly like you, that might be more of a problem, because apparently you weren’t providing enough of this you experience.
So yeah, they’ll find partners who do things that you don’t. But this isn’t a competition. You should not run out and start reading the Times or take up bodybuilding just to make sure you’re still in the game.
I know, because it’s scary sometimes for me to look at other writers with their novels and think They’ve got more PR, they got better blurbs, this person I like is a fan of theirs and they’re not a fan of me. I worry that somehow I sabotaged my own success by writing about donut psychology and videogamemancy instead of, I dunno, whatever the person I’m envious this week wrote.
That’s all the usual writer-insecurity burbling to the surface. Then I remember: if I do things right, their success will not crush my own. I’m my own damn unique voice, and I’ll appeal to different segments.
This is my pond, and I am learning to fish in it to appeal to the sorts of people who want someone like me. I won’t accomplish that by making clumsy attempts to be someone I’m not, nor will I accomplish that by looking over at the other ponds and moaning about how much bigger they are.
What you’ve got is you. In fact, all you’ve really got is you. So find what you like about yourself, and make more of that. And trust that people can like both what other people can provide and also you, in all your delightful youness.
There’s a lot of ponds. There’s a lot of possibilities in fiction, and in love, and in life.
You don’t have to be all of them. You just have to be something that’s not in the other ponds.Forest Gate man catches every Pokémon available in the world
Pokemon master Ahmed Ali with his phone Archant
A man from Newham has become one of the first people in the world to catch all 145 available Pokémon.
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Ahmed Ali, from Forest Gate, completed the mobile phone game just two weeks after it was released - and even travelled to the USA to catch one of the elusive critters.
The 23-year-old got into the game after he graduated with a degree in mathematics from Queen Mary University of London this summer.
“I have a lot of free time because I start work in September. A lot of my friends were the same, so we had a lot of company and fun.”
However, Ahmed did face some judgement for spending his summer playing a computer game. “My parents were not happy. My dad thought I was wasting my time. I was like, “I’m doing lots of walking!””.
Pokemon master Ahmed Ali with his phone Pokemon master Ahmed Ali with his phone
The game requires players to visit real-world locations, and Ahmed was soon travelling across the city - and continents.
Perhaps the craziest part of his Pokémon adventure was taking a university trip to New York. There are four Pokémon that can only be caught on specific continents, and Ahmed caught the European-exclusive Mr. Mime in Canary Wharf, and found the Asia and Australasia rarities in eggs.
That left the America-only bull Pokémon Tauros for him to catch whilst he was studying stateside.
“We went to Central Park and it was just amazing because it was full of crowds playing Pokémon.”
Ahmed caught his final Pokémon closer to home though, in Canary Wharf. He captured the mud Pokémon Muk on Wednesday. So was he overjoyed to reach his goal?
“Honestly I was so drained at that point that it was just a release. Since then I have lost my motivation and haven’t really played.”
Ahmed is waiting for official confirmation from Pokémon Go to find out if he is in fact the first person in the world to catch all 145. “I’m not sure if I’m the first but I’m definitely one of the first.”
Although it’s seen as a childrens’ game, Ahmed said “There’s so much strategy involved, there’s a lot of calculations. Maths definitely comes in useful.”The US, Britain, and European and Arab states are to increase all aspects of support for the mainstream Syrian opposition fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, John Kerry said on Thursday.
Speaking after talks in London, the US secretary of state said he would not discuss specific weapons systems or who might supply them, though Saudi Arabia is understood to be playing the lead role in co-ordinating efforts to arm carefully vetted rebel units. The US and Britain say they provide only "non-lethal aid".
Ahmed Jarba, president of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), had earlier urged the 11-nation Friends of Syria (FOS) group meeting at the Foreign Office to supply anti-aircraft missiles to help counter Assad's air attacks.
"Every possible avenue will be pursued by one country or another," Kerry said. "I'm not going to discuss specific weapons and what country may or may not be providing [weapons], but out of today's meeting every facet of what can be done will be ramped up, and that includes a political effort, aid to the opposition… economic efforts and sanctions."
Jarba spent last week in Washington lobbying for the delivery of Manpad portable missiles, stressing the devastating effect of Syrian government barrel bombs dropped on opposition-held areas. He spoke of trying to "convince the US to give us those weapons, or to convince them to allow our friends to provide us with those weapons". He made the case again in London. "Nobody said no, but nobody made any promises," said one diplomat present.
Jarba's spokesman, Munzer Akbik, told the Guardian "We felt a great deal of understanding for the problem and the need to find a suitable solution. Hopefuly we will find a way."
The foreign secretary, William Hague, said Britain would accord diplomatic mission status to the SNC, after a similar move by the US. He also promised increased UK humanitarian efforts with £30m of extra funding, in particular aimed at getting to areas of Syria that the UN has not yet been able to help. Kerry said the US was willing to follow Britain's example and consider funnelling aid to rebel-held areas using non-governmental organisations instead of the UN. "We are open to the idea of providing aid through any means that will get to people who need it and while a decision has not categorically been made, we are open to anything," he said.
In a short but strongly worded statement, the FOS group condemned Assad's plan for they what called "illegitimate" presidential elections next month as "a parody of democracy". Under a new "co-ordinated strategy," they pledged to "increase support for the moderate opposition National Coalition, its supreme military council and associated moderate opposition groups." Repeated use of the word moderate contrasted with the concern they expressed about "the rising forces of extremism".
Kerry also praised the bravery of British journalists Antony Lloyd and Jack Hill of the Times, who were double-crossed, kidnapped, beaten and shot by a rebel gang in the north of the country.
"This is not the first time that courageous reporters have been part of the heart-breaking story of Syria," he said. "Far too many journalists and innocent civilians have been hurt and killed or held hostage in Syria and just two days ago in Washington we met with many of the families of those who are being held in Syria.
"We are keeping up a very focused effort to try to secure their release. We reiterate our respect and our admiration to reporters who put their lives and their liberties on the line to tell the stories to the world that otherwise people would never learn."As part of its SEC preview series, AL.com asked the SEC’s sports information directors to rank the conference teams 1-14. Predicted finishes in each division were previously published, and now we know how the top media staffers view the conference top to bottom.
Alabama Tennessee LSU Georgia Ole Miss Florida Auburn Arkansas Texas A&M Mississippi State Missouri South Carolina Kentucky Vanderbilt
It should come as no surprise to see the defending champions on top for 2016. The following summary is offered for why Alabama remains No. 1:
The king stays the king. After winning the SEC and a national championship last season, Alabama is again the pick to win the SEC this year. Alabama loses several of its top contributors from last season’s title team, including Heisman Trophy winner Derrick Henry, but the future is bright in Tuscaloosa with the way Nick Saban has been recruiting.
Somewhat noteworthy of the list is an apparent bridging of the gap between the two divisions at the top. While the SEC West dominates the middle, and the SEC East rounds out the bottom four, Nos. 1-6 are split three and three, with the West seen as slightly better. If the prediction plays out on the field, then the SEC Championship Game in Atlanta will truly be between the conference’s top two teams.Plus, 20% savings on Live 9 upgrades, Packs, and Push bundles
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Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/abletonBoston, MA - Boston Bruins General Manager Don Sweeney announced today, May 29, that the club has signed forward Anton Blidh to an entry-level contract.
In 48 regular season games with Frölunda HC of the SHL (Swedish Hockey League) in 2014-15, Blidh potted five goals and totaled 26 penalty minutes. The 20-year-old also netted a postseason goal in 13 playoff games.
The 6'0'', 181-pound winger from Molnycke, Sweden represented Team Sweden in the 2015 World Junior Under-20 Championship, where he registered one goal and two assists in seven games.
Blidh has appeared in 72 games at the SHL level with Frölunda from 2013-15 with 5-5=10 totals and 28 penalty minutes.
Blidh, who has attended the last two Bruins Development camps, was drafted by Boston in the sixth round (180th overall) of the 2013 NHL Entry Draft.(UPDATED) Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III says the Ombudsman has no authority over the case because it happened abroad, but Philippine laws say otherwise
Published 4:23 PM, November 16, 2016
MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED) – Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III said the Ombudsman has no jurisdiction over the ethics issue against Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Roland dela Rosa for accepting an all-expenses-paid trip to the United States from Senator Manny Pacquiao.
Citing some lawyers and even a judge, Sotto said they told told him that the Philippines has no authority over the propriety case against Dela Rosa since it happened in the US.
Philippine laws say otherwise: the country has jurisdiction over cases involving its public officers even if the offense they committed in the exercise of their duties happened abroad.
Dela Rosa earlier admitted it was Pacquiao who paid for his and his family’s trip to Las Vegas to watch the world boxing champion’s match against Jessie Vargas.
Sotto as example
“Judge nga ang pinagtanungan ko eh. Ang krimen ginawa sa Las Vegas,” Sotto said on Tuesday, November 15. (I even asked a judge. The alleged crime was committed in Las Vegas.)
Sotto said he did not see anything wrong about the PNP chief accepting Pacquiao’s favor.
“Kagaya ko, madalas akong maimbitahan, ang nagbabayad ng kinakain ko ay 'yung nag-imbita. Ang ibig sabihin ba, magprisinta ako na ako na magbayad kasi senador ako, baka ma-charge ako? Katulad nun, inimbitahan ni Senator Pacquiao si Dela Rosa,” he said.
(Like me, I frequently get invited. Those who pay for my meals are the people who invited me. Does that mean that I should volunteer to pay for it because I am a senator and I might get charged for it? Like with Dela Rosa, he was invited by Senator Paquiao.)
“Pero ang issue dun is hindi dito nangyari, 'yun ang aking punto. Tanungin 'nyo 'yung mga abogado,” he said. (But the issue is it did not happen in the Philippines. That’s my point. Ask lawyers.)
Philippine laws
The Ombudsman is investigating the possible liability of Dela Rosa for violating Republic Act 6713, or the code of conduct for public officials.
The Ombudsman has the power to investigate and prosecute on its own any act or omission of any public officer or employee when such act or omission appears to be illegal, unjust, improper or inefficient. It did not specifically state that the act should be committed in the country before the agency could conduct an investigation.
Aside from RA 6713, Dela Rosa's act may constitute violation of Article 210 and Article 211 of the Revised Penal Code (RPC) involving direct and indirect bribery.
Article 2 of the RPC specifically says the code is enforceable “not only within the Philippine Archipelago…but also outside of its jurisdiction” against public officers or employees “who commit an offense in the exercise of their functions.”
Lawyer Arno Sanidad, a professorial lecturer at the University of the Philippines College of Law, said that Dela Rosa might have also violated Presidential Decree 46.
PD 46 prohibits public officials from receiving gifts or any other valuable thing when the gift is given because of an official's position, regardless of whether or not the gift is given for past favors, or if the giver is expecting to receive a favor or better treatment in the future.
The same prohibition against receiving gifts is also in Republic Act 6713, which specifies that prohibited gifts include those with a value that "is neither nominal nor insignificant."
Sources at the Office of the Ombudsman pointed out that it was Pacquiao who moved to declare the committee on justice and human rights, formerly headed by Senator Leila de Lima, vacant.
Dela Rosa, sources said, is a "person of interest" for Pacquiao, considering that the PNP chief had appeared in Senate investigations into alleged extrajudicial killings and is invited to the probe into the alleged role of the police in the killing of Albuera Mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr.
The senator defended his gift to Dela Rosa, saying the latter is his friend and it’s better that way than for an official to use public funds.
Dela Rosa, for his part, maintained he has “no regrets” in accepting the gift from his senator-friend. – RapplerWriter’s note: That picture was taken in March of 1997. I was 11 and my mom was 44, almost 45. My mom passed away from lung and brain cancer roughly three months later. I’m now 30 and sadly, more people I care about are dealing with death and sickness of their loved ones, often surprised by what it brings. Perhaps reading some of my experience can help, even if just a bit.
It’s been nearly 20 years and I still haven’t quite figured out how to occupy a room like she did.
I always walked in on the joke late, big roars of laughter filling the room, eyes lit up. I was young. Perhaps I had heard the joke and just didn’t quite get it. Perhaps I was the joke’s featured player, unbeknownst to me. But there were always the yelps of joy. Or loud crescendos of conversation. Or a solo-roar of anger fits from the piano, with a barrage of “SHIT”s that I occasionally tried to copy, to my detriment.
That’s a thing I truly miss about my mom, Barbara Sue Conick: The fun had in her presence, the joy inspired. She had that extra gear, an almost superhuman ability to light up a room, even when her own switch wasn’t quite flipped to “on”. People were there, present in space, with her.
It was with her until her last days. I recall she looked up at her friend from her death bed and muttered with a sly smile, “You look like a pig from this angle.” It briefly nullified any end-of-life tension we felt at that moment. The jokes became less frequent as the spark in her eyes faded, but it was there as long as she was there, even if just a small glimmer, given away in a smirk or a squeeze of the hand.
Today would have been her 64th birthday. 04/13/52, a date I think about often. I’m not sure what we would have done to celebrate. She’d be different in certain ways, just as I am now. But I’m pretty damn sure part of it would involve me playing “When I’m Sixty Four” by The Beatles over and over, playfully, to her annoyance and amusement. As a kid, I was frequently woken up by The Beatles. Or taught life lessons by The Beatles (note: I learned during “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” that killing animals = bad. Thanks, mom).
Hearing her advanced age in song-form would have surely pissed her off, but it’d be so very worth it after all those years of her waking me up to the maximum-volume sound of “Good Morning” on Saturday mornings when I would have just as soon slept until noon. It’s a bittersweet concept for me now.
Some days, I don’t have fun around myself. Permission granted to myself to be joyous, to be passionate, was in short order after she left. Life wasn’t as fun and I only had so much to give. There were no more days driving down the highway at high speeds in a big blue boat of a Cadillac blasting jazz, no more Saturday morning Beatles at full tilt. No more Twizzlers hidden away in the cupboard for me to steal and later boast that I found her stash.
Death is an open secret in America, and it extends deep into lines of friends and family. It’s considered a faux pas to discuss publicly. It’s unpleasant, almost shameful. But then, how do we ever learn to deal with it? How do we see the proverbial semi-truck careening toward us, ready to blindside us? It’s a difficult thing, longing to feel normal but looking in the mirror and seeing your current state perfectly summed up by the look in your own eyes.
Joan Didion wrote a beautiful passage on this in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a book on her grief after the loss of her husband:
People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal.
While this passage is transfixing and personal for me, illustrating part of my storyline I couldn’t shake for years, there has been so much I’ve learned and gained from the life and death of Barbara Sue, and everything that happened after. Thoughts, memories, and things-once-forgotten-now-remembered still sting too, but I’ve gotten better at inhabiting all the personal skills she had by taking on what I recall of her: Being happy. Listening. Enveloping kindness. By trying my fucking hardest not to take for granted that we are truly vulnerable in our human state. Keeping my own spirit but always giving her’s a nod.
I can make myself and others laugh in the worst of times. I can tell a story. I’m learning how to celebrate and to not think too far back into the past or too far into the future, forgetting, even if just momentarily, that there’s an eventual end to every story and a sickening backstory to go along with it. But there’s that extra-something that I feel fades in and out for me, like an FM radio riding across Midwestern state lines. A secret ingredient that I’ve been trying to fine tune for years, whether I’ve realized it or not.
Was it love lost, an inherent love that only a mother can give? That was ever-present. I remember me, 11 years old, lying down until the late hours of the night with my dad on the day she died and asking out loud “I don’t think I told mom I loved her enough. Did mom know I loved her?” But of course she did. Every exchange we had, playing Nintendo together, listening to music loudly in the car, showing my friends and me how to spell “tits” by folding a dollar bill, dabbing hot sauce onto my tongue after I let out a Barbara Conick-esque “SHIT!”…. It was all love, across its various forms. An expectation, view and feeling for me that I couldn’t possibly have of myself. Not yet. That extra ingredient, perhaps. I’m not sure.
She always felt a way about me that I’ve only recently had the ability to feel about myself. Perhaps that’s what has been missing all of these years. A level of expectation and appreciation for myself and others beyond what may actually be there; a respect for the unseen, the unknown. A level of love and care that allows one to joke and be vulnerable all in the same breath. A level of give-a-shit that lets you be there, right there, no matter what.
I hope I’m getting it back. I wish it never had to leave.
AdvertisementsBut is it really so extraordinary? It’s true that labor unions and their members made far more political contributions than the Koch Brothers and their affiliates did. It’s also a misleading comparison. There are 14.5 million people in the labor movement, according to the latest government statistics. There are exactly two people in the Koch brotherhood—Charles and David Koch—plus another 350 or so self-identified Koch employees who, over that same time period, made direct campaign contributions. Extrapolate from that math, and you’ll see that the donation per Koch Industries affiliate positively dwarfs the donation per union member—by a factor of around 1,000, give or take.
But that wasn't Strassel's most egregious argument. By focusing on direct contributions to the parties and the candidates, she did what conservatives defending the Koch brothers almost always do. She severely downplayed the primary way the Kochs influence politics—through unregulated, indirect financing of conservative political organizations. According to research by Robert Maguire, a researcher who pieced together the Koch money trail from disparate Internal Revenue Service and Federal Election Commission reports, conservative nonprofit organizations that received large grants from Koch-backed intermediaries spent $170 million during the 2012 election cycle. Unions spent just $24 million.
The comparison is not precise, but it’s good enough to get a sense of scale. Using the same basic math—the Koch-affiliated organizations have about 200 supporters, including the Koch brothers, according to Maguire—that works out to about $850,000 of influence per Koch brother and $1.65 per union member. At that level of donation, it would take about 515,000 union members to have the same influence as just one Koch brother or affiliate.
Maguire, by the way, works for the Center for Responsive Politics—the same source that Strassel cited in her piece. It’s not the first time Koch defenders have selectively used the Center's data to make their case. “To see this repeatedly brought up is frustrating, because we know it’s not true and it puts us in an awkward position,” says Maguire. “We are fiercely nonpartisan and we don’t like pushing back. We don’t want to be political. Our point is merely that the data does not support, in any way, what they are saying.”
Of course, all of these comparisons are imprecise. It’s virtually impossible to measure accurately how much any individual or group puts into politics, given how much of that money flows through relatively unregulated channels. (One of the best I’ve seen has appeared at Republic Report, complete with a nifty graph of its own.) But very rough measurements convey who has the most power in American politics. Only a handful of individuals in the U.S. can exert the level of influence that the Koch Brothers can—and you can be certain none of them is trying to get by on a union wage.The oil spill that occurred in the Houston Ship Channel on Mar. 23 is having quite a devastating ripple effect on the environment. The disaster, which began when a barge and vessel collided and spilled 170,000 gallons of oil, is now traveling west along the coast of Texas due to heavy currents, complicating cleanup efforts and leaving many migrating birds poisoned or dead.
Some of the oil that plagued the channel is breaking up into troublesome patches and headed in different directions – partly toward the Gulf of Mexico, but more recently, in the other direction down the coast, with crude that could show up hundreds of miles from the spill site. Strong winds have worsened matters, causing the oil to spread across a wider distance.
“You literally have to have a flat sea to vaccuum or remove that oil from the water,” said Scott Smith, chief scientist of Water Defense, a clean water organization founded by actor and environmental activist Mark Ruffalo. “The wind creates the chop and then you can’t get the oil out quickly with these older technologies. Then you take the risk of spreading, like it’s doing now.”
The Environmental Defense Fund added, “This spill is significant. There have already been reports of oil traveling more broadly [from the channel] into Galveston Bay. Galveston Bay is one of America’s greatest estuaries and an important home to Texas seafood providers and recreational fishermen. This spill not only threatens birds and other large animals residing in the bay, but also important seafood species like shrimp, blue crab, menhaden, and oysters. It could also impact populations of popular recreational fish, like red drum and speckled sea trout. Investigation and long-term monitoring within the footprint of this spill is necessary.”
The sensitive bird sanctuary nearby, Bolivar Flats, is, as experts feared, already being affected by the aftermath of this spill. Though signs of oil onshore there are being called “minimal,” birds have been arriving covered in oil. Those birds only have a 50/50 chance of survival, experts say, because they cannot help but ingest the oil when preening their feathers. Numerous fowl have already died, including 37 in Galveston Bay. Others are particularly at risk, as they are in the midst of migrating season.
Now, a second wildlife refuge is at risk. Matagorda Island, and its surrounding Matagorda Bay, are home to a variety of unique, rare, and endangered birds, as well as deer and alligators, but as of Mar. 26, oil slick was found as close as 15 miles away from the island. Workers are scrambling to put up a protective boom around the sensitive areas of the island coast, but some fear it might be a case of “too little, too late”.
“Any impact made by oil there will be very high, because it’s a largely undisturbed area,” said Jorge Brenner, a marine scientist with the Texas Nature Conservancy. “That makes it a really bad target.”
The wellbeing of some oiled birds is out of experts’ hands in Texas because they have already flown to other areas. Oil-covered loons and other migratory birds were found Mar. 28 in parts of Minnesota, some with poor health. Dozens of birds within six different species have already required treatment.
Meanwhile, experts expect the oil to continue to spread farther away from Houston Ship Channel. “Our prediction is that oil is going to be caught up in the coastal current and be carried further west,” said Doug Helton, incident operations coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It is a combination of winds and currents. Particularly, wind speed and wind direction have a big factor on the behavior of the oil. Our predictions on this so far have been pretty accurate.”
In other words, the worst may be yet to come.
Photo: A worker sets up an oil absorbent skirt on a beach in Galveston, Texas. Jennifer Reynolds/APIt has been a great week for mothers in their ongoing fight against hungry snakes.
On Monday, a mother rat victoriously fought off a snake in order to protect its young. Now, it's time for a mother chicken to show a snake who's boss.
Late night action, just now. Posted by Sandy Rewald on Sunday, July 3, 2016
Sandy Rewald from Queensland, Australia, captured an intense moment on Sunday in which a snake, believed to be a water python, was snacking on some her chicken's eggs.
But the chicken, named Chook Chook, wasn't going to let her babies be destroyed without a fight. After noticing the snake, Chook Chook fearlessly attacked the snake, successfully driving it away from where she laid her eggs.
Don't mess with Chook Chook.
[h/t: 9 News]
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.Senator Carr said the 100 per cent mandate would increase sales of Australian-made vehicles by 18,000 units per year or an 8 per cent increase on 2012 production volumes, if it were adopted on Monday by all levels of government. Industry Minister Senator Kim Carr will give $200 million in extra funding to the car industry. Credit:Jay Cronan ''The automotive industry is vital to Australia's economic future and we are determined to increase sales of locally made cars,'' Senator Carr said. Labor strategists will be hoping the announcement tempers the criticism the government has received from the car industry for its recently announced policy to crack down on fringe benefits tax for salary-sacrificed vehicles. Labor's car industry funding would be designed to ''make sure that we do lift the number of vehicles sold in Australia that are made in Australia'', Senator Carr told ABC TV on Monday.
''We are trying to encourage people to buy Australian... and to ensure that we have high-quality Australian-made cars on Australian roads.'' The election caretaker period does not begin until 5.30pm on Monday, making the $200 |
graphed the data, and there is a clear crossover point.
At about 800 people per square mile, people switch from voting primarily Republican to voting primarily Democratic. Put another way, below 800 people per square mile, there is a 66% chance that you voted Republican. Above 800 people per square mile, there is a 66% chance that you voted Democrat. A 66% preference is a clear, dominant majority.
So are progressive political attitudes a function of population density? And does the trend hold true in both red and blue states?
Red States and Blue States
Separating the results from red states and blue states, we can see that while each has a slight preference for their ultimate candidate of choice, on a local level voting behavior is still directly correlated to population density.
Studying this graph, two important facts are revealed. First, there are very few cities in red states. Second, the few dense cities that do exist in red states voted overwhelmingly democratic.
Atlanta, New Orleans, St. Louis, Dallas, and Indianapolis are all in red states — and they all voted blue. And there are no true “cities” in red states that voted red. The only cities in red states that didn’t vote blue were Salt Lake City and Oklahoma City. And by global standards, they are not really cities — each has population density (about 1,000/sq. mi.) less than suburban Maryland (about 1,500/sq. mi.).
Historically, one can argue that red states have disproportionately affected election results by delivering a material number of electoral votes.
Red states simply run out of population at about 2,000 people per square mile. St. Louis is the only city that exceeds that density in a red state. It voted overwhelmingly Democratic (82.7%). In contrast, blue states contain all of the country’s biggest and densest cities: Washington DC, New York City, San Francisco, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Boston, etc.
Red States Are Just Underdeveloped Blue States
As cities continue to grow in red states, those cities will become more blue, and ultimately, those states will become more purple, and then blue. The Republican party says it’s about growth and prosperity; the best way to achieve that in red states is through the growth of cities.
If you follow the red state trend lines, you can clearly see that any dense, fast-growing cities that might emerge in red states will be very likely to vote blue. The few that do already exist already vote blue. How would these new cities be different and cause them to vote red?
Red state voters generally prefer low-density housing, prefer to drive cars, and are sensitive to gas prices. Once population density gets to a certain level, behaviors switch: high-density housing is the norm, public transit becomes more common, and gas use (and price sensitivity) drops.
Red state values are simply incompatible with density.
Cities Are the Future
Globally, cities are growing rapidly as people move from rural to urban areas in search of opportunity. By 2030 it’s estimated that cities will grow by 590,000 square miles and add an additional 1.47 billion people.
Only subsidized suburban housing and fuel prices are insulating the United States from this global trend, and even with these artificial bulwarks, there is no good reason to think that America’s future lies in low-density development.
Density is efficient. Density produces maximum economic output. An America that is not built fundamentally on density and efficiency is not competitive or sustainable. And a Republican party that requires America to grow inefficiently will become extinct.
While the Republican party is retooling in the desert, it should carefully consider whether its primary issue is identity politics or whether its platform is simply not compatible with the global urban future. If that’s the case, an Hispanic candidate running on the same old Republican platform will simply not resonate. The Republican party must develop a city-friendly platform to survive.
Cities are the future and we need candidates from both parties that understand that reality.
The next question: why does population density produce these voting behaviors? Is the relationship causal or correlated? Probably both. I’ll explore this in my next post.
Data Source: US Census 2010 (population density by counties); Politico.com election 2012 results by County.Because you’re trying to shepherd a more balanced perception of him, are you making decisions to show things he might not have wanted to be made public, but that you feel have artistic or personal significance?
I knew him for a long time, so I imagine I’m doing it more or less right. And I try not to be overwhelmed by questions that make me say things that are too personal; women always get asked much more personal questions than men. My brother is always getting the technical, cool questions. I always get the moisture-seeking missiles. [laughs] So that’s harder.
How much do you feel like he would have embraced the technology of DVD and Blu-ray, particularly since he was so careful to frame his films to suit the aspect ratios of VHS presentation?
Yes, he would want very much good prints [to be transferred to video] and we’re fighting for that. And Warner Bros. is wonderful, you know, really wonderful in the way they’re doing this for us, and for themselves also. I think that Stanley was always so careful with the technique — I mean, he was the first person with a computer, ever, that I knew of. And you had to have lessons — do you remember? Ah, you’re too young. But they were these great, big, huge beige things that would arrive and some young lad would come up and teach him and scream at him. But he would have so [loved] every new thing that comes out, every iPhone, every iPod, everything. I think of him, how much he would have liked that.
"He always used to say, 'either you care, or you don’t. There’s no in-between.'"
Looking back at his films, were there any that we now just think of as a masterpiece, but at the time of their making, he really struggled with?
He had both fun and he struggled. He liked struggling. He always used to say, “Either you care, or you don’t. There’s no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.” And I think he did, and I think his life was more interesting for it. I found it more interesting than anybody else because he was so intense. Not beavering away like a suffering, hard-working person, no. That was his toy. He liked filming, he liked all of the difficulties, and he worked all of the time — because that’s what he liked best. He at the same time did not interrupt anything, because he had one enormous gift: that he could concentrate very well. And if children and dogs and the country matters — because we live in the country now — would intrude on whatever he was doing, he would pay attention to it without freaking out or anything, and then go right [back] to the middle of a sentence. And I think that was the gift of a very concentrated person. But he wasn’t trying for that, he just had it.Admit it. You want a white Republican president again.
Now before you start feeling like you’re a racist, understand you are not – by Kevin Jackson
Wanting a white Republican president doesn’t make you racist, it just makes you American.
In the pre-black president era, criticizing the president was simply the American thing to do. An exercise of one’s First Amendment right. Criticism had nothing to do with color, because there had never been a black president, or at least one whom people recognized as black.
So to criticize the president meant that you didn’t like his policies.
The election of a recognized black president was not supposed to change anything. In fact, it was supposed to (1) ease any perceived racial tensions, and (2) allow the government to focus on legislating without race. So America would be more free than ever to discuss the issues.
Not the case. And that is why having a white Republican president is best for the country.
Consider that nobody is ever accused of being racist for disagreeing with white presidents. Mexicans disagreed with most white Republican presidents over America’s immigration policy. Many deranged Mexicans believe we should open the country up to them, some saying that much of America belongs to Mexico anyway. They are not called racists.
Liberal blacks have disagreed with most Republican presidents since Eisenhower, yet these blacks are not considered racists. In fact, when blacks had sanity and disagreed with the policies of racist white Democrat presidents, nobody accused black people of being racists.
Fighting for one’s civil rights was not racist then, nor is it racist now. Blacks (and Republicans) were on the side of righteousness, when they disagreed with the racist policies of Andrew Johnson, and adopted by every Democrat president since.
Never has a black person been called racist, because they didn’t like one of the white presidents’ policies. Blacks were just exercising their First Amendment rights to speak freely. Blacks have disagreed with policy positions of about every Republican president in the modern era, including those who have helped them.
Take Reagan for example. Reagan ushered in a veritable Renaissance for blacks, as Fox News showcased.
And the Reagan record?
African-American columnist Joseph Perkins has studied the effects of Reaganomics on black America. He found that, after the Reagan tax cuts gained traction, African-American unemployment fell from 19.5 percent in 1983 to 11.4 percent in 1989. Black-owned businesses saw income rise from $12.4 billion in 1982 to $18.1 billion in 1987—an annual average growth rate of 7.9 percent. The black middle class expanded by one-third during the Reagan years, from 3.6 million to 4.8 million.
Real Politics reports Obama’s statistics as follows:
Median family income for black Americans has declined a whopping 10.9 percent during the Obama administration…This decline does not include losses suffered during the financial crisis and the recession that followed, but it instead measures declines since June 2009, when the recession officially ended. That’s not the only bad news for African-Americans. The poverty rate for blacks is now 25.8 percent. The black labor force participation rate, which rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has declined for the past decade and quite sharply under Obama to 61.4 percent. The black unemployment rate, according to Pew Research, stands at 13.4 percent. Among black, male, high school dropouts, PBS’ Paul Salmon reports, the unemployment rate is a staggering 95 percent.
Read the rest at TheBlackSphere.netThe puzzle structure of Ocarina of Time
The structure of the puzzles in the Nintendo 64 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. With diagrams and maps.
1. Introduction
This article analyzes the structure of the puzzles in the Nintendo 64 video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
2. Overall structure
Ocarina of Time is structured around the opening of new areas of the game and the acquisition of tools. There is in theory an activity of finding plot tokens: the three spiritual stones and the five medallions of the sages. But that’s not really how it works. It’s not in general the acquisition of new plot tokens that opens up new areas of the game, but instead it’s the acquisition of new tools. For example, you don’t need to complete Dodongo’s Cavern (by beating the boss) in order to progress to Zora’s Domain; you just need the bomb bag that you get by defeating the mini-boss.
Figure 1 shows the items and songs that you acquire during the course of the game, and the places that you gain access to. Plot tokens (items that have no use except to advance the plot) are in sharp-cornered boxes; items which have other uses are in round-cornerned boxes.
When box A is above box B and connected to it by a line then you can’t get item B without having first got item A. This usually means that item A needed to be used in order to get to the place where item B is found, but in a few cases it means that you can’t fail to acquire item A before item B. When there are several items above another and connected to it then all are required. When there are alternative solutions these are indicated with dashed lines; for example at one point in the acquisition of the mirror shield you need to light some torches; this can be done either with Din’s Fire spell or with fire arrows. Places are written in blue and connected to the items you need to possess in order to visit that place.
Most of the side quests have been omitted (golden skulltulas, ammunition power-ups, big poes, bottles, stone of agony, heart pieces, etc) and the ones present have been simplified, notably the masks and Biggoron’s sword. Bombchu are needed once (in the Spirit Temple) but not shown.
The game is narrow to begin with: there is little flexibility about the order you do things in, and few places to visit. Later on, the game is wide: there is a lot of flexibility: you can have as many as four temples on the go at one time, plus many side quests. The narrow beginning is suitable for beginners (and the narrowness extends to the first dungeon; see below) because it means that the most important things about the game can be learned one at a time. The sudden widening of accessible places that occurs when you reach Hyrule Field (five new areas to explore) makes the world feel very large, but the game remains narrow as apart from playing mini-games the only thing to do is to visit the castle and meet Princess Zelda. The real widening of the game occurs somewhat later. This means that a player could become lost, unsure which of the many apparent choices is the right one to tackle. Hence the need for navigational assistance: frequent reminders from Navi of what to do next, and an indication on the world map of where to go next.
There are a few long dependencies in this graph: tools you can get early in the game which have a use late in the game (for example, Epona’s Song can be gained quite early, but Epona herself not until much later. However, almost all of these long dependencies are optional: you can complete the game without getting these items (though their lack might make the game much harder). This means that the player can’t ever get completely stuck by missing something early on. This was probably a deliberate design decision, but it might have been a consequence of play-testing: each time a tester discovered that you can get to place A without necessary item B, an alternative solution was added. (However, one long dependency is not optional: you need the the magic meter, available after Dodongo’s Cavern, and either Din’s Fire or the fire arrows, because a source of fire is needed later, in the Spirit and Shadow temples.)
These long dependencies help to make the plot come together in the player’s mind. They introduce suprising solutions to puzzles, and make the world seem interconnected, but because they are optional they won’t cause a player who misses them to become stuck.
Most dungeons are designed so that you cannot enter it unless you have all the tools you need for its solution. (There are a couple of exceptions: you can enter the Water Temple without the bow and the Shadow Temple without the lens of truth.)
3. Puzzles
Puzzles in Ocarina of Time fall into these categories:
Learning the capabilities of each tool
Learning how to read the environment
Learning how to defeat monsters
Finding your way about
and combinations of these.
3.1. Tool capabilities
Most of the tools have several functions. Typically, one function of the tool helps you defeat some variety of monster; and another allows you to travel to new places in the game. For example, the bow and arrow can be used to kill monsters from a distance, especially useful with annoying monsters such as the Like Like. But it also opens certain doors. In a few cases the second function is a consequence of the first. For example, in the Deku Tree you need to get the slingshot because you can’t climb the wall with the Skulltulas on it without being knocked down by the skulltulas. You have to kill them with the slingshot first.
Leaning to use a tool means:
Learning the button sequence to control it. In most cases this is a matter of reading the instructions, but in some cases there are subtleties not expressed in the instructions. For example, you can forward roll while carrying a lit deku stick to burn something on the floor.
Learning how the tool interacts with the environment. For example, a deku stick can be lit. But not by blue fire. When lit, it will burn cobwebs and light torches. But it won’t melt ice or red ice.
Learning the practical operation of the tool. For example, finding the aiming point for the bow and arrow, figuring out how to hit something with the boomerang.
Learning how the tool interacts with monsters.
Some puzzles involve introducing an unexpected new capability for a tool later in the game. For example, the Song of Time opens the door in the Temple of Time. Later on it can be used to make blocks with the time symbol appear and disappear. Some tools work differently when you’re an adult, forcing you to solve a puzzle in a different way. For example, the Hylian shield completely covers young Link, making him invulnerable to the falling rocks on Death Mountain. But adult Link only holds the shield out in front of him, so he has to escape the rocks by running.
Each new tool gives an incentive for the player to look at all the places they have been to see if the tool makes something newly accessible. For example, on acquiring the bomb bag, many places previously closed off become accessible: Zora’s Domain, the top of Death Mountain, a room in the Deku Tree, a fairy fountain near the castle, several hidden caves under boulders, and so on. Thus the world needs to be explored several times. This helps the player to build up their mental map of the game world. Luckily, this isn’t carried to extremes: the later in the game a tool is acquired, the fewer uses it has. For example, the golden gauntlets can be used only three times. So although you might worry that you’re missing something because (say) you haven’t gone around the whole map looking for places you can use the hover boots, in fact you haven’t missed anything of importance.
3.2. Ammunition
Ammunition must always be available in rooms where you are trapped and have to solve a puzzle to escape, otherwise the player could become stuck by entering the room and using up all their ammunition. This is usually done by having regenerating sources of the required tools nearby, for example deku babas can be killed in two different ways to produce either deku sticks or deku nuts; then they regrow.
3.3. Reading the environment
The environment has to indicate the approach to take to solve a puzzle. This is done by consistent use of textures, icons, objects to indicate what to do:
Bombable walls are a particular texture.
Bombable boulders have one texture, ones vulnerable to the megaton hammer another, invulnerable ones a third.
Pushable blocks have an icon on them; ones pushable only with the silver gauntlets a different icon, ones that will disappear if you play the Song of Time a third.
Some switches can be stood on; some have to be dealt damage (bomb, sword, arrow, boomerang etc), some only respond to an arrow.
Torches need to be lit.
Ice can be melted by ordinary fire, red ice by blue fire.
The player is carefuly taught to read the environment. When a tool is acquired, there is generally a basic puzzle using that tool immediately afterwards. For example, when you get the slingshot the first thing you have to do is to escape from the room by shooting something with it.
The strong prompting of action by the environment has three main consequences:
Once they understand the prompt, players can carry out the action prompted by the environment more or less without thought.
More complicated puzzles can be built out of the simple components (“I see that I need to bomb that wall but how do I get a bomb up there?”).
The player can be stymied when a puzzle introduces something new, because they have unconsciously discarded the solution (their thought process went something like “I know I don’t have to bomb that object because it doesn’t have the right texture, so what do I do with it?”).
4. Dungeon structure
Dungeons are structured around the opening of new areas. Each one begins with a small number of accessible areas and ends with all areas accessible. New areas become available by
Acquiring small keys and unlocking doors.
Defeating enemies and unlocking doors.
Removing obstacles (e.g. bombing walls, burning cobwebs, pushing blocks).
Turning on transport mechanisms (e.g. lifts, water currents).
Finding the dungeon tool (e.g. the longshot makes new targets reachable).
4.1. Dungeon puzzle diagrams
This section contains several diagrams showing the puzzle structure of dungeons. Boxes with rounded corners are puzzles; boxes with sharp corners are items acquired; dotted boxes are conditions or prerequisites. If box A is above box B and connected to it by a line, then the puzzle in box A must be solved (or the item acquired) before the puzzle in box B can be tackled. The dashed arrows indicate changes in the water level in the dungeon, which in turn change the areas of the dungeon that are accessible.
The diagrams for dungeons from Ocarina of Time are prepared with the help of the guides at www.zhq2.com/guides/ and the maps at unlimitedgamer.net/loz-oot.php?nav=coverage/oot/maps.htm.
4.2. Good shape, bad shape
A flat structure with a lot of choice makes players uncertain about what they are supposed to do next, and means that they lack any feeling of accomplishment as they go along, because each achievement doesn’t lead on to anything. A narrow structure with little choice makes players feel that they aren’t are just following the plot set out by the game designer, and not accomplishing anything themselves. See figure 2.
4.3. Small keys
Small keys are interchangable (any key fits any lock) and are used up after use. This means that a dungeon can offer choice (if there are more accessible locked doors than the player currently has keys) with consequences (having chosen one door, the player can’t go back and choose the other door; or at least not until getting another small key).
Not all dungeons offer this choice: some just use the locked doors to prevent the dungeon being too wide. For example, in the Water Temple the six locked doors must be opened in the same order every time the level is played.
Some care has to be taken to avoid the possibility that the dungeon might become unsolvable if the player makes the wrong choice. This means that, at least early in the dungeon, each door that’s unlocked with one small key must make accessible another. See figure 3.
In dungeon A, the player solves puzzle A to get a small key. The intended solution is that the player uses that key to access puzzle C, the solution to which reveals the second small key, which can be used to access puzzle B and so puzzle D and the end. However, the player might choose to access puzzle B instead of puzzle C; in this case no further progress is possible. The dungeon can be repaired by making another small key available after solving puzzle B. This change results in dungeon B.
4.4. Deku Tree
The Deku Tree is the simplest dungeon in Ocarina of Time ; figure 4 is a graph of its puzzles.
There is essentially only one order in which the puzzles can be solved. The order of puzzles corresponds closely to the order in which sections of the dungeon must be visited. This can be seen by overlaying the puzzle graph onto a map of the dungeon, as shown in figure 5. These constraints are appropriate to the first dungeon of the game.
4.5. Water Temple
The Water Temple is perhaps the most complex of the dungeons in Ocarina of Time ; figure 6 is a graph of its puzzles.
None of the individual puzzles is hard; the difficulty of the dungeon is almost entirely in the navigation. This can be illustrated by superimposing the puzzle graph onto the dungeon map, with each puzzle in its approximate location; see figure 7. Several short sequences of puzzles appear as vertical columns in the chart above and in linked rooms in the map below. But the connections between these groups of puzzles are quite haphazard: there is no sense in which the puzzles you can tackle at each stage of the level are grouped together.
Several other features of the dungeon add to the navigational difficulty:
The central chamber is highly symmetric. It’s easy to forget which way is which.
The middle and top ledges in the central chamber are very similar. It’s easy to forget which is which.
It’s easy to forget which bits of the map are accessible under which water level and end up having to go round all three levels each time you want to investigate something.
These make it almost impossible to build up a coherent mental model of the dungeon.
4.6. Boss shortcuts
In most dungeons, there is a short path from the dungeon entrance to the boss room. This is closed to start with, but in the course of completing the dungeon the player opens it up; it might be a passage that has to be opened by solving some puzzle (like the cobwebs across the floor in the Deku Tree) or a route that becomes available when the dungeon’s new tool is acquired (like the longshot in the Water Temple). This quick route means that a player who dies in the course of fighting the boss (which is likely to happen several times) and is therefore sent back to the entrance doesn’t have a long slog to get back to the boss.
The Shadow Temple is the sole exception to this rule.We know a whole lot about Apple’s new iPhone X handset due to various leaks. One thing we haven’t heard up until now, however, is how waterproof Apple’s new flagship device will prove to be.
While there’s still no definite confirmation, a new patent application granted to Apple in Taiwan suggests that Apple’s new iPhone may have waterproofing to match its Samsung marketplace rival, the Galaxy S8.
The patent application makes clear that Apple plans to build a device that extends far beyond the current splash proof iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, which is considered safe for immersion in water up to one meter. The patent application describes a liquid-tight device that forms a, “seal that conform to Rating and International Electrochemical Commission (IEC) 60529 that can also be known as the IP68 rating.”
The International Protection Marking 68 rating refers to a device which is not only completely dust-proof, but also allows for immersion in water to more than 1 meter in depth.
No guarantee
There is, of course, no guarantee that the filing of a patent application is a guarantee that Apple is ready to ship an IP68 iPhone, but the timing — coming one day before Apple’s media event to show off its new handsets — is certainly interesting. As noted, IP68 waterproofing is something that Samsung already offers with its high-end devices, so it makes sense that Apple wants to offer it as well.
It’s not the first time this rumor has circulated regarding the iPhone X, either. Right at the start of this year, a report claimed that Apple’s next-gen flagship device would, “feature the IP68 rating protection as part of drastic upgrades marking the 10th anniversary of the iPhone this year.” This report cited a source in Apple’s supply chain.
How much of a selling point would a truly waterproof iPhone be for you? Leave your comments below.
Via: Patently AppleMission Reports
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Congress wary of fully funding commercial crew
BY STEPHEN CLARK
SPACEFLIGHT NOW
Posted: April 24, 2012
Senate and House budget bills would cut up to 40 percent from NASA's requested budget to pay for new commercial spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and end U.S. reliance on Russia for crew transportation.
Artist's concept of Boeing's CST-100 crew capsule. Credit: Boeing
The Senate's appropriations subcommittee for NASA marked up a spending plan with $525 million allocated for commercial crew. The House's budget calls for the program to receive $500 million in fiscal year 2013, which begins Oct. 1. The budget proposals were released April 17 and April 19, and the bills still must be passed by each body of Congress, and their differences must be resolved in a joint conference committee. NASA expects any significant reduction from the agency's requested $830 million for commercial crew development to push back the resumption of domestic human space travel into low Earth orbit, a capability lost after the retirement of the space shuttle. Congress last year cut NASA's budget proposal to $406 million for fiscal year 2012, which runs through Sept. 30. That is less than half of the space agency's proposal, and NASA officials blamed the budget for a predicted delay in the beginning of crewed space missions from 2016 until 2017. Without the $830 million next year, NASA's commercial crew program will face another delay, according to top space officials. "Any subsequent reductions from what the president has requested for commercial crew only serves to delay the amount of time that we have an American capability to get our crews to the International Space Station," NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in testimony before a Senate committee in March. Phil McAlister, head of NASA's commercial spaceflight office, has repeatedly said mounting delays could cause the agency to question whether the commercial crew approach to space transportation is the right strategy. "At some point, you have to step back and take a look at the whole equation and see if the strategy still is appropriate," McAlister said in a March interview. McAlister said an annual budget between $300 million and $400 million would call into question the program's relevance, adding that at such a level, he would argue "it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to do this program." NASA expects to award at least two companies between $300 million and $500 million in agreements by August to continue developing, testing and validating their vehicles. The 21-month agreements, which run through May 2014, will fund the completion of the design phases for spacecraft and rockets capable of carrying crews into orbit.
Artist's concept of Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane. Credit: Sierra Nevada Corp.
The numbers in the budget bills marked up in the House and Senate appropriations committees could necessitate awards in the lower end of the $300 million to $500 million range. Some in Congress, including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, have suggested paring down the number of competitors for scarce commercial crew money. Boeing Co., Sierra Nevada Corp., SpaceX and Blue Origin currently have funded agreements with NASA through July. Hutchison also questioned NASA's $830 million commercial crew request for fiscal 2013, saying the agency was only authorized $500 million for the effort. But Bolden said the $830 million level was imperative for keeping the commercial crew program on schedule. In a joint bipartisan Op-Ed appearing April 11 in the Austin American-Statesman, Hutchison and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., suggested NASA should only put money toward the most credible bids. "Moving forward, NASA needs to focus its investment on only those providers that are likely to be able to provide crew transportation services by 2017," Nelson and Hutchison wrote. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee for NASA, said the House budget bill "directs NASA to winnow the commercial partners and advance the schedule for moving to traditional government procurement methods." Like the Senate budget proposal, the House bill would boost fiscal year 2013 funding for NASA's Space Launch System, the heavy-lift rocket conceived to send astronauts on expeditions beyond Earth orbit, including asteroids, Mars and other destinations. NASA officials previously said the next step in commercial crew development, called the commercial crew integrated capability phase, would require proposals to merge rocket and spacecraft design and testing into a single bid. The fiscal 2012 budget passed by Congress forced NASA to rethink its development and procurement strategy, and officials opted to continue using more flexible Space Act Agreements with commercial partners, despite plans to switch to more rigid contracts. Under the Space Act Agreements, NASA gives up some control and oversight over spacecraft and rocket developers. But the unique public-private partnerships allow companies to help finance design and testing with private capital.Cuomo said he had heard from top federal officials but that the president himself had not called. | Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo Cuomo hits Trump as NYPD says terror attack was planned for weeks
Gov. Andrew Cuomo criticized President Donald Trump’s tweets following the Tuesday terrorist attack in New York City as officials revealed the man who rammed a truck into pedestrians and bicyclists along the West Side Highway was planning the attack "for weeks."
NYPD Intelligence and Counterterrorism chief John Miller said Sayfullo Saipov, a 29-year-old native of Uzbekistan, who most recently lived in Tampa, Florida, had carried out the attack "in the name of ISIS."
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Cuomo, a Democrat who is positioning himself for a possible 2020 presidential bid, said he had heard from top federal officials but that the president himself had not called. Mayor Bill de Blasio said the same. Trump Wednesday morning faulted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for pushing for the “Diversity Visa Lottery” in 1990 — a program that officials say was used by Saipov to settle in the United States. The idea was absorbed into a larger immigration bill co-sponsored by 32 lawmakers, including Schumer and six Republicans.
“The president’s tweets, I think, were not helpful. I don’t think they were factual. They tended to point fingers and politicize the situation,” Cuomo said in response to a question from reporters. "His tweet wasn’t even accurate, as far as I’m concerned. That was a bipartisan law that was passed that had basically no relevance to the facts of this situation.... As I said before, you play into the terrorists to the extent you disrupt and divide and frighten people in this society. The tone now should be the exact opposite.”
Eight people were killed and 11 seriously injured when Saipov drove a rental Home Depot truck into a bicycle lane along the West Side highway shortly after 3 p.m. Tuesday.
Miller said notes recovered from the truck and the ongoing investigation indicate the suspect followed instructions that ISIS has put out to carry out terror attacks using vehicles "to a T."
Neither Cuomo nor de Blasio received a call from Trump after the attack but both said they had been contacted by Department of Homeland Security officials.
De Blasio also called for unity in the wake of attack, though he did not take on the president directly.
“This should be a unity moment where the focus is on solving the crime and figuring out how we can move forward together, not the pointing of fingers,” de Blasio said.
Both the mayor and governor said they were not bothered that they had not heard from the president directly.
“I’m not bothered at all, because two senior officials called promptly and offered help, and I think that was appropriate," de Blasio said. “We are here to talk about this situation and the facts, and no one up here wants to politicize any of this.”The monotony of waking up and going to our registered classes — a routine that students have long been accustomed to. Classes are met with rolled eyes or the slap of a snooze button rather than excitement, as well as dread of and reluctance to attend classes that simply don’t seem worth attending. A common attitude toward learning is that it’s inherently boring and that fun is simply a rare byproduct.
School is boring, and free time is fun. Any overlap is luck. How often do we receive a perfect lineup of courses that walk this line? Is it possible?
At the intersection of formal education and the diverse out-of-class lives UC Berkeley students lead sits the DeCal — UC Berkeley’s outlet for student passion that allows individuals to design and teach courses themselves. Many view the DeCal, consisting of one to three pass/no pass units, as easy credits to cushion their rigorous schedules.
Initiated in 1965, Democratic Education at Cal, or DeCal, is meant to give students the opportunity to think critically about their education in a proactive way. It serves as an alternative outlet that caters to students’ special interests, whether they’re professional or recreational. Backed by faculty sponsors, student facilitators can teach practically any subject they want.
From a quirky class on Rubik’s Cubes to the intrigue offered in “Criminal Psychology,” DeCals are designed for those seeking a respite from the burdens of a UC Berkeley education. They enable students to take their education into their own hands, especially for those unsatisfied with what departments have to offer.
Turns out, when curated effectively, a DeCal can be far more than a couple of extra units and instead serve as a space where some students’ ideal model of a classroom can be put into practice.
Take the “ ‘Mean Girls’ and Modern Society” DeCal, based on the 2004 cult film. At first glance, this sounds like a great excuse to sit back and watch an old favorite once a week. But the course, co-facilitated by Kunal Kerai, a junior psychology and rhetoric double major, has instead been structured to exhibit how fusing pop culture with contemporary social issues can create interesting and stimulating discourse.
By examining topics such as body image, race, sexual identities and cultural appropriation through the lens of an iconic movie, students can digest longstanding issues within a familiar context for a technologically literate generation. The class’s core concepts are relatable but sound like what might be discussed in a sociology or gender studies course.
“It’s definitely hard to be a university that prides itself on social awareness when we just get ourselves stuck at Doe all the time,” Kerai says.
In the case of the DeCal “Concrete Canoe,” learning beyond theory involves literally going outside the classroom. Students use the principles of civil engineering to come up with the best design for a canoe made out of concrete. Though it’s a course that relies on engineering, the DeCal attracts students from all majors.
Sounds absurd, but the challenge actually ends up being incredibly instructive. Ensuring that a concrete canoe will actually float is a challenging task. The task of collaborating to make concrete float requires hands-on work and a capacity for experimentation — types of |
Ever since the first announcement of Project Morpheus at the 2014 Game Developers Conference (GDC), gamers came to a realization that virtual reality is right around the corner and will change the future of console gaming.
Recently, Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) jumpstarted an event for the Chinese market. The Chinajoy Expo & Conference runs from July 30 to August 2 and is the largest gaming and digital entertainment exhibition held in China and Asia. Most would think that Sony's virtual reality head-mounted display would not make an appearance since it's still under development.
According to the report of VR focus, Sony Computer Entertainment did showcase Project Morpheus with a few demos on the show floor for visitors to try out. To include, SCE's Head of Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida, talked about Sony's VR headset for a short while.
Sony, alongside Facebook, is one of the world's leaders when it comes to virtual reality according to Fox Business. The report stated that these companies can deliver what gamers of all ages had been dreaming of for decades in the form of Facebook's Oculus Rift, and Sony's Project Morpheus.
Furthermore, the latest update revealed is that Sony's Morpheus has made a huge leap forward in both the visual and functional aspects of the VR headset ever since its announcement and demo from last year. SCE America's CEO, Shawn Layden, said that the Morpheus doesn't suit 50-hours long games. Rather, Layden said that concentrated and concise gaming experience is where it really shines.
According to an experience-based report on Mashable, Morpheus is the most comfortable virtual reality headset compared to Facebook's Oculus Rift, and the HTC Vive. The report further added that Sony's VR headset only requires a PlayStation 4 console and not an expensive PC with the latest specs, which is needed to run the competitors' virtual reality devices.
It has been a year long since Sony first announced Project Morpheus at Game Developers Conference 2014. A short four months has passed since Project Morpheus' prototype was revealed at GDC 2015 and Sony already presented its specs with an OLED 1920x1080 display (providing 960x1080 per eye), an RGB sub pixel matrix, and 120 frames per second content display capabilities.
With its current progresss, virtual reality gaming will no longer be a fantasy but the future. Project Morpheus is rumored to be released on the second quarter of 2016.Trump Star Vandal I'm Not Afraid of Donald Or Cops!
Trump Star Vandal's Not Afraid of Donald or the Cops!
EXCLUSIVE
James Otis is the guy who says he took a pickax to Donald Trump's star on the Walk of Fame, and he tells TMZ... he's ready and willing to go to jail for the crime.
Otis was totally open with us about what he did and why. He says he attacked Trump's star around 5:45 AM Wednesday because he sees himself as a sort of modern-day Robin Hood.
As we told you, he planned to auction off pieces of the star and donate the money to the accusers' legal defense, because Trump has vowed to sue them. Otis, who considers himself an activist, says his main motivation was standing up for the alleged victims.
Of course, now that he's gone public in taking credit for vandalizing the star... police are looking for him. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce says the plaque is worth $30k, so he's confessing to a felony.
Otis has a plan to deal with the heat.Chances are the “silent killer” — hypertension — is already stalking you. More than half of all American adults have elevated blood pressure, which can lead to deadly consequences.
“Hypertension is a major cardiovascular risk factor, not only for heart attack but especially for stroke,” says Miami-based cardiologist Dr. Michael Ozner, author of the best-selling book "The Complete Mediterranean Diet.”
If you approach the hypertension stage — blood pressure in excess of 140/80 — your doctor will probably start talking to you about prescription medications. There are several types, and often it’s a trial and error process to find one that works without triggering side effects that may include fatigue, breathing problems, heart palpitations, constipation, insomnia, joint pain, and erectile dysfunction, to name a few.
But there is a lot you can do to stop the creeping menace of hypertension in its tracks before popping pills.
“First, we try lifestyle intervention,” Ozner tells Newsmax Health. “Get some exercise, learn relaxation techniques, and eat right. Nutrition plays a major role. The Mediterranean diet has been proven to lower blood pressure.”
The Mediterranean diet limits sugars, refined carbohydrates, and saturated fat while going heavy on fruits, veggies, whole grains, and healthy fats. It’s a good baseline, but studies show you can add some extra zing by including any of the following six foods that have been shown to naturally lower blood pressure:
Tart cherry juice: British researchers found that hypertension sufferers who drank just two ounces of this bright red superfood a day averaged a 7 percent drop in blood pressure in a placebo-controlled study. They believe the phenolic acids in the cherries were key in improving vascular flexibility and function.
Walnuts: Replacing snack food with walnuts helped knock three points off the resting blood pressure of participants in a study at Penn State University. In another trial, adults who ate a half-cup of walnuts a day for four months also saw their blood pressure drop. The benefits are likely due to walnuts being rich in omega-3 fatty acids and magnesium, two nutrients that bolster blood vessel health.
Beet juice: Beets are rich in nitrate, which your body turns into nitric oxide, a gas that relaxes the smooth muscles in blood vessels and also acts as a natural blood thinner. In a study published in the journal Hypertension, the systolic pressure of subjects who drank about a cup of beet juice a day fell eight points.
Flaxseed: In six-month, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, systolic blood pressure dropped 10 points in people who ate a quarter-cup of ground flaxseed every day. Diastolic pressure went down by seven points. “In summary,” say the researchers, “flaxseed induced one of the most potent antihypertensive effects achieved by dietary intervention.”
Yogurt: Eating good quality yogurt has two proven hypertension busters – calcium and probiotics. A calcium deficiency can contribute to high blood pressure, and a serving of yogurt has about one-third of the Recommended Daily Allowance. And recent research shows that lowering blood pressure is just one of many health benefits of optimizing gut flora with the probiotics found in fermented food like yogurt. Just be sure to get yogurt that is low in sugar and fat and contains “live and active cultures” of good gut bacteria.
Dark chocolate: A popular choice, no doubt, but the key is in eating just one square a day. And it should be a type of chocolate that contains more than 50 percent cocoa. Do that, say researchers at Harvard University, and you can lower your blood pressure. And it works best for folks who already have hypertension. Apparently, the flavonoids in the sweet stuff dilates blood vessels.
You can also augment your diet with supplements. Studies show that coenzyme Q10, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D, magnesium and the amino acid acetyl-L-carnitine can all help to you to keep your blood pressure under control.
Still, that may not work for everybody.
“The bottom line is if you’ve tried lifestyle interventions and your blood pressure is still consistently higher than 140 over 90, then you need to be on medication,” says Ozner.In response to a request from the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported that federal welfare spending reached three-quarters of a trillion dollars last year. When added to what the states spent on welfare, another $300 billion, total government welfare payments in 2011 hit $1.03 trillion. More unnerving is that the report from the CRS didn't include spending on Social Security or Medicare.
Putting it all together, federal spending on welfare greatly exceeded spending on the military ($540 billion), Social Security ($725 billion), Medicare ($480 billion) as well as the Departments of Justice ($31 billion), Transportation ($77 billion) and Education ($65 billion).
Welfare spending is likely to increase in light of the Obama administration’s determination to eviscerate the welfare reform bill passed in 1996 which contained modest work requirements to qualify. In a unilateral, unconstitutional move on July 12th, the administration essentially removed all work requirements that previously applied to the states, claiming that it had, through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the power to “waive compliance” and use instead “alternative” requirements. As noted by Robert Rector, writing in The New Media Journal, “The policy will clearly waive compliance with the law’s existing work participation standard. If this is not gutting the work requirements, it is difficult to imagine what would be.”
Not only is this usurpation unconstitutional — effectively neutralizing and negating legislation passed by Congress and signed into law in 1996 — it also hastens the day of financial bankruptcy of the federal government. The fact that more than 80 percent of the American people opposed the elimination of work requirements in order to receive benefits meant nothing to the ideologues currently in charge in Washington.
Much more than financial bankruptcy is involved. It takes lies and deceit and rampant immorality to continue and expand the welfare state. As Thomas Sowell noted in June:
Among the biggest lies of the welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic is the notion that the government can supply the people with things they want but cannot afford. Since the government gets its resources from the people, if the people as a whole cannot afford something, neither can the government.
The problem is with politicians who lie, and citizens who believe them:
Nothing is easier for a politician than promising government benefits that cannot be delivered. Pensions such as Social Security are perfect for this role. The promises that are made are for money to be paid many years from now – and somebody else will be in power then, left with the job of figuring out what to say and do when the money runs out and the riots start.
There’s also the morality involved in forcing one group of citizens to pay benefits to another group. Walter Williams tells the story of seeing an elderly woman huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter:
She's hungry and in need of shelter and medical attention. To help the woman, I walk up to you using intimidation and threats and demand that you give me $200. Having taken your money, I then purchase food, shelter and medical assistance for the woman. Would I be guilty of a crime?
A moral person would answer in the affirmative. I've committed theft by taking the property of one person to give to another.
It doesn't matter even if 200 million people think it’s ok. It’s still stealing. Williams explained:
Don't get me wrong. I personally believe that assisting one's fellow man in need by reaching into one's own pockets is praiseworthy and laudable. Doing the same by reaching into another's pockets is despicable, dishonest and worthy of condemnation. Some people call governmental handouts charity, but charity and legalized theft are two entirely different things.
As far as charity is concerned, James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, said, "Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." To my knowledge, the Constitution has not been amended to include charity as a legislative duty of Congress.
With such a large percentage of government spending going to support immoral activities disguised and dressed up to look like charity, just how long can such a system survive? In the presidential debates, the question continually comes up: how can the government pay for all of this? The question is never: why is the government involved in these illegal and immoral and financially devastating activities in the first place?
Williams quotes Ayn Rand who said in her novel Atlas Shrugged: “When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good.”
Photo: The Department of Health and Human Services headquarters in Washington.In 2011, the population of the earth will reach 7 billion. It takes 200 years to count to 7 billion. 7 billion steps would take you around the globe 133X.
Population through the ages.
1800 – 1 billion – It took 250,000 years to reach the first billion.
1927 – 2 billion – 127 years
1959 – 3 billion – 32 years
1974 – 4 billion – 14 years
1987 – 5 billion – 13 years
1999 – 6 billion – 12 years
2011 – 7 billion – The first time it took to add 1 billion increased.
2025 – projected to be 8 billion.
2050 – projected to be 9.3 billion
2100 – Science Magazine, in October 2014, predicted there would be 10.9 billion people
Every second, 5 people are born and 2 people die.
Everywhere we are living longer, the average life span: 1960 – 53 years, 2010 – 69 years.
Standing shoulder to shoulder, all 7 billion would fill the city of Los Angeles.
It is not space we need, but balance: 5% consume 20% of the worlds energy; 13% don’t have clean drinking water. 38% don’t have adequate sanitation; 2.6 billion live on less than $2/day. The richest 86 people on earth have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people.
11% of the earth’s land is used to grow food.
Odd though it seems, the growth of the world’s population is actually slowing. The peak of population growth was in the late 1960’s, when the total was rising by almost 2% per year. Now the rate is one-half that. The last time it was that low was in 1950, when the death rate was much higher. The result is that the next billion people will take 14 years to arrive, the first time that a billion milestone has taken longer to reach than the one before. The billion after that will take 18 years.
There are probably already too many people on the planet. But the notion of “too many” is more flexible than it seems. The earth could certainly not support 10 billion hunter-gatherers, who used much more land per head than modern farm-fed people do. But it does not have to. The earth might not be able to support 10 billion people if they had exactly the same impact as 7 billion do today. But that does not necessarily spell doom because the impact humans have on the earth and on each other can change.
The big questions about population are: can the world feed a 9 billion mouths by 2050? Are so many people ruining the environment? And will those billions, living cheek by jowl, go to war more often? On all three counts, surprising as it seems, reducing population growth any more quickly than it is falling anyway may not make much difference.
Start with the link between population and violence. It seems plausible that the more young men there are, the more likely they will be to fight. This is especially true when groups are competing for scarce resources. In 2014 there were 1.8 billion 18-24 year-olds, a historic high. Governments are warned that they need to invest in youth education, health and job prospects or face political instability. Some argue that the genocidal conflict in Darfur, western Sudan, was caused partly by high population growth, which led to unsustainable farming and conflicts over land and water. Land pressure also influenced the Rwandan genocide of 1994, as migrants in search of a living labour force to productive use. In the 1980’s, Latin America and East Asia had similar demographic patterns. But while East Asia experienced a long boom, Latin America endured its “lost decade”. One of the biggest questions for Arab countries, which are beginning to reap theri own demographic dividends, is whether they will follow East Asia or Latin America. But even if demography guarantees nothing, it can make growth harder or easier. National demographic inheritances therefore matter. And they differ a lot.
The world can be divided into three categories according to levels of fertility. About a fifth of the world lives in countries with high fertility – 3 or more. Most are Africans. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the fastest growing parts of the world. In 1975, it had half the population of Europe. It overtook europe in 2004, and by 2050 there will be just under 2 billion people there compared with 720 million Europeans. About half of the 2.3 billion increase in the world’s population over the next 40 years will be in Africa. The rest of the world is more or less equally divided between countries with below replacement fertility (less than 2.1) – Europe, China and the rest of East Asia, and those with intermediate fertility (between 2.1 and 3) – South and SE Asia, the Middle East and the Americas (including the US but not Canada).
The low fertility countries face the biggest demographic problems, The elderly share of Japan’s population is already the highest in the world. By 2050 the country will have almost as many dependents as working-age adults, and half the population will be over 52. This will make Japan the oldest society the world has ever known. Europe faces similar trends, less acutely. It has roughly half as many dependent children and retired people as working-age adults now. By 2050 it will have three dependents for every four adults, so will shoulder a large burden of ageing, which even sustained increases in fertility would fail to reverse for decades. This will cause disturbing policy implications in the provision of pensions and health care, which rely on continuing healthy tax revenues from the working population.
At least these countries are rich enough to make such provision. Not so China. With its fertility artificially suppressed by the one-child policy, it is ageing at an unprecedented rate. In 1980 China’s median age (the point where half the population is older and half younger) was 22 years, a developing country figure. China will be older than America as early as 2020 and older than Europe by 2030. This will bring an abrupt end to its cheap labour manufacturing. its dependency ratio will rise from 38 to 64 by 2050, the sharpest rise in the world. Add in the country’s sexual imbalances – after a decade of sex-selective abortions, China will have 96.5 million men in their 20s in 2025 but only 80.3 million young women – and demography may become the gravest problem the Communist Patty has to face.
Many countries with intermediate fertility – SE Asia, latin America, the US – are better off. There dependency ratios are not deteriorating so fast and their societies are ageing more slowly. Americas demographic profile is slowly tugging it away from Europe. Though its fertility rate may have fallen recently, it is still slightly higher than Europe’s. In 2010 the two sides of the Atlantic had similar dependency rates. By 2050 America’s could be nearly ten points lower.
The biggest potential beneficiaries are the two other areas with intermediate fertility, India and the Middle East, and the high fertility continent of Africa. These have long been regarded as demographic time bombs, with youth bulges, poverty and low levels of education and health. But that is because they are moving only slowly out of the early stage of high fertility into the one in which lower fertility begins to make an impact. At the moment, Africa has larger families and more dependent children than India or Arab countries, and a median age of 20 compared with their 25. All three areas will see their dependency ratios fall in the next 40 years, and they will keep their median ages low – below 38 in 2050. If they can make their public institutions less corrupt, keep their economic policies outward-looking and invest more in education, then these 3 areas could become the fastest growing parts of the world economy within a decade or two.
If you look at the overall size of the world’s population, the picture is one of falling fertility, decelerating growth and a gradual return to the flat population level of the 18th century. But below the surface societies are being churned up in ways not seen in the much more static pre-industrial world.
CITIES – One Solution to Dealing with 7 Billion People
2008 was the first year that more of us lived in cities than rural areas. Rome was the first city to reach 1 million people in 13 BC. In 1800 only London, Beijing and Tokyo had more than 1 million people. By 1900, there were 16, 1950 – 74, and in 2010 – 442 (China-89, India-48, US-42, Brazil-21, Mexico-12). In the 19th century, London was the only city of more than 5 million, now there are 54, most of them in Asia. A megacity has a population of >10 million people: 1975 there were 3, 2011 there were 21.
In 2050, 70% will be living in urban areas. Most urbanites live in cities of less than half a million, but big cities have gotten bigger and more common. Urbanization is now good news. With Earth’s population population headed for 9 or 10 billion, dense cities are looking like a cure – the best hope for lifting people out of poverty without wrecking the planet. There is no such thing as a poor urbanized country; there is no such thing as a rich rural country.
Poor people flock to cities because that’s where the money is. Cities produce more because the absence of space between people reduces the cost of transporting goods, people, and ideas. Historically, cities were built on rivers or natural harbours to ease the flow of goods. But these days, since shipping costs have declined and service industries have risen, what counts most is the flow of ideas. Wall Street is the quintessence of a vibrant city with the trading floor forsaking large offices to work in an open plan bath of information – they value knowledge over space, enabling people to learn from one another. In cities with higher average education, even the uneducated earn higher wages – that’s evidence of “human capital spillover”. Spillover works best face-to-face. No technology yet invented – the telephone, internet, or videoconferencing – delivers the fertile chance encounters that cities deliver. Nor do they deliver the nonverbal, contextual cues that help convey complex ideas.
Economists embrace cities as engines of prosperity. Environmentalists have taken a bit longer. By increasing income, cities increase consumption and pollution. Nature is lost, but the alternative is spreading the damage. From an ecological standpoint, a back-to-the-land ethic would be disastrous. Cities allow half of humanity to live on around 4% of the arable land, leaving more space for open country. Per capita, city dwellers tread more lightly in other ways. Their roads, sewers and power lines are shorter and so use fewer resources. Apartments take less energy to heat, cool, and light than do houses. Most important, people in dense cities drive less. Destinations are close enough to walk to, and public transport is practical. In cities, like New York, per capita energy use and carbon emissions are much lower than the national average. Cities in developing countries are even denser and use far fewer resources. But that’s mostly because poor people don’t consume much. Slums may be a model for low emissions, but its residents lack safe water, toilets, and garbage collection. A billion other city dwellers in developing countries tolerate the same. By 2050, cities will have absorbed most of the worlds population increase to 2 billion.
Developing countries are responding by trying to make migration to cities stop. It’s a mistake to see urbanization as an evil rather than an inevitable part of development. The problem is not the number of people but the inability to govern them.
Seoul is a good example on how to manage rapid urbanization. After WWII and the Korean War which ended in 1953, more than a million refugees migrated to the bombed out city. Between 1960 and 2000, Seoul’s population zoomed from fewer than 3 million to ten million, and South Korea went from being one of the world’s poorest countries, with a per capita GDP of less than $100, to being richer than some of Europe. The speed of transformation shows in the homogenous row of concrete apartment blocks. Rapid improvements in public health and nutrition, and an economic boom fueled by the growing city paid for the infrastructure that helped absorb the growing population. The cities growing middle and upper classes left the old Seoul for high-rises and a grid of boulevards. Initially the poor were unable to afford the high-rises, but over the years, the rising population has been able to cash in on the housing boom. Today half of the population of Seoul live in apartments. Today Seoul is one of the densest cities in the world. It has millions of cars but also an excellent subway system. The streets are vibrant with commerce and crowded with pedestrians, each of whom has a carbon footprint less than half the size of New Yorker’s. The country has gone from 28% urban in 1961 to 83% today. Life expectancy has risen from 51 to 79 years. Korean boys are 6″ taller than they used to be.
Greenbelts were built in many cities to halt further development. They preserved open space, but rarely stopped the growth of cities. They have had the effect of pushing people farther out, sometimes absurdly far. People now commute from suburbs leapfrogging the restraints. When you try to stop urban growth, you amplify sprawl. Greenbelts aren’t the cause of sprawl as most cities don’t have them. Other government policies, such as subsidies for highways and home ownership, have coaxed the suburbs outward. So has that other great shaper of density of cities – the choices made by individual residents as a lot of people want nice houses with gardens. Even in developing countries, most cities are spreading out faster than people pour into them – on average they are getting 2% less dense each year. By 2030. their built up area could more than triple. The expansion is being driven by rising incomes to buy more space and cheap transportation.
In the 20th century, American cities were designed around cars that have made city air unbreathable and carry suburbs beyond the horizon. Car-centered sprawl gobbles farmland, energy, and other resources. Now city planners want to repopulate downtowns and densify suburbs. Urban flight, which seemed like such a good idea a century ago, now seems like a wrong turn. Meanwhile in China and India, car sales are booming along with suburban sprawl. But it would be much better for the planet if dense cities were built around the elevator, rather than the car. Urban planning requires looking decades ahead – looking at growing cities in a positive way – as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped. Sustainability means not designing around cars, being able to walk to the center of town to shop, or catch transportation to jobs. Preserving large, semiwild parks where citizens can commune with nature and expand along railway and subway lines. Get the transportation right and then let things happen.The Taliban is now threatening five of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals in Afghanistan. The Taliban has not confined its operations to one area of the country, but is active in all. The Taliban threaten two capitals in the north (Kunduz City and Pul-i-Khumri), two in the south (Tarin Kot and Lashkar Gah), and one in the west (Farah City).
In order to threaten these capitals, the Taliban has focused its operations in the rural districts of Afghanistan. These districts are vital to the Taliban’s insurgency. The areas are used to recruit and train fighters, raise funds, resupply, and launch attacks into the population centers. This strategy was explained by Mullah Aminullah Yousuf, the Taliban’s shadow governor for Uruzgan, in April 2016. Despite the success the Taliban has had employing this strategy, General John Nicholson, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan and the Resolute Support mission, has downplayed the Taliban’s control of rural areas.
Provincial capitals under Taliban threat:
Kunduz: The Taliban entered the city of Kunduz on Oct. 3 and occupied large areas of the city for nine days before being pushed back by Afghan forces. Resolute Support, NATO’s command in Afghanistan, insisted Kunduz was under Afghan control one day after the Taliban entered the city despite reports to the contrary. The Taliban remain on the outskirts of Kunduz City; all seven districts in the province are at best contested.
Baghlan: Pul-i-Khumri, the capital of Baghlan province which borders Kunduz, has been under Taliban pressure since May 2016. Pul-i-Khumri district and three more of Baghlan’s 13 districts are contested by the Taliban. The Taliban routinely shuts down the highway that links Kunduz City and Pul-i-Khumri.
Lashkar Gah: The capital of Helmand province has been under Taliban threat for well over year. In October 2015, The Taliban advanced to within miles of Lashkar Gah, which has been besieged ever since. Earlier this week, the Taliban ambushed and killed scores of Afghan security personnel after 300 of them attempted to flee an area near the city that was surrounded. US advisers have been deployed to Lashkar Gah and other districts in Helmand to help Afghan forces battle the Taliban, but have struggled to contain the threat. Of Helmand’s 14 districts, six are known to be controlled by the Taliban and another seven, including the provincial capital, are heavily contested.
Tarin Kot: The capital of Uruzgan province has been under direct threat since the beginning of September, when Taliban forces entered the city and battled Afghan security personnel who were backed by US advisers. The Taliban has since been driven to the outskirts of the city, where they remain to this day. Of the province’s six districts, one is under Taliban control and the remaining five are heavily contested.
Farah: In the beginning of October, the Taliban cut off the roads to Farah City and attacked from the north. Afghan military commanders feared the city would “collapse.” NATO forces have deployed to the city and are launching airstrikes on the Taliban, which is said to be pushed to the outskirts. A Taliban spokesman claimed on Oct. 13 that it “launched on enemy positions in Baghi Pul area of Farah capital” and “Mujahidin closing in on city from E & N.” Four of Farah’s 11 districts are controlled or contested by the Taliban.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.Tortured detective Sebastian Castellanos teams up with the mysterious group that ruined his life in the survival horror sequel The Evil Within 2. Set three years after the original title, the game finds Castellanos agreeing to work for the shadowy Mobius group and once again use STEM to enter an alternate dimension created by the mind of a troubled individual: his daughter Lily. Players can freely navigate the surreal, nightmarish world of her subconscious, scavenging for limited resources, and hiding in the shadows, staging direct attacks, or fleeing from horrific creatures.
Gamers can find special green gel, which they can use to customize Castellanos' athleticism, combat, health, recovery, and stealth attributes, and the environments also hold hidden documents, side objectives, and items to be used for crafting. Players can also locate a safe house from which they can regain health, stock up on ammunition, and learn more about the mysterious surroundings.BEIJING: China reaffirmed today that there is no change in its stance on the admission of non-NPT states into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, marring India's chances of entering the elite club during its crucial meeting in Bern "As for non-NPT counties being admitted to the group, I can tell you there is no change to China's position," Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a media briefing.He was replying to a question whether there is any change in China's stand at the plenary meeting currently taking place in the Swiss capital, Bern."I want to point out that the NSG has clear rules on admission of new members and the Seoul plenary made clear mandates on how to deal with this issue. With these rules and mandates, we need to act as they dictate," he said."As for the criteria regarding admitting new members, as far as I know this plenary meeting in Switzerland will follow mandate of the Seoul plenary and uphold principle of decision upon consensus and continue to discuss various dimensions like technology, law, legal and political aspects of non-NPT countries admission the group," he said.China's repeated stonewalling of India's membership bid in the NSG has become a major stumbling block in bilateral relations.After India's application for entry into the 48-member elite group which controls the nuclear trade, Pakistan, the all-weather ally of China, too had applied with the tacit backing of Beijing.While India, which is backed by the US and a number of western countries has garnered the support of a majority of the group's members, China has stuck to its stand that new members should sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), making India's entry difficult as the group is guided by the consensus principle. India is not a signatory to the NPT After a series of meetings, China has backed a two-step approach which stipulates that the NSG members first need to arrive at a set of principles for the admission of non-NPT states into the NSG and then move forward with discussions of specific cases.The Bern meeting is being regarded significant as it is taking place after Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly took up the issue of India's accession to NSG with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during their recent meeting at Astana on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit.Asked about the cooperation between India and the US on the Indo-Pacific region, including the disputed South China Sea which was expected to figure during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to US, Geng said the situation in the South China Sea is cooling down."With the concerted efforts of China and ASEAN countries the situation there is cooling down. We hope other countries especially non-regional countries can respect efforts by the regional countries to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea and can play constructive role in this regard," he said.Bill Shorten gives qualified backing to stripping terrorists of citizenship
Updated
A plan to strip dual citizens with terror links of their Australian citizenship appears to have won the backing of the Federal Opposition.
But Labor leader Bill Shorten said he had concerns about another proposal to remove citizenship from sole Australian nationals — an idea that has also split Federal Cabinet.
That option is now the subject of a discussion paper but legislation dealing with dual nationals is due to be introduced to Parliament in a "week or so's time", according to Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
Mr Shorten has indicated the changes will have Labor's backing.
"We think it is a sensible development in principle that these dual citizens should not be able to claim any longer the marvellous gift of Australian citizenship when they're prepared to be part of terrorist organisations," he said.
"We think it is a sensible step, but we need to go beyond the principle discussion and see the detail."
Mr Abbott said "the principle is absolutely clear".
"We think that anyone who raises a gun or a knife to an Australian because of who we are has utterly forfeited any right to be considered one of us," he said.
But stripping people who can only claim Australian statehood of their citizenship is proving more problematic, including within the senior ranks of the Government.
A strident Cabinet discussion on the proposal was leaked to the media late last week, prompting the Prime Minister to have what he called a "come to Jesus moment" with ministers.
Senior ministers, including Malcolm Turnbull, Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne, were particularly concerned about granting the power to strip citizenship to the Immigration Minister.
The Opposition Leader is worried about that, too.
"We've got concerns with just ministers having those sort of powers, without a court process — that's a question mark, that's a new development," he said.
"If the Liberals can't even agree on the sole nationals matter, if Malcolm Turnbull is at odds with Tony Abbott, they've got to get house in order before they ask the rest of Australia to form their judgement."
Mr Shorten has called for a briefing from the Government on the laws, but Mr Abbott said he would receive one when the legislation was before the House.
Topics: terrorism, federal-government, government-and-politics, alp, australia
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Many of those who work on Wall Street go through a process in which they gradually learn that what is perceived as "smart investing" is often unbelievably dumb.
Specifically, they learn that many of the recommendations that Wall Street makes--and the transactions that Wall Street gets paid to facilitate--are not in their clients' best interests.
And once they learn that, they face a choice between two options:
Continue to make the same bad recommendations and trades. Change the way they do business, often in exchange for a lower initial salary.
One of those who changed is Josh Brown, a former stock broker who now writes a well-read financial blog called The Reformed Broker.
He worked for 10 years in the retail broker industry during both boom and bust markets. When times are good and people are making money, the inherent conflicts in the business are "masked," he says. But when the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked, Brown says, quoting Warren Buffett.
"As a retail broker, your job is to buy things with your clients money. That's it. When you are not doing that they pull the money," Brown tells The Daily Ticker in the accompanying interview. When times were bad and equities were not a good investment, he was forced to continue to buying, choosing the stocks that were the lesser of all evils.
After the market crash of 2008, he realized that he was hurting clients by selling them stocks he didn't think they should buy. Brown abandoned being a "broker" and became a financial adviser at Fusion Analytics. In this new job, Brown says, his interests and his client interests are more closely aligned.
Most people don't recognize that there's even a difference between a "stock broker" and a "financial adviser," but there is. And for clients, it's a critically important difference.
Stock brokers generally work for brokerage firms and do not have to recommend |
they don't trust us to think for ourselves as human beings, I don't know."
Prof Marmot, one of Britain's leading experts on stress at work, said the working conditions at the warehouse are "all the bad stuff at once".
He said: "The characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness."
"There are always going to be menial jobs, but we can make them better or worse. And it seems to me the demands of efficiency at the cost of individual's health and wellbeing - it's got to be balanced."
Amazon said official safety inspections had not raised any concerns and that an independent expert appointed by the company advised that the picking job is "similar to jobs in many other industries and does not increase the risk of mental and physical illness".
The scanner tracked Mr Littler's picking rate and sent his performance to managers. If it was too low, he was told he could face disciplinary action.
When Mr Littler worked night shifts his pay rose from the daily rate of £6.50 per hour to £8.25 per hour.
Image caption Amazon said the safety of its employees was its "number one priority"
After experiencing a ten-and-a-half-hour night shift, he said: "I managed to walk or hobble nearly 11 miles, just short of 11 miles last night. I'm absolutely shattered. My feet are the thing that are bothering me the most to be honest."
Amazon said new recruits are warned some positions are physically demanding and that some workers seek these positions as they enjoy the active nature of the work. The company said productivity targets are set objectively, based on previous performance levels achieved by the workforce.
Those on the night shift work a four-day week with an hour's break per shift.
Experts have told Panorama these ten-and-a-half-hour night shifts could breach the working time regulations because of the long hours and the strenuous nature of the work.
Barrister Giles Bedloe said: "If the work involves heavy physical and, or, mental strain then that night worker should not work more than eight hours in any 24-hour period.
But Amazon said its night shift is lawful. They said they sought expert advice to ensure the shifts "comply with all relevant legal requirements".
Amazon said it had invested £1bn in the UK and created 5,000 permanent jobs.
It added that it relied on the good judgement of thousands of employees. The company said: "Together we're working hard to make sure we're better tomorrow than we are today."
Panorama: The Truth Behind The Click, BBC One, Monday 25 November at 20:30 GMT and then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.On Tuesday night, Nevada governor Brian Sandoval signed into law the nation’s first universal school-choice program. That in and of itself is groundbreaking: The state has created an option open to every single public-school student. Even better, this option improves upon the traditional voucher model, coming in the form of an education savings account (ESA) that parents control and can use to fully customize their children’s education.
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Yes, school choice has often advanced through the introduction of vouchers and charter schools — which remain some of the most important reforms for breaking up the government education monopoly. But vouchers were, to quote researcher Matthew Ladner, “the rotary telephones of our movement — an awesome technology that did one amazing thing.” States such as Nevada (and Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee) have implemented the iPhone of choice programs. They “still do that one thing well, but they also do a lot of other things,” Ladner notes.
As of next year, parents in Nevada can have 90 percent (100 percent for children with special needs and children from low-income families) of the funds that would have been spent on their child in their public school deposited into a restricted-use spending account. That amounts to between $5,100 and $5,700 annually, according to the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Those funds are deposited quarterly onto a debit card, which parents can use to pay for a variety of education-related services and products — things such as private-school tuition, online learning, special-education services and therapies, books, tutors, and dual-enrollment college courses. It’s an à la carte education, and the menu of options will be as hearty as the supply-side response — which, as it is whenever markets replace monopolies, is likely to be robust.
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Notably, families can roll over unused funds from year to year, a feature that makes this approach particularly attractive. It is the only choice model to date that puts downward pressure on prices. Parents consider not only the quality of education service they receive, but the cost, since they can save unused funds for future education expenses.
Accountability is infused throughout the ESA option. Funding is distributed into the accounts quarterly, and parents provide receipts for expenditures to the state. In the event there is a misuse of funds, the subsequent quarter’s distribution can be withheld and used to rectify it. Students must also take a national norm-referenced test in math and reading, a light touch that doesn’t dictate students take a uniform state test.
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So imagine now what the future of education could look like in Nevada. Instead of being assigned to brick-and-mortar schools based on their parents’ ZIP codes, students can instead have their state funds deposited into an ESA. Parents can then craft a learning plan that matches best to the unique learning styles and needs of their children.
Perhaps that means Johnny spends the morning at a private school, and then in the afternoon gets private instruction in algebra from a tutor who meets him at home. At night, Johnny takes a dual-enrollment college course online.
The future of education financing is here. And the future is about separating the financing of education from the delivery of services. ESAs don’t dismantle public financing of education; they just recognize that education, although publicly financed, doesn’t have to be delivered through government schools.
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Nevada understands that, and understands it to such an extent that state policymakers and Governor Sandoval went all-in with a universal option. In other words, families in the Silver State have struck gold.
— Lindsey M. Burke is the Will Skillman Fellow in Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation.YAKIMA, Wash. -- Gaby Rodriguez would worry whenever anyone asked to touch her baby bump.
It wasn't because she felt shy or embarrassed. It was because the bulge -- fashioned from wire mesh and cotton quilt batting -- didn't actually contain a baby.
For the past 6� months -- the bulk of her senior year at Toppenish High School -- the 17-year-old A-student faked her own pregnancy.
Only a handful of people -- her mother, boyfriend and principal among them -- knew Gaby was pretending to be pregnant for her senior project, a culminating assignment required for graduation.
Her teachers and fellow students, except for her best friend, didn't realize they were part of a social experiment.
Neither did six of her seven siblings, including four older brothers, her boyfriend's parents, and his five younger brothers and sisters.
"At times, I just wanted to take it off and be done," she says. "I didn't want to go through this anymore."
But Gaby didn't give up the charade until Wednesday morning, when she revealed her secret during an emotional, all-school assembly.
The topic of her presentation: "Stereotypes, rumors and statistics."
"Teenagers tend to live in the shadows of these elements," she says.
Before taking off her fake baby belly in front of the entire student body, Gaby told her audience, "Many things were said about me. Many things traveled all the way back to me."
Then, she asked several students and teachers to read statements from 3x5 cards, quotes people actually said about her during the course of her experiment.
Her best friend, Saida Cortes, a 17-year-old senior who was sitting in the front row, read card No. 3: "Her attitude is changing, and it might be because of the baby or she was always this annoying and I never realized it."
It grew quiet in the gym as more and more quotes were read aloud. Then Gaby dropped her bomb: "I'm fighting against those stereotypes and rumors because the reality is I'm not pregnant."
She had been nervous about how the crowd might react. After all, she had been lying to them since October.
"It 'happened' at homecoming," says Principal Trevor Greene, making air quotes with his middle and index fingers at the word "happened."
"In essence, she gave up her senior year," he says. "She sacrificed her senior year to find out what it would be like to be a potential teen mom.
"I admire her courage. I admire her preparation. I give her mother a lot of credit for backing her up on this."
But, the principal continues, "I have a daughter that will be here next year, and I would not let her do it."
At first Gaby's mother wasn't sure what to make of the idea, either.
"I thought she was crazy," says 52-year-old Juana Rodriguez, adding it was difficult to lie to family members -- "It didn't feel good" -- but she felt she needed to support her daughter, who enlisted two mentors from Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital's Childbirth Education Program to help her with her project.
When Gaby approached Greene last spring, she says she worried he might say no. He says he was impressed with her determination. He also says he was "shocked."
"I heard her out," he says. "I listened to her presentation, her proposal. And then I went through all the difficulties I foresaw to making this happen."
People might talk about her behind her back. Her older brothers might want to beat up her boyfriend. And there might be backlash -- even broken relationships -- when students, teachers and family members learned the truth.
"None of that deterred her," Greene says, adding he felt he needed to get permission from the superintendent.
John Cerna signed off. In fact, he left the west side of the state -- where he had been attending a conference -- at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday in order to get to Gaby's 10:15 a.m. presentation.
"I wouldn't miss this," Cerna says, adding, "It's amazing that a young lady would take this challenge on. It was a well-kept secret."
Gaby began wearing her homemade, basketball-sized, prosthetic belly to school after spring break. Before that, she wore baggy sweaters and sweatshirts to conceal her faux pregnancy.
Her supposed due date was July 27, not quite two months after graduation.
Gaby and her boyfriend, 20-year-old Jorge Orozco, met at the homecoming game when she was a freshman and he was a senior. They started dating just over three years ago.
When Gaby told him her plan, "I thought she was nuts," the 2009 Toppenish High School graduate says. "I thought I was going to end up getting into problems with her brothers. I didn't really want to get into problems with anybody."
But "I was doing it for her," he says, adding, "My parents thought it was going to be a boy."
Gaby -- who has a grade-point average of 3.8 and serves as president of her school's MEChA, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztl�n, Club -- came up with the idea during her sophomore year Advanced Placement biology class with Shawn Myers. She's in his anatomy class this year.
"You saw the side comments and the looks at her stomach," says Myers, who says he wasn't disappointed -- "just concerned" -- when she told him she was pregnant.
He says he wondered: "How are we going to take all of the potential that's in this girl and make sure it manifests itself and not let this define who she is and let it be a roadblock to what she wants to accomplish?"
It's a question Hispanic teens are more likely to face than white teens, Gaby found in her research. Black and Hispanic teens continue to have higher pregnancy rates than white teens.
And most teens at Toppenish High School -- about 85 percent -- are Hispanic.
Gaby came clean to Myers and two other teachers, both women, Monday. The women, she says, seemed relieved.
Myers had a different reaction: "She kept talking, and it did not register. Then I just kind of leaned forward and said, 'Are you serious?' I told her, 'You've run a great value experiment. You couldn't tell anybody because you had to control the variables.'"
But, he says, "When you're running a social experiment, you're dealing with human emotions. The human person in me felt I had been lied to."
Wednesday, Gaby apologized to teachers and students for misleading them.
When she took off her baby belly, there were a few nervous giggles, and a loud, "Whaaaaat?!" from the audience.
Then, there was applause. And, at the end of the assembly, following a Q&A session, there was a standing ovation, the first one Greene says he remembers during his three-year tenure at Toppenish High School.
"She really fooled me. I never would've guessed it," says 17-year-old senior Vicente Villanueva. "I'm really surprised."
So was 19-year-old Angel Jalomo, a 2010 Davis High School graduate and Gaby's niece: "I didn't know what to say. I just started crying."
Gaby will present her research to a board of community members in May. It will include photos and video from Wednesday's assembly. And Gaby still needs to finish writing her report. But by revealing the project to students Wednesday, she can go on her English class trip to Ashland, Ore., on Friday without her baby belly.
Plus, she didn't want to be pregnant for prom. She already has her dress, a teal form-fitting mermaid gown with spaghetti straps.
Gaby plans to attend Columbia Basin College to study social work or sociology in the fall. And, she says, "I'm not planning to have a child until after I graduate."Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen vented her ire at Muslim fanatics again and took a swipe at Jaipur Literature Festival Organisers. On being asked whether she is attending the festival, she tweeted:
@taslimanasreen
Never invited. I think It's for the agreeable, manageable,uncontroversial,unquestionable elite writers RT @prakash_doc u r not going #jlf?
Malaysia banned #Vishwaroopam.Coward countries will ban it. Coward cinemas will not show it. This fear of Muslim fanatics is just plane stupid.
I wish I were a religious fundoo. I could have freedom to do whatever I like. I could ban books and films and arts,could threatened to kill anyone.
I have been writing for women's empowerment for almost three decades. Now three empowered women made my life hell. Khaleda, Hasina, Mamata.
Kolkata book fair started today. I'm not allowed to enter the fair. Bangladesh book fair will start after a few days. I'm not allowed to enter.
Please read our terms of use before posting commentsIn a blow to Sony Pictures, Lone Star Capital is ending its co-financing partnership with the studio after a series of film flops.
The deal with the Texas-based private equity firm will end at midnight on Monday. The pact was arranged through Lone Star’s credit affiliate, LStar. It had been supposed to co-finance “The Emoji Movie,” “Flatliners,” “The Star,” “Peter Rabbit,” and “Hotel Transylvania 3.”
Some of these films, such as “Flatliners” and “The Star” have co-financing partners lined up — a group of companies that includes Cross Creek and Walden. The Lone Star deal was not a profitable one for the financier and included such misses as “The Brothers Grimsby,” “Life,” and “Smurfs: The Lost Village.”
A spokesman for Sony Motion Pictures Group said Monday that the deal’s conclusion had been anticipated and would not have a negative impact on the studio.
“Lone Star has been a great partner for several years and as anticipated, the deal has concluded – and on a high note,” the spokesperson said. “The decision to part ways was mutual, and won’t impact the studio’s plans or our strong slate of upcoming films moving forward.”
Related ‘Blade Runner 2049’: Harrison Ford Warns Ryan Gosling in New Trailer (Watch)
Going forward, Lone Star may sell off its participation in future movies to another fund or company. DMG has ties to the financier and the studio, at one point, looked at potentially buying out its investment. However, a source with knowledge of the talks, said that DMG had walked away from talks with Sony about coming on board as an investor.
The Lone Star deal was signed in 2014 under the administration of Amy Pascal, who left her post as chairperson of the Motion Pictures Group of Sony Pictures Entertainment in early 2015 and was replaced by Tom Rothman. A studio insider said that Rothman had not been happy with the terms of the deal, believing them to be too generous, and did not see Lone Star’s exit as bad for the studio. Moreover, under Rothman Sony has been reining in budgets. It will still spend money on major superhero films and a few select blockbuster aspirants, but it is trying to become more economical, which reduces its need for a partner to defray costs and risks.
Still, it has been a bruising period for the studio. Sony has not hit the $1 billion milestone in annual domestic grosses since 2014. The studio generated only two 2016 titles with more than $100 million in domestic grosses last year with “Ghostbusters” at $128 million and “The Angry Birds Movie” at $107 million.
Sony’s top performer this year by far is “Spider-Man: Homecoming” with $208 million domestically and $468 million worldwide after less than two weeks. It also scored a low-budget hit with “Baby Driver,” a thriller with Ansel Elgort that has grossed nearly $100 million worldwide on a $34 million budget. The company is looking to continue the rebound with a sequel to “Jumanji” and spinoff Spider-Man movies based on Venom, Black Cat, and Silver Sable.You'll forgive us for frontloading this informational post about Doodle3D -- a simple sketching software tool, complete with hardware dongle, that's being Kickstarted -- with superlatives like "totally rad," but it's difficult to feel otherwise. The software is very accessible, enabling 2D drawings done on a computer, tablet, or smartphone to be wirelessly sent to a hardware dongle attached to a variety of 3D printers. Just like that, drawings are magically turned from crude 2D images into physical 3D objects; this principle is demonstrated in the group's Kickstarter video (below the break), which features a variety of non-techie folks using the application to thrilling results. More importantly? Not a single companion cube!
If you'd like to contribute, several tiered options are available. The early bird special affords 100 lucky folks a Doodle3D WiFi box for just $88, but that's quickly running out. The box will otherwise run you (at least) $99, and the team is expecting to ship them sometime in September -- should the project reach its $50,000 goal, that is. With 35 days to go and just over one fifth of that goal already funded, it's looking like that won't be an issue.Here is the cost of the current GOP tax bill placed in the context of other really expensive things. Although it’s not quite enough money to solve world hunger, it’s enough to end US homelessness four times over or fund nine simultaneous Apollo Programs.
I’m writing this post sort of as penance. During the primaries, I wrote a post arguing that Sanders’ college plan was bad. And compared to any reasonable use of the money, I still think that’s true.
But I worry that people – including me – focus way too much on the kind of bad idea that tries to help people but ends up being too expensive, and not enough on the kind of bad idea where there’s only the thinnest veneer of a claim anyone will be helped at all. If Sanders had been elected, and we were debating his college plan, people would be worried. The affordability of every piece of it would get run over with a fine-toothed comb. Its irresponsibility would be noticed.
Well, instead of Sanders we got Trump. I won’t say nobody’s talking about the tax plan – the problems with it have been all over the news – but are our fiscal irresponsibility detectors being triggered twice as strongly as they would if it was Sanders’ college plan we were considering?
There must be a toxoplasma effect going on here, where things that are possibly bad get debated to pieces, because debating them is so much fun – but things that are definitely bad, things that nobody likes, get through much more easily. Even more pessimistically, if Sanders proposed free college for everybody, it would get a lot of resistance precisely because the fact that so many people would benefit would make sure everyone knew about it and was thinking about it a lot and understood how big a deal it was. Since nobody except a few corporations benefits from the GOP tax plan, how do we even get a feel for how big and important it is?
Next election, if he’s running, I’m probably going to support Sanders, who seems like a decent person who really wants to help the poor. This is going to be a weird choice for someone who flirts with identifying as libertarian, given the whole socialism thing. But the thing is, we have antibodies to socialism. When people push socialism, we give it the scrutiny it deserves. I’m more worried about the things we don’t have antibodies to, and one of them is going to be passed by a joint session of Congress in the next week or two.She is the breakout star of one of the world's most watched shows, but seems some people are shocked that she is not sitting in coach.
Orange Is The New Black star Danielle Brooks has revealed she is regularly insulted by ticketing agents who seem shocked she is flying first class.
The 26-year-old, who plays Tasha 'Taystee' Jefferson on the Netflix hit, took to Twitter on Thursday morning to express her frustration and what appears to be a judgment based on her appearance.
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Being judged: Orange Is The New Black star Danielle Brooks has revealed she is regularly insulted by ticketing agents who seem shocked she is flying first class
The black actress wrote: 'I hate when gate agents look at me like I've never flown first class and say 'You're in first class, lucky you!' really tho.'
Her fans agreed that the ticket agents were out of line with some expressing anger and disappointment and others suggesting ways she could respond.
One Twitter reposded simply saying: '@thedanieb.......the ignorance is real.'
'Damn, probably because of your skin color,' a commenter pointed out.
Venting: The 26-year-old, who plays Tasha 'Taystee' Jefferson on the Netflix hit, took to Twitter on Thursday morning to express her frustration and what appears to be a judgment based on her appearance
Not impressed: Her fans agreed that the ticket agents were out of line with some expressing anger and disappointment and others suggesting ways she could respond
Another, who is also a racial inequalities expert, said: 'The expectation that black women are broke is pervasive. I have perfected the dead eyed 'You're not worth my time' face.'
Another OITNB fan wrote: 'Ew casual racism??? Go off girl.'
Other users felt a witty retort or a funny 'Don't you know who I am?' was in order.
'@thedanieb Next time just reply, ''They pay me enough per episode (gate agents name of airline name),''' one tweeted.
Breakout star: The actress (pictured at the Tony Awards earlier this month) has become a fan favourite for her role on OITNB having been on the Netflix show since it started
Another suggested saying: '@thedanieb tell them it's their lucky day too cause first month of Netflix is free so they can join.'
Aside from starring as Taystee on Netflix, Danielle has also been treading the boards of Broadway playing Sofia in the Color Purple.
Danielle - who attended Julliard - was nominated for a Tony for Best Featured Actress In A Musical.ROCKVILLE, MD — The next-door neighbor who slaughtered a Rockville couple on Mother's Day 2015 will spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance at parole, a judge ruled Tuesday. Scott Michael Tomaszewski, 33, served as caretaker at times for the property of Richard and Julianne Vilardo, and confessed to their murders when he was apprehended on a cruise ship in Alaska.
Tomaszewski was charged with two counts of first-degree murder after Montgomery County Police arrested him with blood-tainted cash police believe was that of the victims, and other items that tied him to a recent burglary and the murders. He pleaded guilty Sept. 20, 2016, to the slayings of the Vilardoes, who were found at their home on the morning of May 10, 2015.
Prosecutors said Richard Vilardo had been stabbed 47 times. His body was found near the home. Julianne Vilardo was found inside the home. She had been stabbed eight times.
Prosecutors said Tomaszewski had conducted Google searches for "how to break into a home." On the night of the murders he cut and removed a screen from a first floor window at the Vilardo house, climbed inside, then attacked the couple in their bedroom.
Police say Tomaszewski posted a Facebook message about his victims' deaths the night he killed them. "My deepest sympathies go out to our neighbors who were found deceased today. I pray that their children are somehow able to make it through this horrible tragedy. They were such nice people. I can't imagine who would do this. Scary to hear about this having possibly happened as we were leaving for our trip," he posted, according to WJLA.
Life in prison with no chance of parole is the maximum sentence allowed by Maryland law. Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy had asked the court, in a written memo filed ahead of the hearing, that Tomaszewski receive the maximum punishment.
"No mercy was shown to Richard and Julianne," McCarthy wrote, says WTOP. "Maryland has already shown the defendant mercy by deciding he will not suffer the same fate as his victims. The defendant has already received more mercy than his actions suggest he deserves."
More at Patch:
The victims' son, Andrew Vilardo, called Tomaszewski a monster during the September court hearing. Prosecutors said Tomaszewski planned to rob his neighbors, slipped into the home about 1 a.m., and stabbed Dick Vilardo nearly 50 times. He slashed Julianne Vilardo's neck so brutally that her spinal cord and spinal column were severed, reports WTOP.
Dick Vilardo fought with Tomaszewski before he collapsed from his wounds. "The last act on Earth Mr. Richard Viladro was engaged in, I firmly believe, was his last effort to try to save his wife," McCarthy said.
After the bloody attacks, Tomaszewski, grabbed a ginger ale from the couple's refrigerator and then returned home.
The parents of Tomaszewski said in a statement after his arrest that they "are a family in shock and filled with sadness." Rockville attorney John Kudel, who defended the double-homicide suspect, read a statement from the Tomaszewski family after the arrest.
"The Tomaszewski family is devastated by the tragic deaths of their neighbors Richard and Julianne Vilardo and the fact that their son Scott has been charged with the commission of these crimes," Kudel said in June 2015.
Joe and Janette Tomaszewski had recently retired from careers in oncology medicine and research, according to Kudel.
»Photos of Richard and Julianne Vilardo, and Scott Tomaszewski, courtesy of Montgomery County PoliceHillary Clinton pounced on late-breaking news Tuesday of two fatal police shootings of a black men in Charlotte, North Carolina and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In a direct tweet from the Democratic presidential nominee herself — marked by an “-H” — Clinton tweeted at 1:35 p.m. on Tuesday, “Another unarmed Black man was shot in a police incident. This should be intolerable. We have so much work to do.”
Though Clinton was talking about the shooting in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her inflammatory weight-in no doubt helped incite the violent riots that left 16 police injured in Charlotte.
Brentley Vinson — a black police officer — shot and killed Keith Lamont Scott, a father of seven, in a parking lot while serving a warrant to a different man in the adjacent apartment complex Tuesday in North Carolina's largest city. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has said that Scott was holding a gun and pointed to eyewitness accounts that back up the police account.
"The subject got back out of the vehicle armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject," police said, according to KTLA-5.
Details of the Tulsa, Oklahoma shooting were certainly limited at the time Clinton sent her tweet, with just an ABC affiliate reporting the shooting victim was unarmed.
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Waiting to know the facts didn't stop Clinton, and others held hostage by their allegiance to the Black Lives Matter movement, from rushing to judgement on the incident.
The incident is particularly iconic coming just days after the liberal media pounced all over Republican nominee Donald Trump for immediately calling the weekend explosions in New York and New Jersey the results of a terrorist bombing before that was confirmed by law enforcement. It turned out the explosions did indeed arise from jihadist bombs.
"[Trump's] being criticized for talking about the New York bomb before local officials or local law enforcement had a chance to do so," CNN's "State of the Union" host Jake Tapper told New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie Sunday. "And his opponent tried to draw a contrast. She waited hours later, until local officials spoke, and then she said this."
Tapper then proceeded to air a conveniently edited clip that omitted Clinton mentioning the "bombings in New York and New Jersey," emphasizing instead Clinton saying, "I think it's important to know the facts about any incident like this. I think it's always wiser to wait until you have information before making conclusions."
Related Content PoliZette CNN Censors Tape to Back Up Hypocritical Hillary Tapper implies Trump reaction to 'bombings' inappropriate, edits clip of Clinton saying same thing
Similar to other recent police-shooting incidents, a social media wave that included Clinton's tweet precipitated violent protests across the city of Charlotte.
Chanting "No justice, no peace," the protesters stormed Interstate 85 as TV footage showed them appearing to loot semi trucks and setting the objects on fire on the highway. Others chucked rocks and bottles at police officers gathered to monitor the riot, including striking one officer in the face with a rock. The protesters also jumped on at least one police van and stomped on it while smashing its windows. Police ultimately dispersed tear gas in an attempt to control and clear the streets at around 11 p.m. on Tuesday. At least seven bystanders who sustained injuries were taken to the hospital and at least five protesters were arrested.
At least 16 police officers were injured in the clash.
The mainstream media, of course, is unlikely to press Clinton or her campaign for her role in inciting violence against police officers and for misleading the public on a law enforcement incident before the facts were known.
"We have got to tackle systemic racism," Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said Tuesday on "The Steve Harvey Morning Show" while addressing last week's police shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "And maybe I can, by speaking directly to white people, say, 'Look, this is not who we are' … We have got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias."Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Cops are investigating whether the death of a young man in Ireland is linked to internet craze 'Neknomination' - the second death this weekend to be associated with the social media drinking game.
The body of Jonny Byrne, 19, was recovered from the River Barrow in Co Carlow this morning, the Irish Mirror reports.
It's believed Jonny, from Leighlinbridge, had been playing the game before jumping into the river last night.
The news comes after the death of Dublin DJ Ross Cummins, 22, which was also linked to the social media drinking game.
Ross, 22, was found unconscious in a house in Dublin city centre in the early hours of yesterday morning.
The DJ was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead shortly afterwards.
Last night Jonny's brother Patrick posted a statement on his Facebook page asking people to stop taking part in the deadly drinking game.
Carlow GAA has also paid tribute to the young man - a hurling player - describing him as a "warrior on the pitch."
It added that he was "a rock in defence and gave 100 per cent on the pitch every time.
“A kind soul well liked throughout Carlow especially in hurling, he was a great hurler and footballer, a gentleman and an even greater friend and we are heartbroken”.
A spokesman for Alcohol Action Ireland last night warned people to be aware of the dangers.
He said: “While some may see this as a game, the consequences of drinking large volumes of alcohol in a short period of time can have very real consequences for those taking part.
“We would call on people to look after their health and well-being by not participating in this ‘game’ and to protect their friends from the serious risks associated with it by not nominating them to take part.”Share. This is a job for more than one Mega Man. This is a job for more than one Mega Man.
Earlier this year, Archie Comics announced a follow-up to 2013's "Worlds Collide" crossover that combined their Mega man and Sonic the Hedgehog comics. Details about this new project have been few and far between, with the company simply promising that this second chapter will be "bigger and better." But now we can exclusively reveal that Worlds Unite won't just involve Sonic and Mega Man crossing paths again, it'll also bring the Mega Man X and Sonic Boom universes into the mix.
Worlds Unite is a mini-series that will be written by Ian Flynn, who currently pens the Mega Man, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sonic Boom Comics for Archie. The covers for Worlds Unite will be drawn by Patrick "Spaz" Spaziante, though no interior artist has been announced yet.
"Not one, but TWO new casts will be joining the battle in this summer's Sonic/Mega Man WORLDS UNITE crossover event! The worlds of Sonic Boom and Mega Man X will be joining the fray, accompanying the worlds of Sonic the Hedgehog and Mega Man in the biggest crossover event in Archie Action history! " said Archie Action editor Paul Kaminski.
Kaminski continued, "The Sonic Boom comic series is part of the latest multi-media initiative from Sega, which includes video games, toys, and an all-new TV series on cartoon Network! Mega Man X has been a staple of video game culture for decades, and we were thrilled to begin exploring that futuristic universe in 2014's Dawn of X storyline in the Mega Man comics! How will the slapstick antics of the ever-paranoid Sticks the Badger measure up against the futuristic action of X and the Maverick Hunters? Pick up Worlds Unite, starting this spring from Archie Action, to find out! And this is only the tip of the iceberg…"
Look for Worlds Unite to kick off sometime in Spring 2015.
Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.Since last weeks Big 12 “Kumbaya” lovefest and unity declaration, movement in the world of conference realignment did slow down. But as nothing has officially been signed in the Big 12, things are still in motion.
So here’s where we stand:
Big 12 Stability:
* Yes, the Big 12 seems to be doing what they did just last year…pledge unity with each other, with Texas and Oklahoma being the primary torch carriers for the conference. This year, the recommended changes weren’t to help the top ranking members like last years decisions were. This time around, unity was defined as spreading the wealth. So what is on the table is equal revenue sharing for Tier 1 and Tier 2 television rights. But the kicker…
* The 6 year conference grants rights: on the table is where all Big 12 members would forfeit their TV rights to the Big 12 for a 6 year period…and the current TV deal runs for 5 years. So if a school left the Big 12, they would not even have their own TV rights for that year. The result would be a revenue loss greater than a simple “exit fee” would be. But…
* Missouri seems to be holding things up. There are reports from the SEC that they are not expecting to expand beyond 14. But it seems to be a semantics game at this point. We know the SEC has some level of interest in Missouri. We know this because all the Big 12 members, including their acting commissioner, have made reference to Missouri and the school waiting to decide if they will remain in the Big 12. As we know they are not considering an offer from another conference, it would seem that Missouri is still considering the SEC.
* The SEC semantics game is likely legal posturing. They have made it clear that a school must reach out the the SEC and apply to the SEC in order to ever be considered. Legally, the SEC is positioning themselves so that IF they added Missouri, it would be Missouri reaching out to them.
* Missouri will have a meeting on Tuesday to discuss their conference situation. If they opt to pursue the SEC, they would follow the same path as Texas A&M in negotiations. If they opt to remain in the Big 12, it is a 6 year commitment. Missouri would need to join the other Big 12 members and everyone sign the 6 year grants waiver. Result would mean Missouri would be off the table for the SEC or any other conference (Big Ten) for 6 years.
* If Missouri does have the SEC as an option, it would be tough to pass on after the past 2 years in the Big 12. Especially since passing means that if the SEC finds 13 schools to be too difficult and needs a 14th, they would be |
sublime flavour and I admit to it being one of my favourites. You know, its the worlds top selling flavour ice cream! Why? Because vanilla is a great flavour and every now and again I love making it the star of the show.
To make sure the vanilla packed a punch I used it in 3 different ways, firstly I used vanilla sugar in the batter. I refuse to buy vanilla sugar because it costs a fortune I always make my own, if you’re not sure how to then check out an earlier post of mine about it here.
Secondly I used seeds scraped out of a vanilla pod, check out those gorgeous little black flecks, pure vanilla heaven! Whatever you do don’t throw out the used pod for ideas on what to do with it check out this post!
Then I used a good quality vanilla extract to bring it all together in the donut and in the icing. If you are a vanilla fan then you will love these.
Sprinkles
Who doesn’t love sprinkles? There was no other reason to use them then the fact it’s my birthday soon and I love a good splash of colour, but it does give these lovely soft donuts a nice little crunchy topping, which is a bonus 😀
Soft and Fluffy
Because these are baked donuts and not fried ones they do have a more cake like texture than the doughy fried ones. But the advantage being these are far more healthier, there is very little sugar in these I have used ingredients likes low fat buttermilk, apple sauce and natural yogurt to keep the fats down and they have no butter in them! But everything combines does keep these baked donuts soft, moist and fluffy.
I just love those vanilla seeds! So am I alone in loving vanilla or are there a bunch of vanilla appreciating people out there? I hope so because vanilla is a great flavour and at times forgotten about for the flashier flavours of today, but I take comfort in the fact vanilla will out last them all after all its a classic 😀
∗NOTE: If you do not have any vanilla sugar and don’t want to buy any (I understand it can be expensive) then substitute it for regular granulated sugar instead.Power is slowly returning to Detroit, Michigan, after a massive power outage on Tuesday morning left much of the Motor City in the dark.
As of 2:15 p.m., about 33 percent of the power outages had been restored, according to the Detroit Free Press, while the majority of city buildings should have electricity back by the evening. In a statement, the city said the power grid was shut down following a "major cable failure."
"The city's public lighting grid suffered a major cable failure that has caused the entire grid to lose power at approximately 10:30 this morning," read the statement. "The outage is affecting all customers on the PLD grid. We have isolated the issue and are working to restore power as soon as possible."
Spokespeople for the city and DTE Energy confirmed at around 11:00 a.m. local time on Tuesday that most of Detroit’s municipal grid is offline, preventing power from being delivered to police stations, schools, traffic lights and other city-run facilities and services.
Municipal buildings were being evacuated, WXYZ Radio anchor Alicia Smith tweeted early Tuesday, although eyewitnesses on the ground told her shortly after 11 a.m. that people were reportedly becoming stuck in elevators.
#BREAKING: #Detroit spokesman says most of municipal grid is down -no power to police,fire,municipal bldgs,schools,jails,traffic lights,etc. — Alicia Smith (@wxyzalicia) December 2, 2014
According to Smith, a spokesperson for the city of Detroit confirmed that most of the municipal power grid was down. Residential structures are apparently unaffected, and some of the emergency facilities — like fire stations — have back-up generators, a local Fox News affiliate reported.
Every fire house in Detroit right now has a power outage, Detroit Fire Department confirms — Robert Allen (@rallenMI) December 2, 2014
“It looks like the entire Detroit Public Lighting system is down. Affecting about 100 buildings, places like The Joe, Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, fire stations, schools. We were notified about 10:30 a.m. We’re working with them to help resolve the situation. We’ll help investigate the problem and make repairs. It’s too early yet to determine what has caused the shutdown,” Scott Simons of DTE Energy Co. told the Detroit News.
Evacuations happening throughout downtown due to a massive power outage #Detroit#Local4pic.twitter.com/xCNbefgCXf — Jamal Bransford (@VideoManJamal) December 2, 2014
Detroit Fire Chief Jack Wiley added to Fox 2 that every one of the city’s firehouse was experiencing outages early Tuesday. Around 50 buildings on the local Wayne State University campus were impacted as well, according to the college, and grade schools in the city were shutting down for the day.
“We have crisis plans in place. There are backup generators running in buildings, especially buildings with labs,” Tom Reynolds, associate director of public relations for Wayne State University, told Detroit News journalist Holly Fournier.
This is what evacuating 900 student visitors looks like! #DetroitPowerOutagepic.twitter.com/tCjhh7FV8c — Detroit Inst of Arts (@DIADetroit) December 2, 2014
According to the paper, a high-profile murder-for-hire trial was interrupted due to the outages.
"This is unusual... it's cold. They don't own a generator? They should look into that,” one attendee at the proceedings told the News.Updated at 3:45 p.m. ET.
U.S. military officials attempting to evacuate Americans in a conflict-riddled region of South Sudan were shot at by rebel gunfire, injuring four and forcing an aborted mission.
The South Sudanese government said it lost control of Bor, the capital of the state of Jonglei, earlier this week, to renegade troops, and was attempting to retake the state capital. Fighting reportedly began Saturday, after rebel soldiers randomly opened fire on civilians, the Associated Press reports. Three CV-22 Ospreys, aircrafts that can fly like a helicopter and a plane, were forced to divert to an airfield outside the country.
A United Nations helicopter helping to evacuate peacekeepers and civilians was also struck in Jonglei Saturday.
President Barack Obama urged peaceful negotiations to resolve the political conflict in South Sudan and threatened to cut off U.S. support if military force is used to seize power, according to a White House statement. The president also emphasized that the nation’s leaders are accountable for securing the safety of American citizens amid the clash.
Tensions are mounting over a potential civil war in the newly formed country, after South Sudan President Salva Kiir ousted vice president Riek Machar and accused him of a failed coup. Ethnic tensions are being blamed. The region has been the backdrop to some of the worst violence the country has seen since it became independent from Sudan in 2011.
Machar said rebel troops have seized the oil-rich state Unity and now control majority of the country, the BBC reports. The former vice president confirmed with the BBC that the rebel troops were under his power.
[AP]About This Game Ultimate Arena is a competitive first person shooter arena game.
Compete against other players online to prove your worth, wielding a loadout of 12 brutal weapons and wrecking total havoc within the arenas!
Control health, armor and weapon pickups throughout the map to gain an advantage against your foes.
Prepare to frag like you never have!
Weapons
-------------
Gauntlet
You spawn with it. This short ranged melee blade will hack and prune anyone dumb enough to get too close up and personal.
Pistol
You spawn with it. The long range and moderate firing rate will allow you to pick off enemies at both medium and long distances, providing they don't overtake you with heavier firepower. Secondary fire uses ice charges which are able to temporary freeze opponents, bogging them down.
Shotgun
The pump action shotgun inflicts considerable damage at close range.
Double Shotgun
Slower than the pump action shotgun but twice as deadly at close range.
Assault Rifle
A special hybrid automatic rifle which peppers foes with 16mm rounds even at long range without ever having the need to reload. Lethal if you have an accurate aim.
Shredder
This unique and nasty tool fires a pair of circular blades in quick succession. You can ricochet them off walls and slice foes who are out of your line of sight.
Rocket Launcher
Blow stuff up. Solve problems.
Grenade Launcher
This particular model is able to detonate your grenades at any given moment by using secondary fire.
Laser Prism
The electric beam is able to harm targets at medium range. Your accuracy will determine the outcome of the fight.
Plasma Cannon
Designed to sweep large areas with plasma projectiles. You'll need to properly predict the enemies movement in order to get the best out of this weapon.
Gas Rifle
This thing spews foulness all over the place. Good for crowd control. The low damage is heavily compensated by the large area of effect.
Crossbow
Primary fire shoots deadly bolts at high speed. Secondary fire also consumes electricity ammo but allows higher range and damage by using electrified arrows.Senator Derryn Hinch uses parliamentary privilege to name'monster' cop who raped children over 16 years. Credit:Andrew Meares This is despite pleas from a number of his victims who say they want to share publicly their stories of horrific abuse at the hands of the convicted paedophile, in the hope other survivors will come forward. "I am going to tell you a horror story tonight," Senator Hinch said in Parliament on Tuesday evening. "About a five-year-old girl... Raped almost daily. "To the extent, that when she was nine... her grandmother took her to the doctor. She was having a miscarriage."
"When this child rapist was sentenced, the County Court judge suppressed his name supposedly to protect the identity of his victims." "Even though three of his victims asked the court to name him because they believed more victims would come forward if they knew it was him and he was behind bars." "The community deserves to know the name of the man accurately described as 'a monster'." Senator Hinch went on to detail the man's abhorrent crimes, including how he assaulted another child in a room at a police station, and sexually abused another little girl who had lost her mother at a carnival in the back of a police divisional van. The County Court heard last year Victoria Police failed to act on complaints about the policeman and instead the organisation forced the officer to resign in 1979.
Senator Hinch said the man then went on another reign of terror, sexually assaulting and raping children for at least another four years in New South Wales. The man, now 67, worked as a police officer between 1967 and 1979, during which time he preyed on boys and girls, often in his uniform and under the pretext of police duties. One of his victims told Fairfax Media she was just five years old when he held a police revolver to her temple and raped her. The sexual abuse continued until she was 15. "Some nights I would just pray I wouldn't wake up in the morning... that somehow my heart would just stop beating," she said.
The victim said under Victoria's Judicial Proceedings Reports Act, her abuser could not be named throughout the County Court case last year. The act suppresses the name of an accused, if it could lead to indirect identification of a victim. However, the victim said she wanted the convicted paedophile "named and shamed" so he was held accountable for his crimes. "I want to be identified, I want my story told, but the court has prevented that from happening," the victim said. "I found the [court] process re-traumatising... I had fought for so long for justice and I felt protecting his name in court was protecting him and his reputation from what he had done... it wasn't protecting us."
"Standing up in court, looking him in the eye, and reading my victim impact statement was the most rewarding and empowering thing I have ever done in my life." "I told him: 'You can't hurt anyone anymore, you won't be able to touch another kid for as long as you live'." The woman was one of a number of the man's victims who flew to Canberra to watch Senator Hinch deliver his speech in Parliament. "To have his name out there for the horrific things he did to me and others is closure for me," she said. Loading
It is not the first time Senator Hinch has used parliamentary privilege to name and shame convicted child sex offenders. Senator Hinch, who recently succeeded in securing government support to tear up paedophiles' passports, is also lobbying for a national child sex offender register.Demaryius Thomas was one of the big winners during a wild Wednesday in the NFL, but players around the league received some collateral benefits. That started with A.J. Green and Julio Jones, two top-tier receivers who are up for new contracts. And Green knew it.
Thomas revealed Friday at his press conference in Denver that Green was one of the first people to contact him after signing the deal. The message?
"Thank you," Green said.
Green has been publicly comfortable with playing out the final year of his contract. He's betting on himself, and with good reason. Thomas' five-year, $70 million contract is likely going to be the starting point for negotiations for Green. As great as Thomas and Dez Bryant have been in the NFL, Green has been even better.
Here were a few more takeaways from Thomas' press conference:
1. Thomas spoke publicly for the first time about his mom since President Barack Obama granted commutations to 46 federal prisoners locked up for non-violent drug charges, including Thomas' mother.
"I just had two things happening in one week and it's just amazing," Thomas said.
2. Thomas isn't sure when his mother will be able to watch him play. She is headed to a halfway house in Georgia in two weeks, and has never flown on a plane in her life.
3. Thomas said he was confident more than a week ago that a deal would be completed. He also said he would have never skipped regular season games, just training camp.
The latest Around The NFL Podcast discusses recent news from around the league, including the new contracts for Dez Bryant and Demaryius Thomas.Quite a scoop — and from quite a source. This is coming from Howard Kurtz of Fox News, which of course has a business interest in reminding viewers that FNC is now essentially the exclusive outlet for Donald Trump interviews. They don’t call it TrumpTV for nothing!
Any theories on why Paul Manafort might want to limit media access to a guy who spent the last week ranting about whether his social-media team should or shouldn’t be borrowing Star of David images from white nationalists?
According to sources familiar with the campaign, one faction is worried that the constant rounds of interviews entail too much risk of the candidate making mistakes or fanning minor controversies, even though his mastery at driving the media agenda helped power his Republican primary victory. A series of clashes over these and other tactical questions has caused Trump himself to openly question who is running his campaign, the sources say. And he has expressed anger when he believes his orders aren’t being followed… Trump, who has resumed his full-throated denunciations of the media—such as calling CNN the Clinton News Network—personally vetted every TV invitation for most of the campaign. Now the staff is weeding out many requests without consulting him, the sources say, which could either be viewed as a mark of professionalization or an attempt to restrain Trump from being Trump… Several weeks ago, high-level staffers concluded at a meeting that the boss should be limited to no more than three interviews a week, print reporters included. He wound up meeting that quota in just half a day.
He hasn’t done an interview on MSNBC in a month and a half and his last interview on CNN was in mid-June. I myself noticed his disappearance from the Sunday shows a few weeks ago in writing the weekly Sunday preview. Suddenly Trump was nowhere to be found, replaced by the duo of Manafort on one show and (while he was still with the campaign) Corey Lewandowski on another. For a guy like Trump who’s supremely narcissistic and who beat the pros in the primaries via little more than his command of the media, losing access to reporters must be baffling and infuriating. Why would his campaign not want to unleash the Trump? America loves the Trump! Republicans nominated the Trump. The Trump is master of every microphone he surveys. Holding him back and quietly canceling his interviews suggests that his own campaign team has come to view his unfiltered thoughts as more of a liability than an asset.
And that certainly can’t be true.
On the merits, there’s nothing wrong with Team Trump limiting their guy’s exposure. Even doing the occasional Hannitized interview on Fox, he’s still vastly more accessible than Hillary Clinton, who’s been gutlessly ducking press conferences for months. So long as his rallies, where he’s in total control of the message, are carried live on networks that he’s boycotting, he has no reason to expose himself to needless jeopardy from Q&As with tough journalists like Jake Tapper. Except for one thing: Trump is counting on earned media to make up the difference between him and Hillary financially. She and her Super PACs will end up raising many millions more than he will but a man who received $2 billion in media coverage in the primaries gratis can afford to be outraised and outspent. If he’s forfeiting earned media opportunities now for fear that he’ll say something stupid in interviews, though, he’s necessarily increasing the disparity between his media reach and Hillary’s. That’s worth doing only if his team has given up on the possibility of Trump reforming himself and becoming a more disciplined candidate, i.e. if they suspect he’s more likely to damage himself than help himself in interviews. I don’t know what other conclusion can be gleaned from Kurtz’s report.
Speaking of fundraising, some Republicans tells David Drucker that Trump’s $51 million haul in June, while a vast improvement over May, still holds ominous signs for the campaign:
Trump financed his primary campaign with his own money from his personal coffers. He did not begin soliciting donations until late May. That means that donors, both small and wealthy, were fresh and potentially eager to give, having not been exhausted or burned out by a series of previous “asks” for money during the past year… From that standpoint, Trump raising $25 million from 22 events that, according to the campaign, stretched from late May through June 30, looks tepid… “Twenty-two events raising $25 million? On the surface that looks pretty weak considering how much they can accept into the joint account,” said a Republican fundraising strategist, who, like others, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.
Donors can give as much as $449,400 to the joint fundraising committee organized by Trump and the RNC. Assume there were 50 rich Republicans at each of the 22 events in June; in order to get to $25 million you’re talking about an average donation of not quite … $23,000. If few of those donors had donated before and they’re all aware that Trump’s facing a huge fundraising disadvantage against Hillary, there’s no obvious reason for them to lowball their donation except for lack of enthusiasm for the candidate. See now why earned media (and small donors) are so important for Trump? This new three-interviews-a-week policy comes at a cost. Which is why it probably won’t last much longer.A city can feel like two totally different places depending on whether you rent or own your home, and Austin is no exception.
The median household income for homeowners in Austin is around $86,000 a year. For renters, it’s under $40,000. Non-Hispanic whites make up less than half of Austin’s population, but more than two thirds of the city's homeowners. Renters are much likelier to be younger and live in a smaller place.
Those are just a few of the differences KUT came across in a review of Census data.
"Austin is very much a renter's city. About 55 percent of people here rent, which is high."
Elizabeth Mueller, a professor of community and regional planning at UT Austin, helped us dig into the numbers. She was not surprised by the results, but said they’re important when you consider the rising cost of living in Austin.
“[Renters] are much more likely to have what [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] calls a cost burden,” says Mueller, “where they spend more than 30 percent of their gross income on their rent and utilities. And some of them spend over 50 percent of that.”
That’s a special concern in Austin where proposals to help lower income renters are often met with resistance from property owners who oppose greater building density, or the construction of low-income units in their neighborhoods.
“Austin is very much a renter’s city,” says Juliana Gonzalez, the executive director of the Austin Tenants Council. “About 55 percent of people here rent, which is high.”
Gonzalez says two segments of Austin’s renting population are growing fastest.
“That’s that high-end renters and those low-income, poor renters,” she says. “Although those are the two parts of our population growing the most quickly, the development is really happening on the high-end, luxury end.”
That gives lower income renters fewer options and less leverage when it comes to negotiating with landlords over everything from the cost of rent, to doing basic repairs on a property.
Prospects might be a little rosier for renters of market-value units. For those units, analysts say prices may begin to moderate as Austin’s building boom continues.
“We’ve got 6,000 units under construction [in Austin’s central core],” says Robin Davis, an analyst with Austin Investor Interest. “So I think that in time we will see some of [the high prices] we are currently seeing dissipate.”
But that development isn’t likely to help lower-income renters.
“New stock will contribute to supply, but it is, especially in the center, going to continue to be fairly expensive,” says UT's Elizabeth Mueller. “That’s why if we can think about existing rental housing apartment complexes that are well located, we should really try to keep them affordable. Purchase them and keep them affordable.”1974: President Nixon to resign from office
Richard Nixon has announced he is stepping down as president of the United States - the first man ever to do so.
He has announced his departure in the face of an imminent impeachment trial - and possible removal from office - over the Watergate affair.
The president broke the news of his resignation in a television broadcast from the White House on Thursday at 2100 local time. It will take effect from noon tomorrow.
Mr Nixon, 61, said initially he had believed it was his duty to complete his term of office despite the Watergate charges.
"In the past days, however, it has become evident that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort," he said.
"As president I must put the interests of America first."
Successor
Mr Nixon has been charged by the House Judiciary Committee with "high crimes and misdemeanours".
The charges stem from a 1972 break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex.
The break-in, during that year's election campaign, was traced to members of a Nixon-support group, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP).
Tape recordings have shown the president subsequently tried to influence the police investigation into the crime.
Mr Nixon is leaving office with more than two years of his second term left to run.
In his address Mr Nixon said he would be succeeded by US vice-president Gerald Ford.
Mr Ford will be sworn in as the 38th president of the United States tomorrow.https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/70/904
Al Ljutic (LEW-tic) was quite the interesting character, from his early days as a professional boxer to his selection for the US 1940 Olympic rifle team, to his eventual primary business making excellent high-end trap shotguns. One of the first was a gun he built for himself which wound up becoming the Space Gun. A very unorthodox looking gun, it offered remarkable recoil reduction for a single shot 12ga, as well as a very natural fit and sight picture. Only about 200 were ever made, though, as Ljutic focused instead on his Mono-Gun, which was a much more tradition looking (but no less excellent) design, and which became very popular.
This is Space Gun #107, and we can take a look at the locking and firing system which makes it so comfortable to shoot. Basically, it is a single shot bolt action with a very heavy striker, the forward impact of which counteracts some of the rearward recoil of firing. This is sometimes describes (incorrectly) as being a slam-fire gun...
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weaponsThe internet giveth and the internet taketh away—and nowhere has that been more evident than in the music business, where the recording industry is decimated by file-sharing even as the web allows artists to reach fans in new and exciting ways.
One of these new music phenoms, who became popular because of the internet, is rapper Childish Gambino. Better known as Donald Glover, the former writer on "30 Rock" and soon-to-be-former star of cult sitcom "Community," the artist is a bit of an anomaly.
Last year he decided to make the lateral move from acting to music, and defy hip-hop conventions by rapping about his feelings like a less egotistical Drake (who, of course, was also an anomalous TV star).
Glover then took that honesty even further this past summer, posting a series of instantly infamous Instagrams listing his many insecurities. The move prompted media outlets (we, admittedly, dubbed them "troubling") to worry that he was having a breakdown.
"Why am I crazy for being honest?" he asked us. But of course, the reason for the widespread overreaction is shared in the title of Childish Gambino's new top ten album, "Because The Internet."
On a recent trip to Toronto, Glover sat down with me to have a long, winding conversation that, surprisingly, ended in a detour about the racism that even a famous black man faces in America. (Read that story here.)
But before we got there, we had an in-depth discussion about Glover's departure from "Community," Drake's origins online, how the internet has changed hip-hop and ourselves, and what he thinks about people who say, "Put your cellphone down, let's go back to reading books and having real conversations." (Spoiler: "They're fucking lame and stupid.")
Oh, and to be fair, Glover doesn't defy all hip-hop conventions: he casually puffed pot through a vaporizer during our entire ritzy hotel room interview.
Q&A continues after slideshow
Photo gallery Childish Gambino Videos and Photos See Gallery Childish Gambino On Quitting 'Community,' Drake's Online Origins, And His Infamous Instagrams 1 / 24
Childish Gambino Videos and Photos 1 / 24
Have you had issues being taken seriously as a rapper coming from another medium?
I mean, yeah, but it's kind of like asking a kid, "Are you afraid of the dark?" The problem was I was looking at it like, "I'm an actor wanting to be a rapper." All of that sentence is wrong. The sentence should be, "I'm an artist."
Why do people act like it's such a crazy thing?
It's a lot of work to not see me as Troy Barnes if you love Troy. That's the thing, it's just work. Everybody's aware that I'm not Troy, but it's just way easier to see me on the street and be like, "Hey, Troy!"
Do people say that a lot?
Yeah. People don't say, "Oh my gosh, I love the acting, I like the way this actor does this." No, they like that character and when they see that person, they want to see the character they fell in love with.
Especially if it's a show that has a cult following, I guess, where fans are really into it.
Human beings are...we’re weird. TV is still pretty new. I don’t know if people are totally okay yet with, like, "I see this person on TV every day, he brings me joy every day or she brings me joy every day, and now I see them for real." Of course they're gonna to be like, 'Be that thing I know."
People initially wondered how Will Smith could be anything other than Fresh Prince. But he was really funny in the music videos—it makes sense that he could do all this other stuff.
But I think I'm doing something kind of different, like this isn't part of the same brand. It was time for me to transition because this is who I am. That’s why I left, because that isn't who I am. Being on "Community" was awesome and it's one of my favourite shows, but that's not something I would do anymore as an artist endeavor.
You've had all these different outlets. What is it about hip-hop that appeals to you as far as like being an outlet for your artistic expression?
I never really look at all those things like that. Like I never really looked at it, "Oh, I wanna do hip-hop."
Right, but you're saying that with “Community” you didn't write your words, so you weren't really being yourself. So obviously with this there's like no intermediary, there’s no filter, right?
With “Community” it wasn't like, "I didn't write those words so I wasn't being myself." When I first started on "Community" that was definitely me. That’s like how I would display myself.
But it was also a character that had never really been seen on TV before, right?
Yeah, there's a uniqueness to that character that you know me and Dan [Harmon] would like play off each other: "Oh, I wanna make this character a Jehovah's Witness." And you could look at episodes where characters on the show are dealing with what people in the show are dealing with, which is cool because that's what makes him [Dan] an amazing writer.
But why music and how did that come about? I always kinda did music. But I feel like music travels faster than everything. Like music can travel at the speed of the internet; it's the only medium [that can], and timing is so important to things.
Yeah, like Drake recorded at "5AM in Toronto," and then put it online about an hour after they finished. What do you think the lasting impact of the internet is going to be on hip-hop?
The lasting impact is that we're not going to remember what it was like before the internet when it came to rap. Our vision will be skewed. Or is already skewed. But also you can choose what your view point is. If I wanted to believe that gangster rap was always a niche market, it was never the dominant, I could find all the things on the internet that support that. I feel like that's what the album is more about: we don't know what we're doing with all this power we have.
People forget that Drake started out as an internet phenomenon. He plays hockey arenas now, but he had this huge YouTube following before the big mixtape even came out. The mainstream media only knew him as the kid from "Degrassi."
Jimmy, yeah. That's the case of the internet working the way it should. Like, let's get these people in the same place and do this thing. That's all Drake is. Most people who listen to Drake are more like Drake than they are Lil' Wayne, and he tied those things together. Like, 'I'm singing these songs and what I'm rapping about isn't popular at the time, but actually there's more of us, we just didn't know that.
Obviously, Drake made a ton of money. How has that made it easier for you to put out music where you're honest and personal?
I don't know if that made it easier. If you're doing it right, it doesn't matter what's popping at the time. Yeah, Drake is an emo-rapper, for lack of a better term—he raps about his feelings. But rappers always rapped about their feelings. Lauryn Hill, one of the biggest acts ever, sang about her feelings and was a great rapper, too. It's different because Drake's a boy, and his masculinity is being questioned, but at the same time even the hardest rappers always had a song, like, "I miss my friend."
The difference is that they're all emotions, but Drake's are coming from a place, like, "I grew up in a pretty good circumstance. My circumstances are more relateable to what you're going through—you're not from the hood, obviously, because you're listening to me."
Rapping about your emotions is always going to be dangerous if you allow them to be. The shit on the record, the way I feel, the honesty, even with the Instagram posts, would Drake do that? I don't know if he would.
Were you surprised about the reaction to the Instagram posts?
I knew people were going to talk, and some people would feel it and some wouldn't. I was more surprised about the media and how they tried to close it off. After I wrote it, they were like, "He's having a crisis," or, "He's being a drama queen." Everybody tried to put it in this little box. Why is it one of those? Why isn't it just: I'm alive and this is how I feel? And I feel like everybody else feels this way, too. Why am I crazy for being honest?
I think the answer is because the internet. Because it's clicky to say a sitcom star has an emotional crisis in cheap hotel room.
I guess it's very clickable. And that's the way the internet works. I'm not against the internet. I think a lot of people will want to make this album, or certain songs, a stance against the internet. I think that's so lame. I am not like, 'Put your cellphone down, let's go back to reading books and having real conversations." That's fucking lame and stupid and anybody who says that is fucking lame and stupid. The internet is here.
But we talk different now, and people don't realize the differences. We just assume that's real life. People assume my real life is like: I go out and hang out with Lil B and we show each other our stacks, and yeah, that happens sometimes, but there's also the other side where it's like really boring and I'm stuck in Cleveland for two days. The moments of sadness need to be there in order to enjoy the moments of happiness. It's like a drug, where we can't feel for real anymore.
I'm more faceless than I've ever been. I feel like we all are. We don't know who are friends are online, people are fake. The people who say shit about me have no face. We should be really connected, and we're not. So I'm gonna try and speak the language of the internet, because nobody is doing it.by
New Democrats are on the offensive, declaring in no uncertain terms that progressives either support Hillary or they are unrealistic socialists. Madeline Albright and Gloria Steinem argue that to not support Hillary is sexist, both Bill and Hillary Clinton attack a call for universal health care as utopian, and former Clinton White House staffers are enjoying nightly reunions of the faithful as commentators on the major news stations. For while the campaign began nicely enough—who can forget Bernie Sanders defending Hillary Clinton against questions about her emails in the first debate—now that the results in Iowa and New Hampshire show that Bernie Sanders is a viable candidate, the gloves are off. Faced with the possibility of a voter revolt, New Democrats are taking aim at New Deal Democrats and those hoping to progress beyond the defensive posture of the Democratic Party since Ronald Reagan became President.
But is that all that can be hoped for when it comes to the Democratic Party? That it will block leftist politics that threaten the centrist positions that Democrats have staked out ever since President Clinton’s triangulation strategy “worked.” Although described as a political strategy, triangulation in practice takes the form of abandoning ideals and selling out the vulnerable. Rather than decrying Republican efforts to demonize the poor, President Clinton used welfare reform to show that he too believed in personal responsibility. Rather than push for a single payer healthcare system, President Obama and now candidate Hillary Clinton seem satisfied with the progress that has been made because of Obamacare, despite the fact that our health care system will continue to be dramatically out of step with what is found in nearly all other developed countries. Without a single-payer system, it will cost more and deliver less. And rather than use existing laws to go after criminal activities and too big to fail banks, the Obama Administration has done little to challenge the status quo of private upside rewards and socialized downside risk. The Sanders’ campaign raises the possibility that perhaps Democrats could expand the political dialogue and range of alternatives considered in the country instead of resting on the main cry of this election cycle: Democrats are reasonable.
If being reasonable, if keeping expectations low regarding change, is the mark of leadership, Hillary Clinton will be a great President. As Robert Reich, Secretary of the Labor under President Clinton, observed, Hillary Clinton is “the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have. But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change.” As perhaps the most experienced presidential candidate of all time and poised to be the first female President should she win the primaries, Hillary Clinton makes sense from a practical perspective. She would hit the ground running and the Democratic establishment would simply change a few photos. Democrats, as well as comedians, are looking at the Republican candidates this cycle and salivating. The fact that they are so obviously not presidential material—that electing another Bush looks like the best and quite improbable scenario—partly reflects Democrats having staked out the center and partly can be attributed to the Republican Party having abandoned all reason.
It is worth taking a step back and recognizing how dysfunctional the Republican Party has become: to take but one example, they actively resist science. Not some areas of science or select controversial studies, but science in general. The bogeymen—guns taken from people’s homes, all liberty suppressed, massive tax increases, an immigrant invasion, and the total demise of the family—imagined by Republican voters have gone from convenient tools used by politicians to rally the vote around election time to nearly the entire Republican agenda. Republican politicians who venture outside of this narrowly defined space—a space also marked by subtle and not so subtle racism as well as Islamophobia—risk being toppled by their own gerrymander |
along the lines of this year’s Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which was accompanied by bunting, Union flag waving and street parties.
His proposal is extraordinary even by the jingoist standards of Britain’s ruling elite. While World War II has long been a patriotic staple in Britain, 1914-1918 has occupied a different position. Unable to cite any democratic or moral imperative in its justification, it is synonymous with the horrors and senselessness of war—made even more poignant by the fact that the “war to end all wars” did nothing of the sort.
This sentiment was encapsulated by the Great War poets, such as Wilfred Owen whose famous verse described as “the old lie” the Latin exhortation Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (How sweet and right it is to die for one’s country).
Owen’s poem dealt with a chemical gas attack on British soldiers, such as occurred during the Battle of the Somme between July-November 1916. In those few months, over a million troops from all sides were killed or wounded, with more than 50,000 British casualties on a single day, July 1.
His disavowal of patriotism, however, spoke to the experience of every nationality in that war, as underscored by some of the most well-known of the military campaigns.
July 1, 1916 is on record as the bloodiest day in the history of the British army, and the total number of British or Commonwealth killed at the Somme stands at 419,654. The total dead or wounded German soldiers from the Somme as a whole is estimated as similar, if not greater. The number of French casualties are recorded as 204,253.
The first Battle of Ypres between October and November 1914 claimed an estimated total of 300,000 killed or wounded. It would be followed by a further four battles for control of the same strategic Belgium town by the war’s end, with more than a million casualties.
In the Battle of Gallipoli, April 1915-January 1916, the estimated dead or injured stands at 500,000, and in the Battle of Verdun, February-December 1916, the estimated dead or injured was 900,000.
The demand of the Russian masses for an end to the slaughter and for peace, and the inability of the bourgeoisie to provide it, played a central role in the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917.
It is with justification that BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman said he was “troubled” to hear Cameron comparing the anniversary to celebrations for the Diamond Jubilee. Only “a complete idiot would celebrate such a calamity”, he said, explaining, “Three quarters of a million men never came back to this country. Millions of men served. Millions of men were wounded mentally and physically. No one would celebrate that. It was just Cameron’s clumsy use of language”.
Paxman’s remarks brought a furious response from Downing Street, with Cameron aide Rob Wilson writing a letter to the BBC Director General to insist that he make the Newsnight presenter apologise.
Cameron’s remarks were not “clumsy”. They were deliberately calculated as part of the efforts by Britain’s ruling class to rewrite history.
This was underscored by a comment in the TES (Times Educational Supplement) by John Blake, a history teacher in a London school. Timed to coincide with Armistice Day, Blake’s article appeared under the disingenuous heading, “The first casualty: truth”. Disingenuous because it claims that previous presentations of World War I are false, and includes as one of the new “truths” now being invented that “many young men serving on the Western Front were happy with their lot”.
Blake describes as “profoundly dangerous” the attitude—held by 84 percent of those surveyed in one poll—that the purpose of “remembering the First World War is to learn about the horrors of war”.
He singles out three “myths” that must now be challenged. “[F]irst, that it was, without question, an unjust and imperialist war; second, that war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen provide a representative response of soldiers to the conflict; and third, that the generals of the First World War were ignorant and callous butchers who had no regard for their men”.
Blake cites how recent historians have “re-evaluate[d] the traditional villains of the piece”—Austria-Hungary and imperial Germany. Far from them acting menacingly against a “tiny, helpless Serbia”, it was they who faced an “aggressive, posturing, expansionist Serbia”.
Blake concedes that such presentations may not be “entirely correct”, but he introduces them in order to argue that the “causes of the war were much more complicated than a narrative of imperialist states seeking expansion suggests”.
He continues by suggesting that the war should be evaluated by the fact that it enabled British imperialism to perfect its techniques. British generals were “instinctively cautious with their men’s lives”, he writes. The waves of soldiers sent over the top together, was so as to “ensure that they arrived at the German lines together and thus were not slaughtered one by one…” (sic)
The Somme is “not the defining example of British tactics and strategy”, he asserts. Rather, by the war’s end, “the British Army was one of most sophisticated war machines ever developed, deploying tanks, aircraft and extraordinarily accurate artillery fire in support of precise infantry advances that smashed German lines. Even on the Somme, more German soldiers were killed or wounded than British ones”.
His comments make clear that the First World War is now up for “reinterpretation” precisely because it was an imperialist conflict—one in which, as Lenin explained, the major capitalist powers sought to redivide the globe among them.
By trying to extract the First World War from the blood and filth in which it is covered, the aim is to justify the contemporary reality of new imperialist wars of expansion.
The fact that Blake is the Chairman of Labour Teachers make clear that this is an undertaking agreed on by the British bourgeoisie as a whole.
This is underscored by the planned festivities for next year’s Armed Forces day. A manufactured celebration of Britain’s military, first initiated in 2006 under the Blair Labour government, it will take place on June 28 in Stirling, Scotland.
That is the same day and place that supporters of Scottish independence in the referendum later that year will celebrate the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn and the victory of Scotland’s King Robert Bruce over King Edward II of England.
Amid the intended competing celebrations of British and Scottish nationalism, entirely ignored, is the fact that June 28 is also the 100th anniversary of the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo by student Gavriol Princip, which provided the pretext for the outbreak of hostilities.
The recklessness with which the ruling elite and its political representatives now rush to rehabilitate imperialist militarism is in no small part dictated by popular opposition to war.
A November 2012 study by a Ministry of Defence (MoD) think tank, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC), is entitled Risk: The Implications of Current Attitudes to Risk for the Joint Operational Concept. In it, the DCDC bewails the lack of public support for military interventions, especially following Afghanistan and Iraq, which has meant that “the need to run military risks has become more difficult”. In response, it proposes greater efforts to mould public opinion to accept further and bloodier military conflicts, combining the already servile efforts of the media to this end with a state war propaganda agency.
Blake’s article in the TES is in line with this imperative. Accompanied by a section “Sign up and join the war effort”, it is aimed at influencing how the First World War should be taught in schools in the approach to its 100th anniversary.Industries including engineering, manufacturing, financial services, training and IT all suffered a drop in the number of jobs available in August compared with July, according to the Reed Jobs Index.
Training was one of the worst hit sectors, falling from 84 in July to 64 last month, on a scale in which 100 is the base. Demand for jobs in the engineering sector fell to 86 in August, down from 91 the previous month. Anything above 100 represents an increase.
The number of jobs available in the financial services sector – which has recently enjoyed a boom in vacancies – slowed to 113 last month, down three points from July's record high. Manufacturing jobs also dipped from 116 down to 111 over the same period.
Other sectors that experienced decline included energy, hospitality, sales and media, the index showed. Public sector jobs plummeted to a record low of 57.
Martin Warnes, managing director of Reed, the recruitment firm, said: "Both financial services and manufacturing jobs have fallen back from last month's highs, while sectors such as engineering and training continue to see steady declines, demonstrating continued nervousness in the private sector economy."
However, Mr Warnes said the overall job index had held steady over the holiday season, at 102 in August, which is "quietly encouraging news for the economy as a whole". Some sectors, including admin, legal and security, had experienced healthy growth in job vacancies.
High tourist numbers attracted by the low pound may have helped boost job increases to record highs in leisure and tourism and retail, Mr Warnes said, coupled with an unexpected rise in consumer confidence.
"Overall confidence, particularly in the business services sector, has been slowly but steadily building over the summer break," he said.
But that confidence could be short-lived after a separate survey revealed one in five small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) anticipated job cuts over the next year. Confidence dented: the survey indicated a decline in recruitment across many sectors last monthAlan Turing, the man who has been called the “Father of the Computer”, had a strong India connection. His father was an ICS officer in the erstwhile Madras presidency, and before him, various Turings had served in India, going back to the 1700s. But Alan’s India connection was from both sides of the family. His mother, Sarah Stoney, grew up in India; her father having been chief engineer of the Madras Railway. While researching this Turing connection, I stumbled upon the factoid that his grandfather had lived in Coonoor in a house called “The Gables”. An idly wondered if that old house was stil around — promising myself that, if it was, I must go and make a pilgrimage.That idle question would lead me into a curious detective story, which ended in the most fantastic of coincidences. I started by asking a friend in Coonoor if The Gables was still there, or if it had been demolished. (After all, it would have been over a hundred years old by now.) She e-mailed back saying yes The Gables was, indeed, still around. It was one of the historic homes in Coonoor, and had recently been bought by “some businessman from Bangalore”, she said.The next clue fell into place, by chance, when a friend told me that an interior designer friend of hers was looking for British Raj period furniture for an old house she was furnishing for Nandan Nilekani in Coonoor. And the name of the house? The Gables!It all made sense. How wonderful — and how appropriate — I thought to myself: Nilekani, as an IT guru himself, had obviously learned that Alan Turing’s old family home was up for sale, and he had bought it, for sentimental reasons. And so the story ended, as far as I was concerned.But over the next several months, I began to suspect that something was not adding up. Because when I mentioned this Gables-Turing-Nilekani connection to mutual friends of the Nilekanis, they seemed mystified. Funny, they said, we’ve visited The Gables, but Nandan never told us about any Turing connection. This was very strange. Could it possibly be that Nilekani was somehow unaware of his house’s Turing connection? Surely not!Finally, on the off-chance, I e-mailed Nilekani, introducing myself, and telling him that in the course of my research, I had discovered that The Gables, which he now owned, had earlier been the home of Alan Turing’s grandfather — and that I assumed he knew this fact.Immediately, I got an e-mail back from Nilekani, saying: THIS IS AMAZING! I DID NOT KNOW THIS. CAN YOU TELL ME MORE? n you imagine the cosmic odds of something like this happening: Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, buys a house in a little South Indian hill station, purely for its serenity and beauty. And then suddenly, out of the blue, he learns that his new house once belonged to the family of the Father of the Computer himself. It’s one of those one-in-agazillion coincidences.We exchanged e-mails, about the house and its Turing connection. Nilekani — being the total pragmatist that he is — wanted documentary evidence to establish the connection. I was able to locate two old documents for him, dated 1916, both listing “Edward Waller Stoney, Chief Engineer, Madras Railway”, and stating his address as “The Gables, Coonoor”. Finally, I received an ecstatic mail from Nilekani saying, “THANKS. YOU’VE REALLY MADE MY DAY!” and inviting me to come and visit The Gables. Detective case closed.As the Mastercard ads might say: Buying a charming old house: Rs x lakhs. Discovering that it was earlier owned by Alan Turing’s family: Priceless. Utterly, totally priceless!Photo: AP
Google is currently locked in a bitter legal fight with Uber over whether an engineer at the former company stole self-driving tech and brought it to the latter. That engineer abruptly left Google in January 2016 to launch a self-driving truck startup called Otto, which Uber quickly sought to purchase. But as early as August 2015, Google’s self-driving car guru knew the guy had to go and didn’t mince words about it.
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In August 2015, Google’s former self-driving car chief, Chris Urmson, advocated firing the self-driving tech engineer Anthony Levandowski. He did this after learning Levandowski had approached several Google employees to set up a “package deal of people that he could sell en masse to Uber,” according to testimony in the ongoing lawsuit.
Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project, is suing the ride-hailing company, claiming Uber hatched a plan with Levandowski to steal Google’s self-driving car secrets and use them to advance the ride-hailing company’s own autonomous vehicle ambitions.
Urmson’s testimony, taken in a deposition late last month, indicates that Levandowski had been frustrated for years before ultimately leaving the company.
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At one point, Urmson was asked about negative performance reviews that Levandowski seemingly received in 2013 and 2014. Urmson said it coincided with a transition period in Project Chauffeur—a codeword for Google’s self-driving car project at the time—where it became evident that he was leading the endeavor, and not Levandowski.
“[T]here was a period after it became clear that I was leading Chauffeur and he was not, where I worked very hard to kind of mend bridges and bring him, you know, into the fold, so to speak,” Urmson said. “Over time my patience with his manipulations and lack of enthusiasm and commitment to the project, it became clearer and clearer that this was a lost cause. And so I think what you’re seeing is some of that turn in my sentiment towards him.”
That sentiment seems obvious in emails from Urmson that were cited by attorneys during the August 24 deposition.
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In an August 4, 2015, email, for example, Urmson started an email to colleagues that said: “We need to fire Anthony Levandowski.”
Urmson went on, “I have just heard today from two different sources that Anthony is approaching members of their team attempting to set up a package deal of people that he could sell en masse to Uber.”
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Levandowski’s rocky departure from Google has been the subject of intense focus from Uber, which hopes to argue at trial that a dispute between Google and Levandowski over a $120 million bonus led him to allegedly steal an array of trade secrets from the company. Waymo has said Uber’s “bonus theory” is without merit.
Records show that Levandowski communicated with Uber executives throughout 2015, and by the end of the year, a tentative deal was already in place between the ride-hailing company and the former Googler to purchase his future start-up Otto.
Jalopnik first reported that, in early December 2015, Uber had drafted a term sheet to acquire “Newco,” a startup understood to be Levandowski’s self-driving truck startup called Otto. Uber officially purchased Otto in August 2016 for a reported $680 million.
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Spokespeople for Uber and Waymo, as well as Levandowski’s attorneys, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case between Uber and Waymo heads to trial next month.Pope Francis Has Appointed About a Third of the Cardinals Eligible to Choose the Next Pope
Francis Benedict XVI John Paul II 44 of the 121 voting cardinals 56 21 Francis Benedict XVI John Paul II 44 of the 121 voting cardinals 56 21
The College of Cardinals is responsible for electing a new pope. Pope Francis’ third set of cardinals will receive their “red hats” at a ceremony on Saturday.
With the new additions, 44 of the 121 cardinals eligible to vote will have been named by Francis. But nearly two-thirds of the current cardinals were appointed by Francis’ predecessors, Popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II, who were more theologically conservative and whose priorities were different from Francis’. The cardinals, however, do not all share the views of the pope who appointed them.
Cardinals Are Eligible to Vote Until They Turn 80
Francis Benedict XVI John Paul II Paul VI Age 50 Cardinals appointed by each pope and current age 55 60 65 70 75 Voting age cutoff 80 85 90 95 Can not vote 100 Francis Benedict XVI John Paul II Age 50 Cardinals appointed by each pope and current age 55 60 65 70 Voting age cutoff 75 80 85 90 95 Can not vote 100 Note: One cardinal appointed by pope Paul VI is not eligible to vote and is not shown on the chart.
Of the 121 cardinals eligible to vote, 32 will turn 80 in the next five years, including 25 who were appointed by Benedict XVI and John Paul II. This gives Francis or his successor the opportunity to make new appointments.
Francis Has Continued to Diversify the College of Cardinals
Share of cardinals appointed by each pope by continent of origin Africa Asia Caribbean Central America Europe North America Oceania South America 18% 13 4 2 38 11 4 13 Francis 9% 12 59 11 9 Benedict XVI Share of cardinals appointed by each pope by continent of origin Francis Benedict XVI 18% 9% Africa 13 12 Asia 4 Caribbean Central America 2 38 59 Europe North America 11 11 4 Oceania South America 9 13
Pope Francis, the first pope from Latin America, has expanded the effort of recent popes to diversify the College of Cardinals to reflect the church’s global reach. Francis has added cardinals from Asia, Africa and Latin America – some from countries that had not previously had a cardinal: Bangladesh, the Central African Republic, Lesotho, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.
The College of Cardinals Has Been Shifting to More Closely Reflect Who Is in the Pews
Voting members of the College of Cardinals on recent conclaves, and today.
The church nearly doubled the number of voting cardinals in the last century. But until recently, the College of Cardinals was dominated by Europeans, especially Italians, even as growth in the church shifted to the Southern Hemisphere.After Kelvin Benjamin tore his ACL during the off-season, Greg Olsen became Cam Newton’s undisputed number one receiver in Mike Shula’s offense. Against the Seahawks, Greg Olsen was targeted 11 times and he caught seven of those for 131 yards through the air. Additionally, Olsen’s touchdown was the game-winner that continued the Panthers’ undefeated season. In this breakdown, we will take a look at some of his plays from Sunday afternoon.
The Panthers line up in off-set I right with “12”-personnel on the field using two tight ends. Olsen runs a drag route across the field from the right side of the formation behind the Seahawks linebackers. Olsen makes a great diving catch to bring in Newton’s pass that was placed slightly too far ahead of Olsen for the 12 yard gain.
Since the play-action pulled in the linebackers who thought the Panthers were running the ball, this allowed Olsen to get behind them for the strike over the middle of the field.
The Panthers line up in shotgun with Olsen split two yards behind the line of scrimmage. Thinking the Panthers will run the ball, the Seahawks bring eight defenders into the box to stuff the run. The Panthers run play-action to the running back which draws in the linebackers. Olsen runs an out-n-up down the right sideline clearing the second level defenders with ease and getting outside the secondary.
The play-action, like in Play 1, is what fools the linebackers again. Linebacker #58 Kevin Pierre-Louis gets caught peeking into the backfield and loses his man coverage responsibilities. Typically on an out-n-up route, the receiver will break further outside before cutting up the field to widen the throwing lane and make the out-portion more believable. However, Olsen recognizes the separation he already gained from the play-action fake, so he cut up the field early to distance himself from his defender. Newton places the ball in-stride setting up the Panthers for a short running touchdown by Jonathan Stewart.
The Seahawks run Cover 3 zones with Richard Sherman in the deep right third and Earl Thomas over the middle of the field. Wide receiver #17 Devin Funchess from shotgun trips left runs an out-n-up up the left seam pulling Thomas out of the play. Meahwhile, Olsen cuts across the vacated middle between zones for the reception on his post route.
Newton places the ball slightly high and slightly behind Olsen but Sherman still can’t make a play on the ball. The vacated zone by Thomas allows Olsen to gain extra yards on the catch and almost score a touchdown. Olsen’s recognition of zones combined with Newton’s eye discipline is the reason why this play worked so well for the Panthers.
With 2:20 remaining in the game, Cam Newton and the Panthers are down by 3 points.
Newton starts the drive by making short passes to the boundaries and then takes what the Seahawks’ defense gives him over the middle of the field. A few separate 15-18 yard catches leads the Panthers down to the Seahawks’ 26 yard line where Newton spikes the ball to organize his teammates. There is only 32 seconds remaining in the game at this point and the Panthers are completely out of time outs.
The Panthers line up in shotgun trips left with Greg Olsen standing by himself on the right side of the formation. The Seahawks are showing an interesting Cover 3 look pre-snap where free safety #29 Earl Thomas is playing in the center of the field and not as deep as you would usually see a Cover 3 deep middle safety.
With that in mind, Olsen sprints off of the line of scrimmage after the snap running a seam route down the numbers on the right side of the field. He’s left wide open. Cam Newton sees the opening and gifts him the go-ahead touchdown score.
Clearly there was a miscommunication between Earl Thomas and Richard Sherman. Sherman obviously thought he was responsible for the short right zone, while Earl Thomas thought Sherman would take the deep right zone in a Cover 3 shell. Who is wrong exactly?
Based on KJ Wright dropping into his deep zone and Sherman staying shallow leaving the deep right third open, I would have to guess Earl Thomas is the defender at fault here as this would have been a Cover 4 shell if Thomas dropped correctly into his zone.
The only blemish on Olsen’s game happened during the second quarter. In one drive Olsen caused two false start penalties while the Panthers were down by 3 putting the Panthers into a punting situation. Just awful.
Outside of his penalties, Olsen was phenomenal. He was targeted eleven times and hauled in seven of those passes. Looking at those four incompletions none of those were actually his fault. Three of those passes were poor throws by Newton: One was overthrown, and two were behind him. The fourth incompletion was simply a great defensive play by Seahawks’ linebacker #50 KJ Wright over the middle of the field stopping what would have been a touchdown pass to Olsen.
The Panthers drafted Devin Funchess out of Michigan last year. If he can step up and Benjamin can remain healthy, then defenses will have a very hard time containing them combined with Newton’s arm/scrambling ability and Olsen’s knack for finding holes in zone coverage.
Follow Samuel Gold on Twitter: @SamuelRGold.Image copyright Design Museum Image caption The Design Museum will relocate in 2016, offering three times more space and a free permanent collection
London's Design Museum will establish a free permanent collection from 2016, following its relocation to new premises in Kensington.
Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, confirmed the museum has been included in the current VAT refund scheme for museum and galleries.
He tweeted that it was "all part of our plan to make UK & London best place in world for creative industries".
It usually costs £12.40 for adult entry to the museum.
The Design Museum, which currently sits on the River Thames near Tower Bridge, will relocate to the former Commonwealth Institute in two years' time. The listed Kensington building has been largely unoccupied since 2001.
The new site will give the museum three times more space for its collection, temporary exhibitions and learning programmes. Visitor numbers are expected to more than double to 650,000 in the first year.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Building works are ongoing at the new site in Kensington
The museum will join more than 50 museums across London in opening its doors for free, including the National Gallery, the Tate Modern and the Natural History Museum. The VAT refund scheme currently supports around 120 museums and galleries across the country.
"The Design Museum is world-renowned for contemporary design and architecture, so it is fantastic news that they are moving to these brilliant new expanded premises in heart of London," said Mr Osborne.
He added that he was "delighted to be offering help through the VAT refund scheme to ensure as many families as possible can visit at no charge at all".
Designer Anya Hindmarch, a trustee of the museum, said the possibilities offered by the new premises would "cement London as the design capital of the world".
The Design Museum was founded in 1989 by Sir Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley. It is devoted to contemporary design in all its forms, including fashion, architecture, product design and graphics.
In 2011, Sir Terence donated £7.5m to the museum. He told the BBC: "It is my ambition to have the world's greatest design museum. We are thought of as the greatest creative nation in the world so why not have the best, most beautiful design museum?"Uber's drive to Winnipeg could get stuck in neutral until the fall thanks to the stall tactics of the Opposition NDP.
The NDP says it plans to hold up the passage of the government bill that would help usher Uber into Winnipeg until next fall. The proposed bill introduced last month would offload the rules and regulations for the taxi industry onto municipalities.
"Pallister is off-loading the tough decisions and is potentially paving the way for an uneven playing field," said Fort Rouge MLA Wab Kinew. "The course that Pallister is pursuing would set-up a two-tiered taxi system... if you are in favour of competition, then ensure there is an even playing field."
The proposed bill dissolves the Manitoba Taxicab Board and puts power in the hands of Manitoba municipalities to regulate all vehicles for hire — which could let communities, including Winnipeg, welcome ride-booking services.
Mayor Brian Bowman has publicly expressed his support for seeing Uber enter the Winnipeg market.
Several taxi drivers came to the legislature Monday to offer their own concerns about the bill, echoing Kinew's concerns that Uber and Lyft don't operate at an even playing field with the standard cab industry.
Change 'out of respect for Winnipeg'
In other Canadian cities, taxi drivers have complained that Uber drivers operate outside of costly insurance and safety regulations that cabs must follow.
"It's an open book given to the city, whatever you want you can write it," cab driver Randy Chhokar said about the legislation.
"It was just dropped from the roof and we had no opportunity to look at the bill."
Pallister said the bill falls in line with vehicle-for-hire rules in major Canadian cities which — except for Winnipeg — have always been able to set their own rules for the taxi industry.
"(It's) out of respect for Winnipeg," Pallister said Monday. "We are the only province that doesn't let municipalities make their own decisions... We want a level playing field and I suspect the city wants the same."
Tuition cap thaw also stalled
NDP MLA Wab Kinew says he wants to make sure that Uber drivers operate around the same rules as standard taxi drivers. (CBC)
Kinew, who is also the education critic for the NDP, said his party will also delay passage of the government's proposed bill that would increase the tuition cap. The bill introduced last month would cap tuition increases at five per cent annually, plus inflation. Legislation introduced by the NDP in 2011 capped tuition to the rate of inflation.
Kinew said stalling the bill's passage until the fall will give students some breathing room by ensuring tuition would not increase in the fall semester.
"What the NDP has done today is taken a step to ensure the law doesn't pass until November, when the academic year is already underway," Kinew said.
Any bill introduced by the government by March 20 or earlier is guaranteed passage by the end of the spring session and would come into effect June 1. However, under the current rules the Opposition is allowed to choose five bills it wants held over until the fall session.About this mod General improvements to Auriel's Bow and its sunstorm effect: higher damage, unlimited charge, longer sunstorm duration, better friendly fire immunity Requirements DLC requirements DLC name Dawnguard Permissions and credits Author's instructions File credits This author has not credited anyone else in this file Donation Points system This mod is not opted-in to receive Donation Points
This mod makes some improvements to Auriel's Bow that I've been using for a while on my character, but I figured I'd share them with everybody. I've increased its base damage to 20, 1 higher than a daedric bow to better reflect its status as a legendary aedric artifact. Previously it just had the damage of a normal elven bow. I've also doubled the damage of the enchantment from 10(30) to 20(60) and removed the enchantment charge capacity entirely; you will always get bonus sun damage and never have to worry about recharging it with soul gems.
The biggest change is to the sunstorm that gets triggered when you shoot the sun with a sunhallowed arrow. Originally it only lasted 15 seconds, but in my mod it will last for a full minute. I've also significantly increased the damage the sunbeams do: each beam deals 88 damage to normal enemies and 120 to undead ones. I've balanced this for high-level play on legendary difficulty where damage dealt is divided by 4 so it may be a tad overpowered on lower difficulties. Considering you have to be fairly far into the main quest to even unlock the weapon at all I think it's appropriate to be catered towards high levels.
The final change improves the friendly fire immunity of the sunstorm. While Bethesda actually did try to implement it so friendly targets won't be aggroed by the beams originally, I've found that in my game people would still aggro anyway somehow and I'd randomly end up with a bounty and guards attacking me. With the changes I've made, you can be certain that the sunstorm will never damage or aggro anyone who wasn't already going to attack you anyways. Try using it in towns, it's fun! Don't worry though, if you've already got a bounty or just want to kill a ton of guards for whatever reason, the beams will start to work on them if they're attacking or searching for you. I've also made non-hostile animals immune to it, so you don't have to feel guilty about seeing a bunch of poor deer and bunny lifebars constantly draining down to 0 on your screen whenever you use it in the wild. It will still work on predatory animals that attack you, although if you use the Kyne's Peace shout any animal affected by it will temporarily become immune.
Obviously you need to have Dawnguard DLC for this mod to work. Also remember you need to be using the special sunhallowed arrows to trigger the sunstorm. You can get them from our friend at the Temple of Auri-El in the Forgotten Vale. I haven't changed anything about the way the Eclipse with bloodcursed arrows works in this mod, as there really isn't much to alter. Let me know if you have any ideas. Thanks and enjoy!BAGHDAD - Iraq's prime minister said yesterday his country wants some type of timetable for a withdrawal of American troops included in the deal the two countries are negotiating.
It was the first time that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has explicitly and publicly called for a withdrawal timetable - an idea opposed by President Bush.
He offered no details. But his national security adviser, Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, told the Associated Press that the government is proposing a timetable conditioned on the ability of Iraqi forces to provide security.
The White House said it did not believe Maliki was proposing a rigid timeline for US troop withdrawals.
"Any agreement would not have any hard timetables for withdrawal, but could include the desire by the US and Iraq to withdraw troops based on conditions on the ground," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.
"I know that Prime Minister al-Maliki has said that he doesn't want a precipitous withdrawal because of the security consequences," Johndroe said in Toyako, Japan, where President Bush is attending the G-8 summit.
Maliki said in a meeting with Arab diplomats in Abu Dhabi that his country also has proposed a short-term interim memorandum of agreement rather than the more formal status of forces agreement the two sides have been negotiating.
The memorandum "now on the table" includes a formula for the withdrawal of US troops, he said.
"The goal is to end the presence [of foreign troops]," Maliki said.
Democratic Senator Barack Obama and an aide for Republican Senator John McCain said the Iraqi leader's remarks were consistent with the presidential candidates' positions.
Obama, speaking aboard his campaign plane yesterday, said Maliki's view "is consistent with my view about how withdrawals should proceed and how a status of force agreement should not be structured without congressional input and should not be rushed."
The Iraqi leader's remark "is encouraging partly because of the extraordinary work of our troops on the ground in Iraq and improvements in the situation when it comes to Iraqi forces," Obama said. "The prime minister himself now acknowledges that in cooperation with Iraq, it's time for American forces to start sending out a time-frame for the withdrawal, and I hope that this administration as well as John McCain is listening."
Randy Scheunemann, a senior foreign policy adviser to the McCain campaign, issued a statatement yesterday saying that McCain "has always said that conditions on the ground - including the security threats posed by extremists and terrorists, and the ability of Iraqi forces to meet those threats - would be key determinants in US force levels."
"As Iraq's national security adviser said as recently as yesterday," Scheunemann said, "the Iraqi government was proposing a timetable that would be conditioned on the ability of Iraqi forces to provide security. Unlike Senator Obama's constantly shifting positions, Senator McCain has been consistent in arguing that the US presence in Iraq should be based on sound judgments of the situation in Iraq."In the latest stunning development involving a documented failure of a bank to deliver physical gold when demanded, yesterday we reported that according to German website godmode-trader.de, a client of the Xetra-Gold Exchange-Traded Commodity was told the fund's designated sponsor, Deutsche Bank, would be unable to deliver the requested gold. This was contrary to the explict reps and warrantiesmade explicitly in the Xetra-Gold's prospectus, which said that investors are entitled to the delivery of the certified amount of physical gold at any time, and proudly added that "since the introduction of Xetra-Gold in 2007, investors have exercised this right 900 times, with a total of 4.5 tons of gold delivered."
As the German article concluded: anyone who wants to easily convert their Xetra-Gold holdings into physical gold - at least for clients of Deutsche Bank - can do so only by selling their shares, and then buying gold coins or bars directly elsewhere. Which leads the author to the logical question: what is the worth of the Xetra-Gold service, which certifies the right to redeem physical gold, if said delivery is no longer possible? In other words, what was supposedly an ETC which promised physical delivery upon demand, is nothing more than yet another "paper only" play.
We asked another, more nuanced question: is the inability to deliver physical gold an issue with Xetra-Gold, or with the company's "designated sponsor", Deutsche Bank, and if the latter is suddenly unable to satisfy even the smallest of delivery requests by retail clients, just how pervasive is the global physical gold shortage?
Our report has stirred a significant response, both at Deutsche Bank, and at Xetra-Gold, which today filed an official response, one which can be read in German on the following page.
What is notable is that instead of immediately refuting the story - as it should have done if there is no breach of prospectus covenants - and declaring that any and all physical gold demands have and will be satisfied, Xetra took a very circular approach to responding, one which in effect confirmed our concerns, that the issue was not so much with Xetra, but with the sponsor bank, in this case Deutsche Bank.
Furthermore, the author of the original godmode article, Oliver Baron, penned his own reaction, in an article titled "Deutsche Boerse takes a stand." He writes that "yesterday's article "Xetra-Gold: Nothing but a scrap of paper?" has struck nerves: Not only that GodmodeTrader was cited among others, at "Zero |
feel full, meaning many later die of starvation. Some companies have already started to suggest interim solutions, such as washing synthetics less or capturing the fibers with filters, But a larger, systemic solution, such as new fabric formulations can only be a permanent solution. Many of the developed nations have proposed regulations to ban the sale of microbeads in toiletries because of the risk they pose to aquatic and marine environments.But now it appears that a different type of microplastic is becoming a growing threat to aquatic animals.Findings of a recent research conducted by scientists from Carleton University, Ontario show that most of the microplastics recovered from the Ottawa River and its tributaries were from microfibers rather than microobeads.Jesse Vermaire, assistant professor of environmental science, geography and environmental studies at Carleton University said Yoga pants, fleece-type jackets, athletic wear and other garments made from synthetic materials contain microscopic plastic fibers — called “microfibers”. Every time you run your washing machine, hundreds of thousands of microfibers are flushed down the drain into natural waterways, eventually reaching the sea and into the food chain.Ingesting microplastics over a period of time makes animals feel full, meaning many later die of starvation.Some companies have already started to suggest interim solutions, such as washing synthetics less or capturing the fibers with filters, But a larger, systemic solution, such as new fabric formulations can only be a permanent solution. More about microfibers, Plastic pollution, Oceans microfibers Plastic pollution OceansSo if you're still not sure of what to wear here's some helpful suggestions...
The hottest costumes for Halloween aren't really costumes at all.
Want a knock out costume for All Hallows Eve? Something that will make everyone double take and stare.
Sure you could buy and WEAR a costume this year.
But that's what you did last year. And the year before that.
If you really want something great to wear, don't wear anything.
I'm not talking birthday suit, I'm thinking something a little more creative.
Grab some body paint and let your cookies give the crowd a treat.
There's loads of costumes you can try. For example, how about going as a...
Ship's Captain
Find a friend to be your first mate and you'll be the life of the bash. Dressed like this, everyone will say "Aye, Aye!"
Superhero!
Wonder Woman. Bat Girl. Cat woman. Supergirl.
Take your pick. You'll do plenty of saving that's guaranteed.
Fox Hunt
You could dress up as a fox or paint yourself as a fox hunter and be both.
Cheerleader
2-4-6-8
Who do we appreciate?
(Do I even have to answer.)
Nurse
Sexy nurse - expected.
Sexy latex body-painted nurse? Sizzle, sizzle. Better call a doctor
Moto-cross
Engines started and revved.
Alice in Wonderland
Yes, that's just what you'll be.
Animals
Cheetah. Leapard. Tiger.
Animals are always in for Halloween.
That includes futuristic animal warriors too.
Soccer player
It's the number 1 sport in the world and the perfect costume.
Goth
Body paint can help you play the villain too.
Whatever you choose for Halloween, go all out.To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Jaws, we honor the timeless costume design with 4 inspired sharp and affordable outfits.
It’s hard to write about Jaws. Everyone knows it. Even if you’ve never seen it you know all of the film's story beats because they’ve been copied so many times. You’re probably terrified of sharks even though more people are killed every year by donkeys. You can thank Jaws for that. Peter Benchley, the author of the original novel and screenplay, later became an ocean conservationist and expressed regret at having ever written it. It was a cultural phenom the likes of which had never been seen before.
Jaws also helped to create (for better or worse) the summer blockbuster as we know it today. It made Steven Spielberg one of the most well-known and imitated directors in modern cinema. The imitators and sequels can’t take away that Jaws is an expertly constructed film and this particularly shows in the costuming. While there are many elements that scream late 70s, costume designers Robert Ellsworth (who handled the men) and Louise Clark (the women) give a master class in how to convey essential elements of the characters and the times they live in while still maintaining an absolutely timeless look. So timeless in fact that many of these looks can be adapted and look just as at home today as they did in the 1970s.
When looking at the clothes you first need to look at the environment. The story takes place in a New England beach town at the start of the summer beach season. This means that the water and air temperatures are still a bit on the chilly side so you see a lot of sweatshirts and jackets in addition to bathing suits and t-shirts. This makes for some outfits that are absolutely fantastic for those chilly end of summer nights.
Take a look at the three main characters, Quint, Brody and Hooper, and you can see how important, and subtle the costuming is. Even if you’ve never seen the film it’s easy to see which character is the battered old fisherman, the big city cop turned small-town police chief, and the young academic in the field. Where Jaws succeeds is the verisimilitude of these outfits. They don’t look like costumes or stereotypes of how these people are supposed to look. It’s just how they look.
Now, these aren’t going to be perfect replicas of the looks in the film. It’s not cosplay and it’s based around easy to find clothing that most guys have already in their wardrobes. You may need to buy a new piece or two but almost everything here can be considered a staple.
Hooper
Matt Hooper enters the story as the young oceanographer brought into the field to figure out what the hell is going on and his costume reflects that perfectly. His leather duffle bag shows his youth. He is a professional but he has not been out of college for very long. I know plenty of guys who have a bag just like this handed down from their dad’s college days and they still use it to this day. He wears a watch cap and a dive watch to show his bona fides as an ocean explorer. He is an oceanographer dammit and he will be taken seriously.
The dive watch is of particular interest to me. By this point in the late 70s dive watches were just starting to make their transition from a true tool watch mostly worn by divers to a staple that guys who never even thought about going deeper than a swimming pool wore. This was the start of the Rolex Submariner’s climb up the market ladder to the position of luxury it inhabits today. To illustrate this, when the Sub was introduced it sold for $150 (around $1200 today) and by 1977 it was selling for $585 ($2300 in today’s dollars.) In less than 10 short years an entry-level Sub would be selling for $1,575 (around $3500 today.) Dive watches were becoming more than tools but at this point Hooper’s watch is still meant to convey the point that he is a true professional even if he is young.
As an aside it was always something of a mystery what watch Hooper was wearing but finally after the release of the Blu-rays it was determined to be a Nautoscaph from long forgotten watch brand Alsta.
Hoopers outfit is a pretty easy one to replicate and is great for those chilly nights in late August early September.
Sweatshirt – J Crew Factory, $30
Jeans – J Crew Factory, $45
Watch – Tiger Concepts 16800, $140
Sneakers – Gap, $20 [similar – Converse, $55]
Bag – Gusty Leder Toby, $74
Sunglasses – ZeroUV, $12
Watch cap – AE, $13
Total – $350
Oddly enough I don’t actually own a denim jacket and could not replicate this look completely. Throw on your own and you are good to go.
The bag, Gusty Leder Toby, is actually a pretty good bang for the buck. The leather is supple and does not have the plastic feel that a lot of lower-end leather items do. My only complaints are the zippers. The black with brown leather I think is a poor combination and reveals it’s more “affordable” nature. Still a damn good bag for the price though.
Quint
Everything about Quint’s look let’s you know that this guy has seen some shit. I don’t think you will ever find a a better grizzled sea captain than Robert Shaw as Bartholomew Marion Quint. The costuming for this character is truly masterful. There are no fisherman’s hats or thick knitted sweaters. Not a sailor cliche to be found. Instead this is just a man that is used to work and hardship and it has broken him down but he is still tough as hell. He is battered but not beaten. And damn is that a good look to steal.
Jacket – US Army Surplus M65 Field Jacket, $60
Jeans – J.Crew Factory Driggs, $40
Shirt – J.Crew Factory Chambray, $35
Watch – Casio MDV106, $45 on a perlon strap, $15
Webbing Belt – Army Surplus, $7
Shoes – Converse Chuck Taylors, $40
Sunglasses – American Optical Aviators, $60
Total – $302
The Casio MDV-106 is the perfect watch for a guy like Quint. It’s inexpensive, durable and no-nonesense. Throw it on a perlon strap and you have something that will take a beating with the fast-drying, easy to adjust perlon strap being the ultimate strap for tough voyaging. The American Optical Aviators were the original aviators used by the US Air Force during the Vietnam Conflict and well beyond. Randolph Engineering now produces them for the US Military but American Optical still makes them to GI spec in the USA for the civilian market.
The jacket and sunglasses are both staples of military looks adopted by civilians since time immemorial. The M65 Field Jacket in particular has been adapted by everybody from the Gap to Ralph Lauren to meet every budget possible. But nothing beats the real deal in terms of bang for the buck. These do tend to run big so I would suggest sizing down quite a bit.
Brody
Brody is the fish out of water (pun intended.) A big city cop turned small town police chief, he is the only one that sees the true danger the shark presents. When the rest of the town is working to keep things going as normally as possible he is trying to save whomever he can. The costuming shows this pretty well and I don’t think I’ve ever seen another man look more awkward in a lifejacket than Brody.
Despite not being comfortable at sea Brody still manages to save the day and go on to slaughter even more sharks in a multitude of Jaws sequels.
Chambray Shirt – J Crew Factory, $35
Undershirt – Old Navy Thermal, $17
Jeans – Levi’s 511, $40
Shoes – ASOS Plimsolls, $40
Belt – J.Crew Factory, $20
Watch – Timex Main Street, $37
Total – $189
The Timex Main Street is a fantastic bang for the buck. While it comes on a black faux-gator strap you can easily swap it out to something different to change up the look. With a water resistance of 30 I would not go for a swim with it on but it should have no problem getting splashed if you are out shark hunting.
Mayor Vaughn
Larry Vaughn is the mayor of Amity and is trying to keep the problems with the shark under wraps. If this was a real world situation I would sympathize with the mayor quite a bit. The town’s life blood is tourism and shark attacks are so rare the last thing the town needs is a hysterical sheriff scaring the bejeezus out of everyone. But this is a movie and the shark in this film is a heinous monster not a wild animal doing what animals do. And so the Mayor is also a villain letting his own greed get people killed.
As far as his wardrobe goes I don’t think you could costume a better prep-school mayor. Just look at that sports coat! Looking at this outfit you can tell that his family sailed over on the Mayflower and has been in Amity ever since. He only wore J. Press in college and he will be in Brooks Brothers until the day he dies. My wardrobe leans towards the preppy side but I don’t have anything close to that sports coat but I can put something together with the same vibe.
Sports Coat – J.Crew Factory Oxford Suit Jacket, $75 [similar, $60]
Pants – J Crew Factory Chino, $35
Shirt – H&M, $15
Shoes – Steve Madden Cabal Oxfords, $80
Belt – H&M, $20
Socks – Topman, $25 for pack
Watch – Vintage Bulova, $150
Cufflinks – Vintage, $25
Sunglasses – J.Crew Factory, $15
Tie – J.Crew Factory, $24
Tie Clip – Vintage, $20
Total – $469
So there you have it Jaws from a menswear point of view. Movies are truly a fantastic place to look if you are trying to figure out what you want to do with your wardrobe. In a lot of cases, costume designers will put things together that you may never have thought of before. It can also help you define the language of style. A good costume designer does not just grab clothes off a rack and throw them on an actor. Every outfit is meant to convey something to you, the audience, about that character without you ever being aware of it. Applying that same type of care to your own outfits can go a long way to determining how you present yourself to the world.
Would you like to see more posts like this? Help us spread the word!The first time Safia Halifa fired a gun, she aimed it straight at a camp of Islamic State soldiers. The AK-47 in her hands was well worn – rust lined the length of the barrel, and wrinkled duct-tape was bound tight around the fore grip.
Until now, she’d never been allowed to touch it. But if the rifle was old, Safia was even older; and by the age of 80, she’d had enough of caring about what men thought she should and shouldn’t do.
Isil soldiers had already attacked her village twice in the past year, kidnapping younger women and children in the middle of the night. She wasn’t going to sit around drinking tea and twisting her prayer beads in wait for it to happen again. As she pulled back the...We don’t know just how they’d pull it off, but Bleeding Cool has heard from a solid source that David Tennant will be returning to Doctor Who.
Word of Tennant’s involvement was passed along to us this evening. Here’s what we have been told, word for word:
Yes. David Tennant will be back in time for the Doctor Who anniversary. Be prepared to be surprised…
Too late for preparation, I’m afraid, because I’m rather surprised already.
It somehow doesn’t seen very Moffat-y to me. I really thought he was trying to draw a line between his era as show runner and everything that came before. I guess there might be space for Tennant and, if he’d only play along, Christopher Eccleston, seeing as Moffat has written for both before.
It’s worth noting that we have also asked our Who-adjacent friends about John Simm returning as The Master. That’s another persistent rumour that pops up in our inbox every now and then, alongside the Tennant one, but unless somebody we know to have some kind of vantage point on the issue can comment, we’ll have to just keep shrugging. Would be nice though, right?
Hearsay has told me that there will be two anniversary specials for the show, though this is far from confirmed and it may yet turn out to be several, or just one. Moffat has apparently been laying the groundwork for the anniversary storyline for some time. I can’t help but hope it’s going to be very special.
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None foundLISTEN: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio Your browser does not support the audio element.
PHOENIX — Outgoing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio might take a much-needed vacation or enjoy retirement. Or he might be willing to work for the federal government under President-elect Donald Trump.
The 84-year-old told KTAR’s Arizona’s Morning News on Thursday that he had no immediate plans other than finish to out his tenure two days after a surprising loss in Arizona’s general election.
But if he got a call from the White House, he’d listen. “I haven’t received any calls, I haven’t placed any calls. I didn’t support (Trump) to get a job,” Arpaio said. “… But I do have another background (in federal law enforcement).”
Arpaio, who was sheriff for 23 years and was seeking a seventh term, spent a long career with the DEA before becoming sheriff and has been a longtime advocate of stronger immigration controls and border protection. Those issues were high on Trump’s campaign list.
He was among the first authority figures in the state to back Trump’s candidacy and tweeted out congratulations to Trump after the elections.
“I’m not looking for another job” he said. “I did run for sheriff, I lost.”
Democratic challenger Paul Penzone unseated Arpaio.
The county’s hard-charging law enforcer is already beginning the moving-out process in his office.
The @RealSheriffJoe has started packing up his office. Pictures being boxed up. #fox10phoenix pic.twitter.com/y95erzlF6O — Corey G (@CGoodFOX10) November 9, 2016
“In my 24 years, almost 5 million people have voted for me,” Arpaio said. “That’s a lot of people.”
The longest-serving sheriff in county history said he knew 16 months ago Trump would win the election.
“I’ve been at many rallies with him, he’s different from all the other presidential candidates that I’ve endorsed in my career. Glad to see he won.”
Arpaio added that he were invited to the presidential inauguration, he more than likely would attend.
“Of course, for him I would go. He’ll be a great president.”
A more permanent move to the nation’s capital “would depend on the job,” he said.
Follow @KTAR923Hello Dolly, poster created 1970
Man, I really got lost in the massive archive of Czechoslovakian posters of American films on the Terry Posters website. I cherry-picked the ones I really dug, but there are a ton more that might strike your fancy. A lot of these are for sale too. If you see something you just gotta have, it just might be available for purchase.
As a side note: The poster for Ghostbusters below really has me scratching my head….
Ghostbusters, poster created 1988
Mary Poppins, poster created 1969
My Fair Lady, poster created 1967
Planet of the Apes, poster created 1970
Cinderella, poster created 1970
Rebel Without A Cause, poster created 1969
The Birds / Psycho, poster created 1970
Flipper’s New Adventure, poster created 1969
The Seven Year Itch, poster created 1964
The Days of the Condor, poster created 1979
Splendor in the Grass, poster created 1969
The Pink Panther, poster created 1966
Roman Holiday, poster created 1964
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next, poster created 1978
Cleopatra, poster created 1967
100 Riffles, poster created 1971
h/t to WFMU on TwitterThe reality of war with North Korea is almost too terrifying to imagine.
Experts say the North’s artillery could kill tens of thousands of civilians in Seoul, South Korea’s densely populated capital, within the first hours of a conflict. A protracted fight would lead to destruction on the Korean Peninsula on a scale unheard of since the Korean War in the 1950s, with millions of deaths on both sides.
The North’s nuclear missiles could easily reach Tokyo; most major American cities are also within their range. Imagine a nuclear strike on New York City — hundreds of thousands of Americans dead or irradiated in a catastrophe that would dwarf 9/11 by multiple orders of magnitude — and you start to understand what’s at risk here.
But here’s the genuinely scary thing. Numerous conversations with US policymakers, former US government officials, and experts all point to one disturbing conclusion: Far from being unthinkable, a war with North Korea is becoming more likely by the day.
“We are far closer to actual conflict over North Korea than the American people realize,” says Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient. “Everything we’re doing shows a military that, in my personal opinion, has turned the corner... the president is likely to make this decision [to attack], and we need to be ready.”
North Korea’s escalating behavior — most notably its recent 2017 tests of powerful nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles — has prompted an extremely aggressive response from President Trump. He has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, and to respond to its missile tests with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” He has tweeted that negotiations with the North have made “fools of US negotiators," that the secretary of state was “wasting his time” trying to talk North Korea, and that “only one thing will work” when it comes to fixing the North Korea standoff — seemingly implying a willingness to use force.
There are two reasons to take all of this saber rattling seriously. First, the president might mean what he says: There’s a real chance that he and some of his top advisers truly believe Kim Jong Un’s recent behavior proves that he can’t be deterred and that launching a military strike against now, before the North’s nuclear program gets any stronger, is the least bad option.
But even if they are just bluffing, North Korea’s leaders can’t be sure about that, because they don’t have a great read on American intentions. This could lead Pyongyang to conclude an attack is imminent even when it isn’t and attempt to preempt a US strike with its own attack — potentially kicking off a war nobody actually wants.
This doesn’t mean war is inevitable. Political and military leaders on both sides of the conflict have for decades understood how disastrous the fighting would be for everyone involved, and have chosen time and time again to back down in situations that looked like they could escalate into a full-scale conflict.
But Kim Jong Un’s provocations, and Trump’s angry and unpredictable responses, have combined to make the situation genuinely more dangerous than it has been in the past. And there seems to be virtually no serious public debate going on over how to stop things from going wrong.
“We should be worried,” says Mira Rapp-Hooper, a North Korea expert at Yale University. “Given the stakes we’re talking about, nobody should be comfortable.”
Why Trump may be willing to launch a catastrophic war
Rhetoric from the president, who has final and essentially unrestricted power to use force, suggests he is open to war with North Korea. But discerning actual policy decisions from Trump’s Twitter and public comments can be difficult. To get a deeper read on what the White House may actually be thinking, looking at two other sources is instructive: Trump’s top advisers and the US military’s actions.
Both are quite worrying.
Trump’s advisers are, in theory, supposed to prevent him from making any rash and potentially catastrophic decisions. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, for example, is a decorated three-star general and the author of a well-regarded book, Dereliction of Duty, which focuses on how President Lyndon Johnson’s advisers failed to warn him away from disastrous escalation in Vietnam. McMaster, of all people, should know the true costs of letting a president get into a war he isn’t prepared for.
Yet he has spent months arguing that the North Korean regime is not rational, meaning that it cannot be deterred by the threat of US military retaliation. That’s an important point: If McMaster believes that North Korea cannot be deterred by the threat of force, the only logical conclusion is that the US should strike before the North has more time to expand and improve its nuclear arsenal. And he has suggested publicly that war is in the offing.
The risk of war with North Korea is “increasing every day,” McMaster said in early December. “There are ways to address this problem short of armed conflict, [but] there’s not much time left.”
CIA Director Mike Pompeo, rumored to be the top pick for secretary of state after Rex Tillerson’s expected departure, has taken a similarly hawkish line — warning in July that the most dangerous part of North Korea’s nuclear weapons is “the character who holds the control over them” and suggesting that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “might well have intent” to use those weapons against the United States.
These voices aren’t unopposed in Trump’s war cabinet; both Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis have been more cautious in their characterization of North Korea. Tillerson is clearly marginalized in the White House, with rumors of his departure coming seemingly weekly, but there is a general sense among Trump Kremlinologists that Mattis has the president’s ear.
“If you believe that war is imminent, you’re going to want to get your shot in first”
Yet we can’t assume Mattis is reining in McMaster and Pompeo. For one thing, the president seems more inclined to agree with the hawkish voices on his staff than the cautious ones. For another, the normal interagency policy planning process that helps presidents make big decisions like this — where relevant experts from around the government weigh in — isn’t working well.
Due to both Trump, who has failed to appoint people to key positions in the departments of State and Defense, and Tillerson, who has done an extremely poor job managing America’s diplomats, the administration lacks vital input from North Korea experts. There is, for example, no ambassador to South Korea in place.
Trump nominated respected Georgetown professor Victor Cha to the post in mid-December, but Cha still has to go through the Senate confirmation process before he can start, a process that could take months. Positions of this significance are almost never left vacant this long; with them unfilled, Trump and his top decision-makers aren’t getting vital information that could push them off their dangerous path.
“Part of what’s concerning me about all of this is how few North Korea and Asia hands are in the proper political positions,” says Rapp-Hooper. “McMaster, who is not an Asia hand or a nuclear weapons expert, is running [the] national security process — but does not have an assistant secretary of state for East Asia.”
Perhaps the most ominous sign in all of this is that the US military seems to be taking steps to prepare for conflict in North Korea that go beyond their normal troop rotations.
Over the past year, the US military has been quietly ramping up its presence near the Korean Peninsula. The Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe reported in October that the US military was deploying classified “strategic assets” — most likely meaning “submarines, aircraft carriers, nuclear weapons or bombers,” per Lamothe — to the peninsula.
Around the same time, South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo announced that Washington and Seoul would step up “relevant cooperation” involving strategic assets, including “studies to improve deterrence against North Korea.” The two nations have held several previously unplanned military exercises in late fall and early winter 2017.
These public actions, according to people with direct knowledge of the US military’s thinking, reflect a real sense inside the Pentagon that the president might actually pull the trigger.
“There are more serious conversations [now] happening inside the Department of Defense about military action than had been happening earlier in the year,” Sen. Chris Murphy, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told me in early December. These preparations, together with the president’s rhetoric, have made him worried about “Trump’s willingness to launch a preemptive strike.”
His worries are very much shared by some outside experts.
“If McMaster [and] Trump are serious, God help us” says Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association.
The Trump administration’s rhetoric makes North Korea more likely to attack the US
Of course, all of this rhetoric could just be a giant bluff.
Many informed observers think McMaster is too smart to actually believe that North Korea can’t be deterred, given that experts are virtually unanimous in believing the North has long been successfully deterred by the threat of American retaliation. On this view, the administration’s rhetoric is principally about trying to scare China, North Korea’s largest trading partner, which Trump has often blamed for the crisis. The ultimate aim would be for China to more aggressively deploy its immense economic leverage over North Korea to rein in Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
“I think it’s rhetorical... a way of convincing third parties that we will not compromise,” Joshua Pollack, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told me.
It’s nearly impossible to tell from the outside if this read is right. If the entire point of the administration’s strategy is to convince other countries that the threat of force is credible, then the threat needs to seem, well, credible. Bluffs don’t work if your opponent knows you have a 2-7, to use a poker analogy; they need to believe that you’re holding two aces.
And therein lies the problem: Even if Trump is bluffing, the North Koreans can’t be sure of that. They have to take the possibility of a US attack seriously because the United States has more than enough firepower to topple their government. Trump’s aggressive rhetoric, whether serious or not, has put the North Koreans on high alert.
That in and of itself makes war more likely — even if no one actually wants it. That’s what keeps even experts like Pollack, who are dubious of Trump’s first strike intentions, up at night.
“If you believe that war is imminent, you’re going to want to get your shot in first,” he says. “That is something the North Koreans have promised to do: If we see indications of an attack coming, we’re going to hit you first, and we’re going to use nuclear weapons.”
From North Korea’s point of view, this doctrine makes a grim kind of sense. While North Korea’s military outnumbers that of its South Korean rivals (1.1 million active-duty soldiers compared to 630,000), the South’s forces are better trained and equipped with the latest technology. The North, by contrast, is stuck using knockoff Soviet-era tanks and aircraft. Add in the South’s alliance with the United States, by far the world’s most powerful military, and it’s clear to all observers that North Korea would lose any protracted conflict.
The only hope for North Korea is to anticipate an attack before it happens: to deal a devastating blow to both South Korea and the United States before the fighting really gets going and thus destroy its adversaries’ will to fight. This means that the North Koreans would launch a massive strike — potentially a nuclear one — against South Korea and US military targets if it believed either of these enemies was about to attack.
The North’s most fundamental military doctrine, then, relies almost entirely on reading American and South Korean intentions. Which is why a deliberate policy of making it seem like America is moving toward war with North Korea is so dangerous.
If the policy is working as intended, and the North Koreans really believe America is preparing a first strike, then the North Koreans will start preparing their own.
“If somehow this is actually just a bluff, and an effort to set North Korea on its back foot by convincing it that we’re seriously thinking about military options, it’s nonetheless raising the risk of conflict because North Korea has first-strike incentives,” Rapp-Hooper says.
This makes generally predictable interactions between North Korea and the United States — the kinds of North Korean weapons tests that have already escalated tensions, for example — into much more dangerous affairs.
Typically, the United States responds to North Korean provocations with some kind of show of force: a new military exercise with the South Koreans, an Air Force overflight of the Korean Peninsula, and so on. These are designed to signal resolve, and to show Pyongyang that the Washington-Seoul alliance remains strong.
But if North Korea is already worried about a US attack because of the Trump administration’s threatening behavior, the risks that American signals get misread are higher.
What if North Korea sees an overflight as the first flight in a bombing raid, and shoots down American jets? What if, in the midst of a missile test–induced crisis, Trump or one of his top deputies says something indelicate — something that convinces an already paranoid leader that the US has settled on war?
These scenarios may sound hypothetical, but more North Korean provocations of one sort or another are inevitable. With Trump and Kim in power, each one of them has become a game of Russian roulette.
The more the US prepares for war, the more likely it becomes
For months before the United States invaded Iraq in both 1990 and 2003, the US military engaged in a massive buildup of troops and materiel in the region. North Korea learned a lesson from that: If America suddenly starts ramping up its military presence in your area, war is coming.
“Going as far back as 1994, [the North Koreans] have said that they would not sit there like Iraq did and wait for the United States to build up its forces,” Pollack told me. “They would strike first under those circumstances. And now they’ve said that we’re going to strike you with nuclear weapons, specifically.”
This creates yet another pathway toward war.
The concern here is a kind of cycle of escalation. North Korea does something provocative, Trump says something aggressive in response, North Korea shows it isn’t afraid with another provocation, and the cycle starts again. The more that tensions rise, the more the US military is forced to prepare for the chance that the president might really order them into battle.
Those preparations, most notably the kinds of increased troop deployments to the Korean Peninsula we’ve already been seeing, risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The North Koreans might read them not as worst-case preparations but as a buildup to a planned invasion à la Iraq. North Korean military doctrine, as far as we can tell publicly, heavily emphasizes strikes on US military positions in the East Asian region.
“Just ramping up — prepositioning troops, stocks, and logistics in a place where we could do it — could prompt the North Koreans to do something,” Sen. Duckworth told me.
It’s important to note here that we also don’t actually understand what red line — what kind of response to a missile test, what kind of military buildup — is likely to set off North Korea. The country is notoriously insular; it’s not clear who actually influences Kim Jong Un or how top decision-makers in Pyongyang assess the risk of war with the US.
There are no direct lines of communication between Trump and Kim, no good way to convey American intentions and reassure the North that war isn’t coming. Sen. Murphy described the US government as “flying blind” when it comes to the North’s intentions.
North Korean defectors, one of the world’s few good sources of information about the Kim regime’s military policy, describe its forces as being on a hair-trigger alert — one where authority to launch an attack is delegated down to individual battlefield commanders who may have little to no understanding of what the US is doing.
“There are tens of thousands of North Korean artillery and short range missiles, ready to fire at any moment,” Thae Yong Ho, a former high-level North Korean diplomat, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in November. “North Korean officers are trained to press the button without further instruction from the general command if something happens on their side.”
With both sides on such high alert and neither capable of being sure about what the other side wants, the chances that a misunderstanding could lead to a catastrophic war are dangerously high.
The public debate in the US does not match this reality
In the runup to the 2003 Iraq War, there was a major public debate in America about the wisdom of the Bush administration’s strategy. It was lopsided, with pro-war voices drowning out antiwar ones, but it was nonetheless the topic in American public life — marked by massive protests and bitter arguments dividing the country’s intellectual class.
A war with North Korea would dwarf the 2003 Iraq War in scope and death toll, yet there is very little in the way of serious public debate happening right now about the risks posed by the Trump administration’s approach — bluff or no.
This is most glaring in Congress, which (per the Constitution) is supposed to make the decision to declare war. In 2003, Bush went to Congress first to ask for authorization to invade. Yet there’s no talk of Trump asking for a similar vote — just an assumption that he could strike whenever he wanted and the rest of the world would have to live with it.
Murphy has proposed a bill that would require congressional approval for a strike on North Korea, but when I asked him if he was getting any support from colleagues on Capitol Hill, his answer was a flat no.
“These are muscles that we haven’t used in decades, having not authorized military action for 14 years,” he said. “It’s hard given how much authority we’ve abdicated to the president over the past decade.”
Beyond Congress, the broader public debate has been far more muted than it was in 2002-’03. There have been no major antiwar demonstrations; public intellectuals seem to assume that war with North Korea is too scary, the possibility of such an awful war too remote, to be worth taking seriously.
Part of that is because, unlike the Bush administration did with the Iraq War, the Trump administration isn’t presenting a united front in favor of war.
There’s no active campaign of trying to sell the American public on a war like there was in 2002-’03, let alone one that relied on the kind of flimsy evidence that Bush’s did. What we’ve gotten instead is a lot of mixed messages from the administration, a lot of signaling that it would be willing to use force (against a country that’s demonstrably more of a threat than Iraq was), without a clear and unmistakable commitment to actually doing it.
On top of that, grassroots energy on the left, the natural leader of an antiwar coalition under a Republican president, has focused on domestic policy, like blocking Obamacare repeal and the travel ban. These issues are demonstrably real, not hypothetical; it |
to life.
The 'Future' 50/50 Bookstore
50/50 has been in the works for the last three years and originally stemmed from the idea of "how can we get these books out of paper mills and into people's hands?"
50/50 Bookstore will utilize a pay what you can model to ensure that all who want books, can have books, simple as that. We're hoping that this will be particularly useful to young readers and the teachers that educate them.
At the heart of it, 50/50 is a community project. Once open, we will be partnering with local organizations like youth literacy programs and animal shelters. These local organizations will receive 50% of our net proceeds each month to help continue the work they are doing in our community.
We launched this project for two reasons: to raise funds to build out our bookstore and to raise awareness.
We have found a location that we feel is centralized to serve the community around us. It is currently an open canvas but with a little love, we believe it will transform to something truly remarkable. The campaign funds will go towards updating the space with new flooring and lights, fresh paint, signage so people can find us, and lots and lots of book shelves. A portion of the funds will go towards installing a kiosk for payment, prepaying rent, and other project related costs. We're planning mid February 2018 for our opening!
Open Canvas
The current space will likely hold around 5,000 books. Anything we raise above our original goal will go towards increasing our square footage and adding a larger selection of books.
If you not just like, but LOVE this idea, please share this project with other book-lovers you know! We can't do this alone and need the community to make this possible.
Rewards
So we have some really cool rewards for our cool backers (that's you)! We have store "credit" available for backers who want to see this bookstore come to life. Our totes with 50/50 branding will make a wonderful vessel for books and groceries.
Totally Awesome Totes
We even have a pizza party because who doesn't like pizza? And with every level of support, we will be partnering with Reach Out and Read Colorado to distribute books to children within our community and all throughout Colorado.
Special Thanks to Nick Jones for the video and mura;kami for the music.When most people think of emergency fixes in space, the first incident that comes to mind is the famous Apollo 13 mission. The astronauts fashioned duct tape and surplus materials into air filtration canisters in the lunar module to keep all three astronauts alive for the entire trip home. You might remember the story from the 1995 Ron Howard film Apollo 13.
An ABC News poll conducted in 2005 asked over a thousand people if they kept duct tape in their emergency kits, 86% of the people polled said they did. NASA is by no means an exception. In fact, labeled officially by NASA as ‘Tape’ in the official stowage lists, every Apollo mission from 11 to 17 carried duct tape with them to the Moon (see page 8 of the Apollo 17 stowage list). Perhaps less known than the Apollo 13 incident, the Apollo 17 mission also owes much to ordinary duct tape.
The Apollo 17 mission left Earth on December 7, 1972 and arrived at the Moon on December 9. Commander Eugene “Gene” Cernan and Lunar Module pilot Harrison “Jack” Schmitt explored the lunar surface while Ron Evans remained in the Command Module, America. While on the surface, Cernan and Schmitt deployed various science experiments across their landing site, making essential use of their Lunar Rover Vehicle (LRV).
This LRV is a Qualification Test Unit used for training the Apollo astronauts. Its configuration is very similar to the Apollo 17 LRV and can be found in the Museum in Washington, DC. Photo: National Air and Space Museum
This ‘Moon buggy’ made it easier for the astronauts to traverse long distances on the Moon and explore diverse geological landscapes. This was especially important for this mission, since Schmitt was, and still is, the only scientist (a geologist) to travel to the Moon. With his expert knowledge, the Apollo 17 mission gathered unmeasurable amounts of scientific information, owing much of its success to the LRV. During the Apollo 17 mission, the astronauts completed three extravehicular activities (EVA). It was at the end of the first EVA, that trouble arose, placing the mission in serious jeopardy. “Ohhh you won’t believe it,” Gene Cernan groaned as he realized what happened.
“Ohhhh there goes a fender. Oh shoot.”(See the 36 minute mark of this video to hear Cernan.) Cernan’s hammer in one of his suit’s pockets had caught the edge of the back right tire’s fender extension and it popped clean off. This accident might well have totaled the entire LRV. Without the fender extension protecting them from the Moon dust, driving the LRV became a serious hazard.
When dirt is picked up by the woven wire wheels of the LRV in the 1/6 Earth gravity and airless near-vacuum of the lunar surface, it goes much farther than it would on Earth. Much more abrasive than any sand found on earth because the grains are not worn down by wind and water, lunar dust lifted off the surface by the rover wheel could cause catastrophic consequences. Riding without the fender extension caused massive “rooster tails” as Schmitt and Cernan called them, spreading lunar dust all over their instruments and suits and into every nook and cranny. If the darker colored dust were allowed to stay on an instrument for too long, the dust would absorb heat from the sun. This then would heat the instruments to very high temperatures potentially causing them to fail. And not only had dust begun to cover the instruments, but it also began to cover the astronaut’s suits.
Gene Cernan suited up during a pressure check. Note how his suit is bright white. Photo: NASA ap17-72-HC-878HR
Gene Cernan on the Moon towards the end of the third EVA. Note the dark color of his legs due to the dust. Photo: NASA AS17-140-21390HR
The problem of dust was not exclusive to the Apollo 17 astronauts as dust caused certain challenges on previous Apollo missions. Cernan and Schmitt just had to deal with more of the dust because of the broken fender extension.
At the end of the first EVA, before they re-entered the Lunar Module, Cernan stated, “… it's going to take us half a dozen Sundays to dust. Look at that fender; that's terrible.” Cernan had first attempted to re-attach the fender extension with duct tape but due to the dust, the tape lost its adhesiveness and the fender extension fell off driving between experiment sites. A better fix to this very dirty problem was required.
Following the first EVA, while the Apollo 17 astronauts slept, John Young, Charlie Duke, Deke Slayton, Roco Patrone, and Ronald Blevins in Houston came up with a solution. They were challenged with creating a replacement fender with only the materials that the astronauts had on the Moon, knowing that without the fender, the LRV would be practically useless for the rest of the mission. Their solution was to attach four of the 28 lunar maps with what Cernan would later call, “good old-fashioned American gray tape,” carried on board. The maps could be configured in a way that would resemble the fender extension and affixed to the fender with two clamps from the optical alignment telescope.
John Young, Charlie Duke, Deke Slayton, Roco Patrone, and Ronald Blevins work on a repair to the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the Apollo 17 mission.
The make-shift repair on the Moon. Photo: NASA AS17-137-20979
Upon waking up, the astronauts followed their colleagues’ instructions and repaired the fender. The mission continued as planned. Duct tape, once again, saved the day and avoided a possible sticky situation on the Moon.
The four maps used in this lunar repair were returned from the Moon and are now located in the Museum in Washington, DC. The remaining maps from the mission have been donated to the Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Maps on display at the Museum in Washington, DC in the Apollo to the Moon exhibition. Photo: National Air and Space MuseumHave you ever heard of the International Republican Institute? Probably not.
But your tax dollars fund it and its counterpart, the International Democratic Institute. Money is appropriated by the Congress and given to the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID, which then make grants to those two groups.
The stated purpose of these organizations is to help build democratic institutions in countries all over the world. They do so by, among other activities, providing help to political parties during campaigns. That help may include media manipulation and opposition candidate research. Oftentimes the effort opposes the ruling party and has therefore resulted in the expulsion, and even arrest, of Americans working as IRI and IDI operatives.
Now, don’t get me wrong: this “foreign intervention” is not a program that is uniquely American. The Russian and Chinese play in the same elections but do so in a much more practical manner. They build homes and buy cars for their favored candidates. The point is, contrary to President Obama’s recent temper tantrum, political involvement in other nations’ elections is a game played by major powers and it has been going on for decades.
Russian hacking of American business and government operations has also been going on for decades, and has been widely reported. So has the hacking by the Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, Cubans and others.
It is not news that foreign governments – including American “allies” including Britain, Saudi Arabia and Israel– also fund organizations and publications to influence American public opinion— even in election years. Anyone surprised that the Russians do it must have been living in another galaxy the last fifty years.
This is old news, but unlike today’s headlines, it is real news, not fake news.
Obama’s hypocrisy on this matter is surprisingly well documented. In the months leading up to the March 2015 Israeli parliamentary elections, the Obama administration made little secret of its hope for a defeat of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by the Labor Party candidate. Obama’s interest in the Israeli election went beyond hoping for a change. Obama’s 2012 campaign national field director, Jeremy Bird, was hired by the pro-Labor “VI-5” group to advise and assist the anti-Netanyahu effort.
Indeed, funding for much of the Labor Party campaign came from wealthy United States activists closely associated with the Democratic Party.
Yes, both sides in that 2015 Israeli election complained of the “undue influence of foreign money,” but no one challenged the legitimacy of the election results.
So, pardon me if I consider President Obama’s moral outrage over alleged Russian interference in 2016 the height of political hypocrisy. Sadly, the only surprising thing about this manufactured ruckus is how many Republicans in Congress have joined the charade. Obama has his political axe to grind, and so do Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, political losers who have not let up on their criticism of Donald Trump since November 8.
United States government sponsorship and funding of interventions in foreign elections has been official government policy for at least 50 years since the Cold War began in the 1950s, and it has had bipartisan Congressional support. Millions of taxpayer dollars are spent ANNUALLY on such activities.
Hacking into computers to steal sensitive data, email messages and other information is simply the use of new technologies to pursue traditional foreign policy goals. It is not news that the Russians do it, and Obama has known it for eight years since the day he walked into the Oval Office. He also knows his own government is doing it on a massive scale.
So, I must ask: What is so different or so shocking if Russia was somehow involved in assisting the WikiLeaks theft and subsequent publication of the highly embarrassing DNC emails that damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign? The New York Times and Washington Post showed no moral scruples when publishing other WikiLeaks-obtained information embarrassing to American politicians and national security interests. Why are the DNC emails more sacrosanct than Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails?
The brazen dishonesty and hypocrisy of the allegations of “Russian hacking of the 2016 election” is made even more grotesque by the sophomoric media bait and switch: While Russian hacking of both industrial secrets and government agency data is widespread, as is hacking by Chinese and North Koreans and others, there is no evidence of hacking into election machines or any attempted compromise of 2016 election tabulations.
Simply put, there is yet to be any evidence of Russian “hacking” of the 2016 election. And yet, the White House and the media establishment is intent on planting that idea in the American political conversation as if it were a proven fact. Trying to influence American public opinion is not the same as manipulating the election results and the attempt to confuse and confound the two is an insult to the American people.
The whole fabric of this fake news story is a fiction intended to mislead the public and cast a shadow of illegitimacy over the electoral victory of Donald Trump. Yet, when we look beyond the screaming headlines and examine the facts of the matter, we find there is no evidence the Russians have done anything that the US government isn’t doing TODAY in a dozen places around the globe. But somehow, we are supposed to believe they have engaged in impermissible interference in our politics.
The stench of this fake news hogwash is overpowering.After his Redskins had blown a 14-0 lead against the Vikings to enter the locker room at halftime looking at a 20-14 deficit, coach Jay Gruden told his team to remember that they have been there before.
“We just had to keep our poise,” he said when asked about his halftime message.
“I remind them every game this year, we’ve been leading and we’ve been trailing, and today’s no different. We just have to continue to handle the adversity, the adverse situations.”
Gruden wasn’t quite accurate there—there is one game that they never trailed—but the Eagles did tie the game after Washington took a 14-0 lead so it was a similar emotional effect to falling behind. In the big picture getting to 5-3-1 has been a roller coaster ride.
On top of that, each game has had some wild ups and downs no matter what the result was in the end.
Here are the biggest deficits and biggest leads the Redskins have had in each game this year and when they took those leads:
RELATED: WHO IS THE REDSKINS MVP THROUGH WEEK 10?
The biggest deficit the Redskins have overcome to win a game was 12, against the Giants in Week 3. The largest lead they have blown in a loss is six against the Steelers. They had a seven-point lead early on in the Bengals game, which they ultimately tied.
The Redskins have overcome double-digit deficits to take the lead four times. They ultimately lost to the Cowboys and Lions after rallying to take the lead, they beat the Giants and tied the Bengals.
Last year things were not all that different.
There were tense, pivotal moments in almost every game and the Redskins have learned to navigate them. They aren’t always successful but they are always competitive.
“We have a pretty good resolve in this locker room,” said linebacker Ryan Kerrigan.
“We know every game is going to be close. You rarely have a game where you just beat a team 40-0. We know most games we’re playing are going to be close and you have to have that mindset going into every game that you have to play for a full 60 minutes.”
RELATED: STUNNING IMAGES FROM WEEK 10PORTLAND, Ore. -- Portland's Biketown bike share program has only been in existence for a little over three weeks. But Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) leaders are already touting its success.
"We're flabbergasted at how popular it is," said PBOT spokesman Dylan Rivera.
City leaders say they anticipated success for the program, but that the early numbers have exceeded expectations.
While Biketown users don't have to sign up for annual memberships, more than 2,000 people have taken that step. The busiest Biketown station in the system, at Southwest Naito and Southwest Salmon, has logged 4,000 rentals in the past three weeks. Rivera also says a few bikes have logged around 500 individual miles.
"We're having to go out and adjust some gears," said Rivera, referring to problems caused by the heavy use.
Rivera says there have been a few hiccups. Some users have been confused by the "hold" feature on bikes. While riders can hold a bike, those holds only last for 30 minutes. In addition, "all day pass" doesn't mean riders have one specific bike tied to them for the day. Some people have bought all day passes, and locked their bike up at various locations. When they've returned, their bikes have been rented by someone else.
"All day passes don't mean that one bike is on hold for you," said Rivera. "They give you access to any bike."
Rivera also says there have been no reported cases of theft or vandalism, noting theft isn't usually a problem that other bike share programs face.
"The parts are unique," said Rivera. "There's really no market for them."
Riders seem enthusiastic about the bike share launch.
"I thought it was going to fail," laughed Vince Schreck of Portland. "I thought it was actually going to bomb. I've used them probably three times now and I didn't think I would."
"My girlfriend hasn't really ridden bikes before this so this is a great opportunity for her to kind of learn the ropes," said Niles McGiver of Portland. "It's been handy for her to commute and I think she's probably going to use them more for that reason."
Potential riders are encouraged to read through the Frequently Asked Questions category on Biketown's website.Ajax boss Frank de Boer says Tottenham have not contacted him about their vacant managerial position.
Dutch champions Ajax revealed in April that the Premier League club had enquired about de Boer's availability.
Frank de Boer managerial factfile De Boer took over as Ajax manager in December 2010 after a spell as assistant to Netherlands boss Bert van Marwijk in the 2010 World Cup. He rejected talks over the vacant Liverpool job in the summer of 2012
He has won 4 Eredivisie titles with Ajax, and one Johan Cruyff Shield, the equivalent of England's Community Shield
However, de Boer, 44, says nobody from Tottenham has either spoken to him personally or contacted his club in the last few weeks.
When asked if he expected them to, De Boer told BBC Sport: "I don't know. And I am happy with Ajax."
Tottenham have been searching for a new manager since they sacked Tim Sherwood on 13 May, with de Boer and Southampton boss Mauricio Pochettino heavily linked with the position.
Former Netherlands international de Boer, who has won the Dutch title in each of his four years as Ajax manager, said that he will listen to approaches from other clubs despite being under contract at the Amsterdam ArenA until 2017.
"If a club comes to speak to me I will listen to them, but I am going on holiday now and that is the most important thing for me."On March 9, 2019, SOJOURN will be “up all night to get lucky” at Purim Off Ponce, Atlanta’s best costume party!
Join us in honoring Bex Taylor-Klaus as the 2019 Michael Jay Kinsler Rainmaker Award Honoree!
A 24 year-old Atlanta native, Bex is boldly using her platform as an actor to bring gender and sexually diverse characters into the light, empowering fans to come to terms with their own gender fluidity. “There’s so much in this world telling you to be something different and that’s so detrimental. I’d rather have kids see something and go, ‘It’s okay to be me.’ ”
All proceeds from Purim off Ponce support the important work of SOJOURN, including our nationally recognized curricula for community-based training and education for gender and sexually diverse (GSD) inclusion and suicide prevention.
Information, Tickets and Host Sponsorships are HERE!
Like Daft Punk sang in “Get Lucky:”
WHAT KEEPS THE PLANET SPINNING
THE FORCE OF LOVE BEGINNING
WE’VE COME TOO FAR TO GIVE UP WHO WE ARE
SO LET’S RAISE THE BAR AND OUR CUPS TO THE STARSJust a day ago, solar scam accused Saritha S Nair, in a recorded conversation, had stated that there is a lobby among Congress ministers in Kerala, who trap women, sexually exploit and exchange them among the colleagues.
As the campaigning to the Aruvikkara Assembly bypoll concludes on Thursday, the CPI (M) said the expose of “brothel culture” prevailing among Congress ministers showed that “Kerala is ruled by the underworld”.
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Just a day ago, solar scam accused Saritha S Nair, in a recorded conversation, had stated that there is a lobby among Congress ministers in Kerala, who trap women, sexually exploit and exchange them among the colleagues. When the solar scam was exposed in 2013, the detailed call list of Nair had showed that some of the congress ministers were engaged in prolonged conversation with her at odd hours. She had earlier told a court that she was sexually exploited by several political leaders, but the magistrate had failed to record her statement. The magistrate had late faced disciplinary action.
Addressing a press conference at Aruvikkara, CPI(M) Politburo member Pinarayi Vijayan said the cabinet is filled with dirty ministers. “Kerala hasnever witnessed a similar scenario. A brothel culture is prevailing in the cabinet. Corruption charges are coming like an avalanche,” said Vijayan, who is heading the party’s campaign at Aruvikkara.
[related-post]
Vijayan said the poll outcome from the bypoll would be a shock treatment for Congress government. “The entire cabinet has stooped to the level of a sex racket. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy should react to the revelations of Nair that the cabinet members are engaged in exchanging women among themselves,” he said.
Vijayan pointed out the contradiction in senior Congress leaders soliciting votes for Congress candidate after publically stating that corruption has become rampant in Kerala under its regime. He said the government would collapse when the result of the bypoll comes out next week.
Meanwhile, Congress attacked Opposition leader V S Achuthanandan for his statement against party working committee member A K Antony. The Congress had turned against Achuthanandan after he attracted a huge turnout at public meetings during the campaigning.
Achuthanandan had stated that Antony is an ‘arattu mundan’, who is carrying a light in front of the process of corruption staged by Congress in Kerala. Achuthanandan was referring to a temple practice in Kerala in which a short man (mundan), would carry light in front of a procession led by a royal family member. Congress felt it as insulting considering that Antony is a short man.
Chief Minister Oommen Chandy said Achuthanandan has insulted Antony. “People of Aruvikkara constituency will give befitting reply to his derogatory remark. Achuthanandan should be tolerant towards political criticism.”
VS was provoked by Congress state president V M Sudheeran’s comment that the Opposition leader is a lamb being taken to slaughter house. He said a lamb would be fed very well before being slaughtered.
CPI (M) was treating Achuthanandan in a similar manner during the campaigning. After the election is over, the party would crack the whip against him on pending charges of indiscipline, said Sudheeran.
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Although VS had been not co-operating with the party since he walked out of the recent state conference, CPI (M) played to hilt his mass appeal during the electioneering.This week was jam-packed with security news. A new worldwide survey of crypto products shows that encryption is international, so a ban makes no sense. Researchers found a way to hack power grids by remotely manipulating air conditioners. Obama covered the basics in a new cybersecurity plan, perhaps in an attempt to secure his legacy. FBI and DHS employees got hacked. Google announced the phasing out of Flash in banner ads. India banned Facebook’s Basics app to support net neutrality. We celebrated the 20-year anniversary of John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” manifesto, and looked at how you can donate your old USB drive to fight North Korean brainwashing. A new Malware Museum was born. And someone finally wrote a good encryption bill to preempt states from trying to implement their own anti-crypto policies at a state level.
But that’s not all. Each Saturday we round up the news stories that we didn’t break or cover in depth at WIRED, but which deserve your attention nonetheless. As always, click on the headlines to read the full story in each link posted. And stay safe out there!
### US Intelligence Chief James Clapper: The Government Could Use the Internet of Things to Spy on You
US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a congressional testimony that intelligence services could use the increasingly interconnected smart household devices for surveillance. “In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” he said.
### After Losing Copyright Lawsuit, Site Offering Access to Academic Papers For Free Emerges on the Deep Web
Alexandra Elbakyan, a university student in Kazakhstan, developed the Sci-Hub website to allow users to download paywalled academic papers for free by tapping into university networks to access the subscription-only papers. Unfortunately, the site was shut down after a copyright lawsuit on behalf of Elsevier, and its domain was shut down. But Sci-Hub popped back up againunder a different domain, and is also available on the deep web. (Just download the Tor browser and head over to here for that.)
### More Than A Third of Leaked Police Contracts Contain Guarantees To Keep Disciplinary Records Secret, Destroy Civilian Complaint Records
How’s this for accountability? Leaked police contracts contain guarantees blocking public access to disciplinary records, formal complaints against officers, and internal investigation documents. Some contracts even had clauses allowing for complaints and disciplinary records to be destroyed after a negotiated amount of time. The documents became publicly accessible when hackers breached the Fraternal Order of Police website and posted its files online.
### Proposed Utah Law Punishes Doxing With Up to Six Months in Jail—But its Language is Overly Broad
Utah State Representative David Lifferth has written a bill that would make doxing a crime punishable by up to six months in jail. However, the bill’s language is overly broad, to the point where it could make holding public officials accountable for their actions a crime. “The bill as drafted is clearly unconstitutional,” Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Nate Cardozo told Ars Technica, pointing out that publishing a person’s name “with the intent to annoy” could be a crime under the proposal draft. Lifferth told Ars Technica that he is revising the bill to address these concerns.
### Hacked Toy Company Updates Terms of Service to Shunt Responsibility for Future Hacks
VTech, the toy company that reopened last week after a data breach exposed the personal data of more than 6 million children, is now back online. The bad news is that its terms and conditions include a new statement requiring users to acknowledge that any information they send or receive while using the site could be insecure or at risk of unauthorized interception. Although the clause may not be valid legally, it could be an attempt by the site to restrict liability for future hacks.
### Many Mac Apps Vulnerable to Hijacking
A large number of apps using a third party updater over HTTP are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, due to a bug in the third-party software framework Sparkle, which apps including Camtasia, uTorrent, and others use to receive updates.
Although Sparkle has provided a fix for two vulnerabilities found, developers need to update the Sparkle framework inside their apps, which can be a difficult process. In addition, it isn’t easy for users to know which of their apps are vulnerable.
### FBI Can’t Unlock Encrypted Phone Used by San Bernardino Killers
FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that FBI technicians have been unable to unlock encrypted data on the phone belonging to either Syed Rizwan Farook or Tashfeen Malik, the terrorists who killed 14 people in San Bernardino in December. Comey didn’t specify the cellphone model, nor did he indicate whether it belonged to Farook or Malik.
### Site Hosting Hacked FBI Database Went Dark
Cryptobin, an anonymous site that hosts text files submitted by users, was taken offline this week two days after a hacker used it to publish the personal details of 22,000 FBI employees. The site is still available by its IP address, however, and the data has since been mirrored by at least two websites.
### Google Improves Gmail Security
On Safer Internet Day this past Tuesday, Google announced that Gmail messages sent to or from a service that doesn’t support TLS encryption will be flagged with a broken lock icon in the message. Emails that can’t be authenticated will also be flagged with a question mark in place of the sender’s avatar (or logo, or photo). This update will allow users to take extra care before responding to these messages–or clicking on links.
### NYPD Has Used Stingrays More Than 1,000 Times Since 2008
In response to a public records request submitted by the NYCLU, the NYPD has disclosed that it not only owns and operates Stingrays, but that it’s done so more than a thousand times between May 2008 and May 2015. Further, it does so without any sort of written policy, and primarily through the use of pen register, a lower standard than an actual warrant, which would require probable cause. Last year, the Department of Justice began using warrants rather than pen registers for using the cell site simulators barring exceptional/emergency circumstances.A decade ago, activist Ron Unz conducted a study of the ethnic and religious composition of the student body at Harvard.
Blacks and Hispanics, Unz found, were then being admitted to his alma mater in numbers approaching their share of the population.
And who were the most underrepresented Americans at Harvard?
White Christians and ethnic Catholics. Though two-thirds of the U.S. population then, they had dropped to one-fourth of the student body.
Comes now a more scientific study from Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford to confirm that a deep bias against the white conservative and Christian young of America is pervasive at America’s elite colleges and Ivy League schools.
Wake up! This is the reality of what Christian students face in the secular world of academia.
The Espenshade-Radford study “draws from … the National Study of College Experience … gathered from eight highly competitive private colleges and universities (entering freshman SAT scores: 1360),” writes Princeton Professor Russell K. Nieli, who has summarized the findings:
Elite college admissions officers may prattle about “diversity,” but what they mean is the African-American contingent on campus should be 5 percent to 7 percent, with Hispanics about as numerous.
However, “an estimated 40 percent to 50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants,” who never suffered segregation or Jim Crow.
To achieve even these percentages, however, the discrimination against white and Asian applicants, because of the color of their skin and where their ancestors came from, is astonishing.
As Nieli puts it, “Being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white … equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1,600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310-point SAT advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.”
“To have the same chance of gaining admission as a black student with a SAT score of 1100, a Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have 1230, a white student a 1410 and an Asian student a 1550.”
Was this what the civil-rights revolution was all about – requiring kids whose parents came from Korea, Japan or Vietnam to get a perfect SAT score of 1600 to be given equal consideration with a Jamaican or Kenyan kid who got an 1150? Is this what it means to be an Ivy League progressive?
What are the historic and moral arguments for discriminating in favor of kids from Angola and Argentina over kids whose parents came from Poland and Vietnam?
There is yet another form of bigotry prevalent among our academic elite that is a throwback to the snobbery of the WASPs of yesterday. While Ivy League recruiters prefer working-class to middle-class black kids with the same test scores, the reverse is true with white kids.
White kids from poor families who score as well as white kids from wealthy families – think George W. Bush – not only get no break, they seem to be the most undesirable and unwanted of all students.
Though elite schools give points to applicants for extracurricular activities, especially for leadership roles and honors, writes Nieli, if you played a lead role in Future Farmers of America, the 4-H Clubs or junior ROTC, leave it off your resume or you may just be blackballed. “Excelling in these activities is ‘associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds on admissions.'”
Writes Nieli, there seems an unwritten admissions rule at America’s elite schools: “Poor Whites Need Not Apply.”
For admissions officers at our top private and public schools, diversity is “a code word” for particular prejudices.
For these schools are not interested in a diversity that would include “born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lower- and middle-class Catholics, working-class ‘white ethnics,’ social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children or older students just starting into college and raising children.”
“Students in these categories,” writes Nieli, “are often very rare at the most competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League.”
“Lower-class whites prove to be all-around losers” at the elite schools. They are rarely accepted. Lower-class Hispanics and blacks are eight to 10 times more likely to get in with the same scores.
That such bigotry is pervasive in 2010 at institutions that preen about how progressive they are is disgusting. That a GOP which purports to represents Middle America, whose young are bearing the brunt of this bigotry, has remained largely silent is shameful.
Many of these elite public and private colleges and universities benefit from U.S. tax dollars through student loans and direct grants. The future flow of those tax dollars should be made contingent on Harvard and Yale ending racial practices that went out at Little Rock Central High in 1957.Remember back in April when a picture of Big Sean and Eminem in the studio had surfaced and it had the internet buzzing? Well, not much was heard about their collab after that until today when Big Sean spoke with MTV News about that time working with Eminem.
Big Sean sat down with MTV News and briefly spoke about his studio session with Eminem. Sean stated that he wasn't sure where the song will end up, but that it will be a "Detroit Classic". When asked about his experience with the Detroit legend, Sean stated,
“We talked for a few hours before we even worked on music. I was telling him my stories about how we were performing all around downtown Detroit and [it turned out that] he was performing in the same places. It was funny because every story I told him about how I lost a lot of friends, relationships and girls…and [how I've] made new friends, he was like, ‘Man, it’s crazy, because every story you telling me, I got the exact same story just in a different way. Real G’s…similar tales.”
Look for Big Sean's upcoming album, Hall of Fame, to impact sometime this year. Maybe this summer? Check out the full interview below. [Via]jesse freidin
Weeks after being displaced from New Orleans due to Katrina, I was 17 and walking home in Chicago when I met two men who changed my life forever.After talking with them for a few minutes, they pulled me into a nearby alleyway and started roughing me around. They kept yelling at me that they were going to give me AIDS. Eventually they pulled my pants down and they raped me.While it was happening, all I could hear were those words over and over, rattling around in my head: “We’re gonna give you AIDS! We’re gonna give you AIDS!”I tested positive a few weeks later.The only way I knew how to cope with this was denial. This led to a major downward spiral and breakdown. For over tens years, I battled different addictions, major health issues and the death of a close friend. But most of all I battled meth, which became the cure and the cause for everything good and bad in my life.It was a dark time, to say the least.After a decade, I fell into a deep depression while dealing with a relationship that went south. I decided I needed to do something to help myself get better, because for the first time I was starting to feel like I didn’t want to wake up anymore.I needed someone or something to hold me accountable for my life and my responsibilities, and to remind me to travel lightly — to carry as little emotional baggage as possible. I had a dog earlier in my life who was a big help in dark moments of my life. I thought of her and thought maybe another dog could help me now.While searching for dogs, I came across the French bulldog, which is described as “a clown in the cloak of a philosopher.” Immediately, I thought this was so perfect for me and described how I had felt my entire life! I had just never been able to put it into words.Between growing up in a southern household where I was the rebel, the black sheep, and the colorful son (as my mom used to call me) my life seemed to have gone from one tragedy to the next. But I kept pushing forward. These words describing the French bulldog stuck with me.Stud is from a breeder in Kentucky, and when I met him I immediately felt myself become lighter. From the moment I brought him home, I started to see my life change for the better.He would wake me up each morning to take him out with him waking me up on a routine; he gave a consistency to my schedule, and I began to get better at taking my medication, which made me begin to feel better as a whole.Stud’s love for me doesn’t expire |
'm aware of the effect that these kinds of tragedies have on the university community. At the same time, tuition is higher than ever, and you have to wonder if NYU is justified in spending all of this money on a library redesign. Unfortunately, a suicide-proof library doesn't mean a community without suicide. Students will still find ways to hurt themselves; NYU would be better to spend the money addressing the issues which underlie tragedies like suicide than draping the library in what seems to be largely unpopular pixelated gold plates."
To be sure, there are some "alt" nonconformist NYU kids who say they like the suicide screens. Priya Mulgaonkar, an Environmental Studies Major, says, "The screens are very ominous, but I suppose being pre-cautious is better than having over stressed college students in such close proximity to heights. It is difficult to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of something I know is there to keep people from jumping to their deaths, but if they had to install something, I guess gilded cathedral-like fixtures are not too bad to look at."
Of course, this being college, there are no shortage of cynics. Film and Television major Cole Carter contends that NYU administrators "are trying to make themselves less liable at the expense of making the library more prison-like. I don't think that it will actually prevent anyone from actually killing themselves, I just think it will just prevent people from killing themselves in the library. There are plenty of high places to throw yourself off of in the city. If this one is made inaccessible, people will just find another one."
Reporting by Claire Voon.In Germany, the Pirate Party has sent a candidate to a state senate; in Sweden, the party has actually elected members of the European Parliament. But whatever its successes, the Pirate Party still won't be able to sit in on proceedings of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a UN body that sets international rules for trademarks, copyrights, and patents. (WIPO also resolves certain disputes over who should control Internet domain names).
In a closed-door session yesterday, WIPO officials approved several groups for observer status, but delayed ruling on the Pirate Party's application. The delay will be until at least 2013, and comes despite the fact that the WIPO director-general recommended approval. The application came from Pirate Party International, a non-government organization that represents the major European pirate parties (political parties themselves can't apply.)
"I am concerned that the WIPO is not interested in the dialog with this part of the civil society that thinks that the time for a massive reform of the copyright systems has come," PPI co-chairman Gregory Engels wrote in a blog post today.
"This decision is really distressing," wrote the European Parliament's youngest member, Swedish Pirate Party MEP Amelia Andersdotter. She cited a report that the delay took place after objections were raised by a few WIPO member states, including the US, Switzerland, and France.
WIPO officials wouldn't comment on the decision, except to confirm that the delay took place.West Ham United manager Sam Allardyce says that Andy Carroll is "pretty miserable" after being ruled out with an ankle injury until December.
West Ham United manager Sam Allardyce has said that Andy Carroll is "very miserable" following his most recent injury blow.
The 25-year-old suffered ligament damage in his ankle on the club's tour of New Zealand and has been ruled out until December.
Carroll missed a large portion of the last season with a heel injury and his manager has admitted that he is devastated to be back on the sidelines again.
"He is pretty miserable," Allardyce told reporters. "He is not very happy with life at the moment because it is a massive blow to him again.
"We just have to pick his spirits up. Hopefully when the boot comes off and the specialist gives him the okay to start working again he will feel a lot happier with himself. But he is certainly very upset and very miserable at this moment in time."
Carroll scored twice in 15 appearances for West Ham in the Premier League last season.Citing worries about foreign surveillance efforts, the government of Switzerland has ordered tighter control methods on its own computer and phone technology systems in order to prevent Swiss communications from being monitored.
The Swiss Federal Council, a seven-member committee that serves as the head of the Swiss government and is responsible for enacting federal policy, admitted concern about other governments spying on official communications within Switzerland.
A government statement as quoted by the Associated Press indicated that future contracts for IT infrastructure will “where possible, only be given to companies that act exclusively according to Swiss law, where a majority of the ownership is in Switzerland and which provides all of its services within Switzerland's borders.”
The legislation covers contracts with the military, along with mobile phones and computers.
Wednesday's announcement comes after the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's office launched a criminal investigation based on the “genuine suspicion” that foreign entities conducted surveillance in Switzerland. The Swiss News Agency reported in December that article 271 of the Swiss penal code, which includes punishable acts by a foreign state, had been broken.
“Various clarifications are under way, and will be later examined,” one official said at the time.
That probe was ordered after NSA revelations emerged from whistleblower Edward Snowden. Along with documents detailing major American covert surveillance operations conducted throughout the world, Snowden told the Guardian newspaper that he had worked in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007.
Working for the Central Intelligence Agency under the guise of a US diplomat, Snowden said that it was in Geneva where he first encountered the vast scope of the American intelligence apparatus. Snowden said it was a “formative” moment and the first time he questioned the “rightness” of the US intelligence effort.
He also claimed that, as part of gathering intelligence on secret financial information, CIA agents would get Swiss bankers drunk and “encourage” the individuals to drive home. When that person would inevitably be arrested, the CIA would offer to spring him loose in exchange for his cooperation. US officials have since maintained that American officials stationed in Switzerland respect the country's laws.
“Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world,” Snowden said. “I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”
Switzerland's Federal Department of Foreign Affairs told ABC News last year they had “taken note” of Snowden's comments and requested “clarification” from the US State Department's office in Bern.
“In accordance with the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, Switzerland expects the members of the diplomatic missions in Bern and members of the permanent mission in Geneva to comply with the laws and rules of the country of residence,” the statement said.For weeks, you’ve driven around with “Wash Me” etched on your back window, boldly defying cleanliness and dirty looks alike. You’ve contemplated a (pricey) trip to the car wash. You even prayed for rain.
One day, the dirt finally becomes too much and you cave in. You wash your car and give it a good wax, but the next day — splat. A pigeon poops on your hood.
If this has happened to you, chances are you’ve wondered: “Why me? Is it karma … or just the car I drive?”
Well, according to a recent study from the UK, the color of your car could make your ride more prone to avian waste. So which colors are bird magnets?
Birds poop on red cars most
Though red cars don’t cost more to insure, they do attract more bird droppings than any other car color. A study sponsored by Halfords (a car accessory chain) measured the frequency with which 1,140 cars in 5 cities around the UK got bird bombed and found that red cars were hit the most (18 percent of cars attacked were red). Green cars, on the other hand, were generally spared (only 1 percent of the cars pooped on were green).
Why this color preference among the birds? Do red cars fire their tempers? Are green cars just so pacific (and rare) that the birds want to give them amnesty? So far, only the birds know, but maybe one day they’ll tweet us the answer.
Why bird droppings damage car paint
For years, we’ve heard that the alkaline and acidic substance of bird doo-doo corrodes car paint, eventually etching the damage into the paint itself.
But according to research from Autoglym, car-care experts based in the UK (is it me or are the Brits obsessed?), it’s not the acid that’s to blame — it’s the heat.
Say you park your just-pooped-on car in the sun. The sun’s rays will warm the paint so that it softens and expands while hardening the droppings on its surface. Once the lacquer cools, it hardens and molds to birdie’s little gift, dulling the paint.
How to clean bird poop
Okay, we all know that soap and water will work wonders on wet and dry droppings alike. But is there a secret removal technique we don’t know about?
Autoglym experts recommend removing the dropping ASAP with a moist cloth to gently lift the unwanted deposit from the surface. If it’s dried, place a damp cloth over it for 10 minutes and then remove.
Others recommend pouring unsalted seltzer water over the dropping and wiping it with a microfiber cloth once the water has bubbled away. Check out our eco-friendly car wash tips for even more ideas, and find out how to get sparkling window panes.
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Newcastle has been named the best city in Britain to raise a family.
The Toon has been rated top for good schools, a low crime rate and low house prices.
The city, famous for the Tyne Bridge, Cheryl and its Brown Ale, beat 34 others to head the UK Family Living Index for having the most family-friendly environment.
MoneySuperMarket.com examined six categories, including the number of outstanding schools, parks, job opportunities, burglaries, house prices and average income, and crowned Newcastle the best place to start a family and bring up children.
The city scored highly for affordable homes, with the average price of property £161,255, compared with the UK average of £232,885 and £483,803 in London.
(Image: Newcastle Chronicle)
(Image: EyeEm)
(Image: EyeEm)
And it was awarded 10 out of 10 for outstanding schools per head of population and low house burglaries, scored above average for parks – but dropped points for its lack of jobs.
The survey found average incomes were £25,573 – higher than neighbour Sunderland, which had £24,767, but lower than Liverpool and Manchester, where they were £26,000.
Derby came second with its lower than average house prices at £148,437 seen as selling point and Wolverhampton bagged third place with affordable housing at £135,108 but lost points for a lack of parks for children to play in.
Southampton, Bath and Nottingham also made the top ten places to raise a family along with Coventry, York, Oxford and Stoke.
(Image: Universal Images Group)
(Image: Rob Cousins)
London came last, losing points for sky high property prices, burglaries and massive competition for school places.
MoneySuperMarket spokesperson Kevin Pratt said: “Parents naturally want the best for their children, whether it’s a good school, a safe and leafy neighbourhood, or plenty of career opportunities when they grow up.”
The Index analysed six categories - schools, parks, burglaries, jobs, house prices and income - awarding marks out of ten across the board.
It then weighted the scores with total marks out of five to come up with the rankings.
MoneySuperMarket said: “The Family Living Index was created to guide parents - or soon to be parents - looking to future proof their next move.”
The Family Living Index
Newcastle -upon-Tyne - 5
Derby - 4.82
Wolverhampton - 4.71
Southampton - 4.56
Bath - 4.53
Nottingham - 4.36
Coventry - 4.34
York - 4.33
Oxford - 4.33
Stoke-on-Trent - 4.31
Portsmouth - 4.29
Wakefield - 4.27
Swansea - 4.18
Liverpool - 4.13
Sunderland - 4.13
Manchester - 4.03
Leicester - 3.99
Aberdeen - 3.98
Chester - 3.97
Plymouth - 3.97
Peterborough - 3.96
Edinburgh - 3.92
Bristol - 3.90
Cardiff - 3.88
Belfast - 3.71
Birmingham - 3.68
Brighton & Hove - 3.57
Kingston upon Hull - 3.56
Glasgow - 3.55
Sheffield - 3.46
Bradford - 3.40
Leeds - 3.38
Armagh - 3.36
Newry - 3.29
London - 3.04Over the last 15 years, baseball has experienced incredible growth as an industry, with MLB revenue climbing from $3.4 billion in 2000 to north of $8 billion in 2015. They might even be over $9 billion at this point. Attendance is as good as it’s ever been, television contracts are enormous (at least for teams that don’t own their own network), and MLBAM is a media juggernaut.
Baseball is extremely healthy right now and, as a result, teams are spending more than ever on players. According to the USA Today salary database, the average MLB payroll has gone from $52.8M in 2000 to $65.8M in 2005 to $83.7M in 2010 to $114.8M in 2015. The average payrolls have more than doubled over the last 15 years. That’s incredible! The Yankees specifically have gone from a $92.8M payroll in 2000 to a $213.4M payroll in 2015.
That only tells part of the story, however. New York’s payroll increased $23.1M on average each year from 2000-05. They went from that $92.8M payroll in 2000 to a $208.3M payroll in 2005. That’s insane. The team’s payroll has held fairly steady over the last ten years though. It was $208.3M in 2005 and $213.4M in 2015 according to USA Today’s numbers, which I’m certain are not 100% accurate, but are good enough for our purposes. Here’s a graph:
The Yankees have added some significant revenue streams over the last ten years. First and foremost, the new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009. That’s kind of a big deal. Then, in November 2012, a significant percentage of the YES Network was sold to News Corp. for hundreds of millions of dollars over a span of several years. And finally, MLB recently signed new national television contracts with FOX and TBS, more than doubling each team’s take. All of that additional revenue has not led to a payroll increase.
Of course, the Yankees have some significant expenses as well, including revenue sharing and the luxury tax. (They’re also paying off the new ballpark.) They’ve paid something along the lines of $20M annually in luxury tax for a few years now, and who knows how much they’re playing in revenue sharing. A Forbes article says the Yankees paid $95M (!) in revenue sharing in 2013. That’s ridiculous. Then again, the same article says the team led MLB with $461M in revenue that year. (That’s after revenue sharing and bond payments on the ballpark.) Forbes had the team’s revenue at $277M in 2005.
Revenue is up and expenses are up, but payroll has held steady for a decade now. To be fair, the Yankees have spent a lot of money on things not directly related to the roster the last few years. The team beefed up their pro scouting and statistical analysis departments, the Himes complex in Tampa was upgraded with major renovations a few years ago, and of course there was the unprecedented international spending spree a few years ago. Who knows what else has gone on behind the scenes?
But still, something isn’t adding up here. Annual revenue increased nearly $200M from 2005-13 according to Forbes — their numbers are estimations, it should be noted — yet payroll has not changed. Has all the extra revenue gone to increased expenses and behind-the-scenes stuff? I suppose it’s possible, but man, that’s really hard to believe. Especially when Hal Steinbrenner has been wearing out that “you don’t need a $200M payroll to win the World Series” line. He’s made it very clear he doesn’t want to spend more money.
The Yankees are in the game’s largest market and they are the biggest brand in the sport — if not all sports — and that comes with its advantages, specifically money. Lots and lots of money. Look at that graph above. From 2003 to 2011 or so the Yankees blew the rest of the league out of the water with their payroll. That isn’t the case anymore. The rest of the league is catching up, so the Yankees are not taking advantage of their market. They’ve done the rest of the league a favor and leveled the playing field, and it’s showing in the standings. The Yankees haven’t finishing closer than six games back of the AL East winner since 2012.
That is the intention of the luxury tax and revenue sharing system, of course. After all, the luxury tax is officially called the Competitive Balance Tax. It’s meant to level the playing field and as far as the Yankees are concerned, it appears to be working beautifully. Hal doesn’t want to pay the tax. He’s made that abundantly clear. And I get that. The luxury tax is dead money. The Yankees have been writing an eight-figure check for a few years now for … nothing. The money does nothing. It goes into MLB’s Central Fund and that’s it. It’s an investment with no return.
It’s one thing to pass on some free agents because of the luxury tax. Over the last few offseasons the Yankees have only spent whatever has come off the books, little if anything more. But now the Yankees have apparently reached the point where Brett Gardner and Andrew Miller — two of their very best players — are reportedly being made available. There are baseball reasons to trade them, but it’s also financially motivated too. The Yankees didn’t shed much money this year, so they can’t afford any significant free agents, meaning the best way to add talent is by trading some of their best players.
That is screwed up, man. The thought of trading players as good as Gardner and Miller because spending money on free agents is not permitted is screwed up. It’s one thing when you can’t sign a free agent because payroll won’t increase, but once you start trading away good players to make things work financially, then it’s really a problem. Shouldn’t this concern the MLBPA? The Yankees haven’t increased payroll in ten years. I feel like the union should consider that a problem.
The Steinbrenners own the Yankees and they’re free to do whatever they want with the team, the same way I own this stupid blog and am free to do whatever I want with it. And fans are free to disagree with the team’s direction. When payroll stands still for a decade even though a new ballpark opened (!) and the News Corp. deal happened and the league itself keeps setting revenue records, it’s not hard to understand why fans might be unhappy. Now there’s talk about trading good players because signing expensive free agents is not an option? Holy mackerel.
The Yankees don’t have to go out and sign the biggest free agents. You needn’t look beyond their roster to see why that can be a really bad strategy. There’s a point of diminishing returns too, where every dollar you spend brings fewer and fewer wins to the roster. I thought the Yankees were beyond that point a few years ago, but with payroll holding steady and the team winnings 84-87 games the last three years, they’re not there any more. There are some obvious ways the Yankees could spent money this winter and add a lot of wins to the roster.
For a few years in the mid-to-late-2000s it was difficult to see how a static payroll was hurting the Yankees. The rest of the league was still so far behind it didn’t matter. Now though, in 2015 heading into 2016, it couldn’t be any more obvious the league is getting more competitive and the Yankees are no longer in a class of their own. They were kings of the sport and now they’re much closer to everyone else.
The Steinbrenners don’t have to up payroll. It’s their team and they can do what they want. But they also can’t ignore how failing to keep up with league-wide inflation — a modest goal, I’d say — is hurting their chances to field one of those “championship caliber teams” Hal is always talking about. The longer the Yankees’ payroll remains stagnant, the better it is for the rest of MLB.The Green Bay Packers continue to evaluate defensive talent before the trade deadline.
According to Rob Demvosky of ESPN.com, the Packers brought in DE Francis Kallon for a visit this week and the team also worked out DB B.T. Sanders. Kallon recently spent time with the Pittsburgh Steelers while Sanders recently spent time with the Buffalo Bills.
Kallon signed with the Steelers as an undrafted free agent from Georgia Tech. In his senior season, Kallon started six games and recorded 15 tackles.
The Packers were off last week and will be back in action on Monday to face the Detroit Lions. Make sure you’re in the loop – take five seconds to Sign up for our FREE Packers newsletter now!
Sanders played college football at Nicholls State where he recorded 56 tackles last year despite missing the final three games. He was named to the All-Southland Second Team at the end of the year.
The visits/workouts come on the heels of the Packers signing FB Joe Kerridge to the practice squad. Kerridge was on the Packers roster last year and played in eight games.
Be sure to follow Brian Jones on Twitter: @BrianJones247Donald Trump is promoting an ad titled, “Deplorable,” to remind voters that Hillary Clinton said half of Trump’s supporters could be put into a “basket of deplorables.”
According to the Trump campaign press release, the ad shows “Hillary Clinton’s true nature” and exposes “her contempt for everyday Americans.”
“’Deplorable’ is a response to the incredibly offensive comments Hillary Clinton made last Friday in front of reporters and her wealthy donor friends, and serves as a call to action for the tens of millions of hard working Americans she viciously demonized – to stand united against the Clinton-led rigged Washington system,” stated Trump’s senior communications adviser.
“These highly offensive and divisive comments reveal the contempt and disgust for everyday Americans that Hillary Clinton has hoped to hide by avoiding the press and running the least-transparent campaign in modern political history.”
The ad will air in the key battleground states of North Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio.An ongoing project dedicated to updating and expanding the original Aliens vs. Predator PC FPS by Rebellion. Almost every model, texture, and sound in the game has been replaced. All of the multiplayer maps are updated with high resolution textures and new detailed models. In addition, the singleplayer maps have been revamped with high res textures, tweaked, or expanded.
Addons:
Predator Shuriken II No Predator HUD
Predator Weapons Pack Dark Predator
SADAR Mk II Predator 2
Blade Runner Blaster Maskless Predator
Wolf Predator Mask Classic Smartgun
Motion Tracker Disabled AvPRedux-ColonyCoop
Alien Motion Tracker AvPRedux-MassacreCoop
Nethead Alien AvPRedux-JungleXL-Night
Runner Alien AvPRedux-adam
AvPRedux-mult Predator Plasma Burner
Auto-9 Handgun
General Graphics:
New menu graphics, background images, episode title pictures.
Improved static for Marine night vision and Predator cloak in first person.
New high resolution burning graphic when player is on fire and for 3d explosions
Improved blood decals, lens flares, and other random particle effects
New High Resolution Marine motion tracker in HUD
Improved Alien vision
High resolution clouds
Models:
Every single model is replaced with new high poly, high detail models.
New Predator model with new weapons and features
New Alien, Predalien, Praetorian, Queen models and all resized correctly.
Multiple Marines with additional details such as light sources on certain weapons and shoulder lamps
New Facehugger
New Sentry Gun
Xenoborg replaced with Exosuit NPC
Every single HUD weapon replaced, including the Marine and Predator weapons and Alien claws/tail.
Sounds:
Nearly 100% of the sounds are replaced or redone. Everything from the Predator's shoulder cannon to the sound of Alien footsteps to the Marine's smartgun.
High-Resolution Texture Conversions:
Singleplayer:
Alien, Marine, and Predator campaigns + Bonus Missions completely re-textured
Multiplayer/Skirmish maps:
Stranded
Leadworks
Trapped
Meatfactory
Nostromo
Hive
Statue
Office
Subway
Jockey
Hadley's Hope
Compound
Sewer
Elevator
Massacre
Lab14
New Multiplayer/Skirmish Maps:
AvPRedux-Subwayride
AvPRedux-Slaughterhouse
AvPRedux-JungleXL
AvPRedux-Lockdown4
AvP2-Leadworks
AvP2-ALesserFate
Expanded Singleplayer:
Predator Campaign:
Waterfall: new starting area, entire map re-textured with various new model details and prop replacements
Caverns: various details, cocooned humans in hive area
Battle: Entire map is redone and expanded several times larger
Marine Campaign:
Derelict: various details, replaced Space Jockey model
Colony: various environmental details, new control room, lightning, new terrain outside of colony
Invasion: several new areas, new start section with friendly marines and sentry gun, hidden Queen chamber
Orbital: redone Predator ship attack, friendly marines at start. new space details such as planet Acheron and high res Tyrargo, hanging corpses
Alien Campaign:
Earthbound: new high res Milky Way and Earth props
Invasion: friendly aliens randomly spawn from starting hive area
Caverns: several friendly aliens scattered throughout the map
Tons and tons of bug fixes.
GeneralLotz's Lets Play:The remains of the Egtved Girl. Image: National Museum of Denmark
During the summer of 1370 BCE, a young woman died in Egtved, Denmark. She was between 16 and 18 years old, and her immaculate burial suggests she was from a high status family. Slim, blonde, and 5'3" tall, the girl has become known to history as the Egtved Girl—one of the most well-preserved human specimens from Bronze Age Europe.
Except, as it turns out, the Egtved Girl was not from Egtved at all. According to a fascinating new study published this week in Scientific Reports, this teenager traveled widely during her short life, and she likely grew up near the Black Forest in Germany, some 500 miles away from where she was buried, as the crow flies.
"I have analysed the strontium isotopic signatures of the enamel from one of the Egtved Girl's first molars, which was fully formed when she was three or four years old," said lead author and archeologist Karin Margarita Frei in a statement. "[T]he analysis tells us that she was born and lived her first years in a region that is geologically older than and different from the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark."
If you have been following the ongoing saga surrounding the analysis of Richard III's body, which was recovered from under a parking lot in 2012, you may recognize the strontium analysis technique. In a study published last summer, strontium levels were used to map out Richard III's movements during his lifetime, as well as to determine what kind of diet he maintained in each location.
"[S]trontium gets incorporated into your teeth through the food you eat," Angela Lamb, the lead author of the Richard III study, told me last August. "[Strontium] varies depending on the soil type and geology of where the food was grown [and] grazed."
The fact that strontium levels vary so much regionally has proven to be a veritable Rosetta Stone for archeologists hoping to reconstruct the lives of these long-dead people. It is impressive enough that Lamb and her colleagues intuited Richard III's travels from five centuries ago, but deciphering the 3,400-year-old remains of the Egtved Girl is a whole other level.
The Egtved Girl's hair. Image: National Museum of Denmark
The authors were able to pin down the girl's movements in incredible detail, discovering that the girl was on the move for most of the tail end of her life. "[W]e can see that, 13 to 15 months before her death, she stayed in a place with a strontium isotope signature very similar to the one that characterizes the area where she was born," Frei said.
"Then she moved to an area that may well have been Jutland," she continued. "After a period of [about] nine to ten months there, she went back to the region she originally came from and stayed there for four to six months before she travelled to her final resting place, Egtved. Neither her hair nor her thumb nail contains a strontium isotopic signatures which indicates that she returned to Scandinavia until very shortly before she died."
"As an area's strontium isotopic signature is only detectable in human hair and nails after a month, she must have come to 'Denmark' and 'Egtved' about a month before she passed away," Frei concluded (using quotation marks to denote that these were not the names of those regions in the Bronze Age).
Study co-author and fellow archeologist Kristian Kristiansen speculates that the girl was probably sent to Denmark to cement a marriage alliance with a prominent ally.
"In Bronze Age Western Europe, Southern Germany and Denmark were the two dominant centres of power, very similar to kingdoms," he said in a statement. "We find many direct connections between the two in the archaeological evidence, and my guess is that the Egtved Girl was a Southern German girl who was given in marriage to a man in Jutland so as to forge an alliance between two powerful families."
It's extraordinary how much of this Bronze Age teenager's life can be revealed through isotope analysis. Moreover, the careful manner in which her coffin was buried in bogland soil left her clothing and ritual essentials intact, which sheds even more light on her biography—including her religious persuasion.
"Her extremely well preserved costume consists of several textiles including a short corded skirt, a short blouse and a disc-shaped bronze belt plate symbolizing the Sun, which has been interpreted as belonging to a priestess of the Nordic Sun worshipping cult," Frei and her colleagues noted in their paper. In essence: She dressed like Daenerys Targaryen during her Dothraki phase.
Reconstruction of Egtved Girl's clothes. Image: Eigenes Wirk
Clearly, researchers are finding many effective ways to bridge the massive historical gap between ancient peoples like Egtved Girl, and our 21st century world. But that doesn't mean that this body has divulged all its secrets. Plenty of mystery surrounds the girl's burial, especially the identity of the partially cremated child placed at the girl's feet. The child would have been about five to six years old, and his or her relation to the Egtved Girl is unknown.
Fortunately, the girl's body represents only one of many Bronze Age burials that have been found exquisitely preserved in Denmark over the last century. Frei and Kristiansen intend to perform isotope analysis on other bodies recovered from these bogs, which should breathe new life into this murky period of European history.
It is astonishing to ruminate over the life of this Sun-worshipping priestess, who lived and died millennia ago, and was then reborn again as a valuable archaeological resource. The myth structure of many solar deities is intricately woven into the rising and setting of our star from Earth's perspective, which is often interpreted as a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It's hard not to wonder whether she would have appreciated that her own life would end up paralleling the mythological rhythm of the Sun she praised.
Alas, that's just one more secret that was buried with the Egtved Girl.The Premier League has witnessed less rivalry more intense than Liverpool vs Manchester United. Though not a derby technically, the two most successful sides in the Premier League have given us unforgettable moments. With great players in both the sides, a Liverpool VS United clash has always been one to savor.
Here, we look at five exceptional matches played by the two giants.
The list is from Premier League era and from league matches only. The list is ordered in the timeline they occurred.
Liverpool 3 – United 3 (4th January, 1994)
One of the greatest comebacks ever in the Premier League history was completed by Liverpool just 11 minutes from time. United took a 3 goal lead inside 24 minutes of the match. Steve Bruce, a young Ryan Giggs and Denis Irwin were on the score sheet before the half an hour mark.
The shell shocked were in for a treat though. Liverpool equalized just 1 minute later from a Nigel Clough screamer. At the 38th minute mark Clough scored another one and it was game on. The comeback was completed at 79th minute when Neil Ruddock scored a memorable header.Hancock Stadium South Stand to be Removed
NORMAL, Ill. - Hancock Stadium's south end zone stand will be removed after a University-commissioned structural engineering study found them to be potentially unsafe, Interim Athletics Director Larry Lyons announced today. Temporary bleachers will be installed to accommodate the Big Red Marching Machine, and the student section will be moved to the east-side bleachers. The project is expected to be completed before the 2011 football season begins.
"After reviewing the engineering report, we don't believe investing in quick-fix repairs to the stands is appropriate," Lyons said. "Although we consider this a temporary solution, the safety and enjoyment of our fans is the most important factor in our decision."
Funding for the $350,000 project will come from existing bond revenue set aside for stadium renovations. In addition to installing temporary bleachers, landscape improvements will provide for south end lawn seating and standing room space.
"This is the initial step in what will be an ongoing campus conversation regarding permanent renovations to Hancock Stadium," said President Al Bowman. "With the exception of some minor repairs, the facility looks much as it did when constructed more than 50 years ago. Hancock Stadium is one of the visual front doors to the University, and a comprehensive rehabilitation project is well overdue."
In addition to hosting home Redbird football games, Hancock Stadium is used for a variety of University and community events, including the Illinois Special Olympics, high school football games, Town of Normal recreational leagues and summer youth camps.
GoRedbirds.com: Your online source for Illinois State Athletics, tickets, Weisbecker Scholarship Fund gifts, multimedia, Redbird merchandise, photos and more.Hazleton must pay nearly $1.4 million to civil rights attorneys who thwarted the city’s immigration law in federal court, U.S. Judge James Munley ruled Tuesday.
Munley of U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in Scranton awarded about half as much as the $2.84 million that the attorneys sought for the case, which began in 2006 and reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hazleton must pay
$1.38 million in fees and $47,594 in costs, Munley said.
The cost of a court battle was one reason why the American Civil Liberties Union and Latino Justice PRLDEF warned the financially troubled city not to enact the law.
“Hazleton knew and its politicians knew all along that if they were sued and lost, there would be a bill to pay at the end,” Omar Jadwat, an ACLU attorney assigned to the case from start to finish, said.
Hazleton’s law penalized companies that hired immigrants who lacked legal status to work in the country and landlords whose tenants lacked legal residency status.
In addition to the ACLU and Latino Justice, formerly called the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, lawyers from the Philadelphia office of the Cozen O’Connor law firm and the Community Justice Project also helped challenge the law.
The 2007 trial, which led Munley to strike down the law and appeals to a circuit court and the Supreme Court, received international attention. The case also gave Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta a national profile that helped him win the congressional seat he now holds as a Republican in the 11th District of Pennsylvania.
Through a website called smalltowndefenders.com, Hazleton city received donations to pay most of the fees charged by its defense team, headed by attorney Kris Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas, but the donations have dried up, and the website is out of service.
Barletta proposed the law, modeled after one drafted but never approved in San Bernardino, California, in the spring of 2006. The previous winter, he went to Washington, D.C., to talk with federal immigration and Justice Department officials but came away without tangible help to deal with the city’s crime.
The final push to enact the law occurred on May 10, 2006.
Derek Kichline was murdered in a case for which two immigrants later were deported but not tried, and a 15-year-old immigrant was arrested for shooting a gun in a separate incident at the Pine Street Playground.
City council approved the first of several versions of the immigration law soon after.
Council members Joseph Yannuzzi, Jack Mundie, Evelyn Graham and Tom Gabos supported the law, while Robert Nilles voted against it.
“We felt we were right. We still feel we are right. Of course, they don’t agree with us,” Yannuzzi, who is now mayor, said.
He hopes to negotiate to spread out the repayment to lessen the strain on the city’s budget. Munley’s ruling makes the payment due on Jan. 15, 2016, so the two sides have until then to agree on terms.
“The court concludes that this is a reasonable offer because it appears that a payment schedule is best left to the |
, but Alain de Botton (46) wasn't available, so we had to settle for the late Arthur Schopenhauer instead.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey, in American Beauty, undergoes a traumatic mid-life crisis
The views of this 19th Century German seer were outlined to me by Kieran Setiya, a philosophy professor who is writing a guide to midlife.
"Schopenhauer's basic argument is that the problem with getting what you want is that your pursuit is over and then you have nothing to do," says Setiya. "He thought we were doomed to swing endlessly between the boredom of having no desires, and the agony of having unsatisfied desires."
Happily Schopenhauer managed to get out of the bed the right side one morning and acknowledged that although all desire was ultimately pointless he thought the pursuit of atelic activities, like going for a walk, seeing friends for a coffee, was less likely to lead to depression and futility
I tried to have the best of both worlds, by inviting BBC director general Tony Hall to savour a cup of coffee with me while I leveraged an inflation-busting salary review, but I soon discovered Schopenhauer's iron laws weren't to be trifled with.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Pining for his youth, or, failing that, his 70s - former French PM Georges Clemenceau
Someone who gets that very well is former businessman turned stand-up comic Dave Streeter. He had it all, to coin a phrase: family, business, nice house. But then the business went, and pretty soon, so did everything else. Streeter adapted the presentation skills he had learned at work into stage patter.
"My wife got the house, the car, the kids. I got the guilt and a four-man tent," he says. "The tragedy is, I don't know four men that like camping."
Like all the MLC veterans I met, Streeter looks back on it as a valuable if painful stocktaking.
He introduced me to his new passion: vibing, a kind of disco on two wheels. Vibers work up a sweat on static bikes to the sound of club favourites. With the tang of scorched lycra in my nostrils, I reflected that vibing could be seen as a metaphor for the MLC: pedalling furiously, but getting nowhere. But as I essayed a few sclerotic revolutions myself, I understood that, on the contrary, it could be the perfect tonic.
What do Schopenhauer's insights boil down to, after all, but the tried and tested message of the needlework sampler: it's not about the destination, it's the journey.
All the data suggests that we're living longer and beginning to adapt accordingly. What used to be pensionable age is now considered late middle-life; if you're not there yet, by the time you are, it will probably have been recalibrated again, to the bloom of youth - think of all that time you'll have to work on your Pokemon Go handicap.
So to anyone inclined to take a dim view of Clemenceau and the flicker of desire awakened in the octogenarian, all I can say is that he was clearly ahead of his time: 80 is the new 70.
In Defence of the Midlife Crisis, presented by Stephen Smith, is on Radio 4, Saturday August 20 at 1030 BSTPoland is on the verge of banning communist symbols in a change to the country's penal code that could make everything from the hammer and sickle and red star to Che Guevara t-shirts illegal.
The amendment would adjust the country's hate-crime legislation to criminalize the "production, distribution, sale or possession... in print, recordings or other means of fascist, communist or other symbols of totalitarianism." The punishment could be a fine or up to two years in prison. Exceptions could be made for artistic, educational, collecting or research purposes.
Elzbieta Radziszewska, the Polish government's special representative for equal rights issues and a member of the country's ruling Civic Platform (PO) party, proposed the changes to the law in the spring. It has enjoyed broad support from other Civic Platform politicians as well as members of the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, of which Polish President Lech Kaczynski was formerly a member. The two parties control 375 of the 460 seats in the Polish parliament.
The amendment would beef up an existing hate-crime law that banned "public propagation of fascist and other totalitarian systems." Similar bans on symbols of the Nazi era exist elsewhere in Europe, including Germany, but the breadth of Poland's law -- and its application to symbols of communism -- is unusual.
'Communism Comparable to Nazism'
When the changes to the law were passed by the Polish parliament in early November, Jaroslaw Kaczynski -- the president's twin brother and head of the Law and Justice party -- spoke strongly in support of it. "Communism was a genocidal system that led to the murder of tens of millions of people," PiS head Jaroslaw Kaczynski said. "No symbol of communism has a right to exist in Poland, because these are symbols of a genocidal system that should be compared to German Nazism."
The law's critics say the word "symbol" leaves the law broad to the point of absurdity, making everything produced during Poland's more than 50 years under communist rule potentially illegal, from popular communist-era movies and TV shows to the iconic Palace of Culture, a Stalinist behemoth built in 1955 that towers over central Warsaw.
"It's just a silly thing," Tadeusz Iwinski, a parliamentarian from the left-wing Polish Social Democratic party who opposes the change, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "What does it mean,'symbol'? Does that mean when government officials go to China and make pictures under the banner of the Communist Party they are breaking the law?"
The amendment has already been approved by the Polish Senate, and still needs the signature of the Polish president. President Kaczynski has until Monday, Nov. 30 to sign off on the penal code amendments. Iwinski says if the law goes into effect -- it's part of a larger bill including other changes to the nation's penal code -- it will likely be struck down at the European level.
Handcuffed for a Red Star
There is, in fact, a clear precedent from Hungary, where symbols of communism like the hammer and sickle and red star -- along with the swastika -- have been banned as "symbols of tyranny" since 1994. In 2003, Hungarian politician Attila Vajnai was arrested, handcuffed and fined for wearing a red star on his lapel during a demonstration.
Vajnai appealed his sentence all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, which decided last year that the ban was a violation of the freedom of expression, calling the Hungarian ban "indiscriminate" and "too broad."
"Merely wearing the red star could lead to a criminal sanction and no proof was required that the display of such a symbol amounted to totalitarian propaganda," the court ruled. "Uneasiness alone, however understandable, could not set the limits of freedom of expression."
Right-wing Polish politicians are also pushing for a law that would force local authorities to re-name street signs and buildings bearing the names of communists.If you just finished watching Wednesday’s season finale of The 100, you’re probably asking yourself three questions: Who’s that girl? What’s that ship? And what’s coming next? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
But before we dive into our chat with executive producer Jason Rothenberg, a quick recap of the episode’s big events:
* Following a few heart-to-heart talks, first with Bellamy (over the radio) and then with Indra, Octavia finally steps up as the commander — small C this time! — of her people.
* In order to get her friends into space, Clarke sacrifices herself, remaining on the ground to power the satellite Raven needs to gain entry to the Ark.
* A time jump (six years and seven days, to be exact) reveals that Clarke is alive and well on the ground — and with a sweet new haircut! She and her young companion (more on that later) are still hopeful that they’ll someday make contact with Bellamy and the gang, but instead, they’re visited by a sinister-looking ship in the episode’s final moments.
* As for everyone in the bunker, their collective status is kind of a question mark, though Clarke’s report isn’t super hopeful.
OK, time for some answers from Rothenberg…
TVLINE | First of all, I’m shocked there weren’t any confirmed deaths this week, especially considering how many casualties there have been this season. Was there talk of killing anyone else off?
Actually, no. I thought the most important thing to see in the finale was these characters working together as a team. Clarke’s choice to sacrifice herself, to me, was a very different type of choice for her. In the past, we’ve forced her to make these really awful choices where there’s no good choice. In this case, it’s self-sacrificial. She’s willing to die in that moment as she’s climbing the tower. She says, “My fight is over,” not knowing that her Nightblood is going to save her. To see her willing to sacrifice herself so her friends could go to space was, for me, really important. It was also important for me to see these characters — particularly Bellamy — to have to make decisions without her.
TVLINE | I’m also glad, if a little surprised, that they made it back to the Ark.
One of my favorite scenes in the whole episode was the little scene between Bellamy and Raven at the very end. They’re looking out and Bellamy says, “If we don’t make it, she died for nothing.” And he’s not going to let that happen. To me, that encapsulates everything this character has learned, and the change Clarke has forced in him just by the choices she made in this episode.
TVLINE | My initial thought when I saw the little girl with Clarke was “She’s way too old to be her actual daughter.” Who is she?
Well, it’s not her biological daughter, but what we’ll see in Season 5 is that this relationship is hugely important for Clarke. She’s a Nightblood named Maddie, and she’s been with her for five years. They are, for all intents and purposes, bonded the way a mother and daughter would be. So Clarke loves her, and her decision-making process has changed, just as it does for anyone who has a child. … We’ll tell the story of how they came together in Season 5, and how they’ve been surviving as the only two people on the planet — until that ship shows up.
TVLINE | Yeah, about that spaceship… Should we just assume it’s packed with angry prisoners?
We will definitely tell their story. Some of them will probably be angry. All of them will be home, alive and back on Earth. I think, in some really cool ways, it’s a rebooting of the entire story. The 100 were prisoners when they came to the ground, and they thought they were alone, but they weren’t. There were Grounders in this world, which we learned when a spear came out of the woods and impaled Jasper’s chest. Now Clarke is the Grounder, and these prisoners are the 100. We screw with people’s perspectives. Of course, the prisoners are going to start as antagonists, but we’ll probably dimensionalize them as we do with all of our bad guys.
TVLINE | Lastly, I have to know about Monty’s hands. Will they be OK?
[Laughs] They got pretty screwed up, obviously, but he’s going to be fine — long-term, I imagine. But he was willing to sacrifice himself also in order to save his friends, which is important to note. It’s funny, that moment where he loses his glove was all ad-libbed. [Christopher Larkin] really did lose his other glove. He was just so in that moment, as was Richard [Harmon], and they just went with it. Happy accidents like that are the best.
Your thoughts on The 100 finale? Grade the episode below, then drop a comment with your hopes for Season 5.
–By By Leigh Goessl Mar 25, 2013 in Odd News Terre Haute - In an act of true devotion, one recently adopted dog left his new home and walked 10 miles to reunite back at the shelter with his favorite female canine. According to the “They were a bonded pair,” said Charles Brown, the shelter manager of the Terre Haute Humane Shelter. The puppies had been adopted out. Ben was then adopted by a family who only wanted one dog. According to What Ben did next was amazing. After about three weeks, he found a way to escape when the trash was being taken out. He left his new home, walked 10 miles in cold weather and found his way back to the Terre Haute Humane Shelter within 24 hours. Rescue workers say he then ran to Jade's pen and "kissed" her through the pen. He hung around the shelter eluding workers who tried to catch him; they believe Jade was warning him somehow as Ben knew they were trying to trap him. They did finally catch him a couple of days later. Ben and Jade were “visibly happy to see each other, barking and wagging their tales,” Brown told the Tribune Star. The Lawlers now have another dog. Not wanting to separate the pair, they adopted Jade. The couple spoke to media about their two dogs that are so devoted to one another. "They show utter devotion to each other like my wife and I do," Jason Lawler told "They go on walks together, and stay together at all times," said Courtney Lawler. "They do have the humanlike qualities. They do have emotions." Dogs are known as loyal companions to humans, but are typically less known for monogamous relationships with other dogs, unlike On a related note, last year a study found that urban coyotes In a story of true puppy love, Ben, a 4-year-old rescued stray, walked 10 miles this winter to find his mate, another shelter dog named Jade.According to the Huffington Post, the duo lived together as strays in Terre Haute, Indiana. When Jade became pregnant with Ben's puppies, the two dogs were trapped and brought to a rescue shelter, so Jade could be cared for as she prepared to have puppies. The pair then continued on as a couple at the shelter, having six puppies.“They were a bonded pair,” said Charles Brown, the shelter manager of the Terre Haute Humane Shelter. The puppies had been adopted out.Ben was then adopted by a family who only wanted one dog. According to The Tribune-Star, Courtney and Jason Lawler felt the 1-year-old Jade was too skittish to be around their young child.What Ben did next was amazing. After about three weeks, he found a way to escape when the trash was being taken out. He left his new home, walked 10 miles in cold weather and found his way back to the Terre Haute Humane Shelter within 24 hours. Rescue workers say he then ran to Jade's pen and "kissed" her through the pen.He hung around the shelter eluding workers who tried to catch him; they believe Jade was warning him somehow as Ben knew they were trying to trap him. They did finally catch him a couple of days later.Ben and Jade were “visibly happy to see each other, barking and wagging their tales,” Brown told the Tribune Star.The Lawlers now have another dog. Not wanting to separate the pair, they adopted Jade.The couple spoke to media about their two dogs that are so devoted to one another."They show utter devotion to each other like my wife and I do," Jason Lawler told NBC News 2 "They go on walks together, and stay together at all times," said Courtney Lawler. "They do have the humanlike qualities. They do have emotions."Dogs are known as loyal companions to humans, but are typically less known for monogamous relationships with other dogs, unlike other animals On a related note, last year a study found that urban coyotes do not stray from their mates. More about dog monogamy, Dogs, adopted dogs, faithful dogs, dog walks 10 miles More news from dog monogamy Dogs adopted dogs faithful dogs dog walks 10 milesJapanese government awarded Nakamura with the Order of the Rising Sun in 2007.
Masaya Nakumura, the founder of Japanese games outfit Namco, has passed away. Nakumura, who was 91, passed away on January 22nd, with Namco Bandai announcing it with a press release today.
Nakamura founded amusement-ride company Nakamura Manufacturing in 1955, and originally the company produced games and rides for Japanese department stores. Later, they became known as Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company and then Namco.
Nakamura founded Nakamura Manufacturing back in 1955. Then an amusement-ride company making family rides and carnival-style games for Japanese department stores, the firm later became Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company - or Namco as it became known.
The company rose to prominence with arcade hits like Galaxian, Galaga, Pole Position and Pac-Man, which was key to the rise of the Japanese games industry. Since then, they've continued to be one of its driving forces, producing franchises like Tekken, Ace Combat and Soul Caliber. They linked up with Bandai to become Namco Bandai in 2006.
In recognition of his service to the company and all he has done to assist the rise of the video game industry in Japan, the Japanese government awarded Nakamura with the Order of the Rising Sun in 2007.LaunchControl Create, manage and debug launchd(8) services
LaunchControl is a fully-featured launchd GUI allowing you to create, manage and debug system- and user services on your Mac.
See the big picture… With LaunchControl you see all services and their respective status at a glance. Invalid services are highlighted and a problem description is provided. You can enable or disable services with a single click. The same goes for loading, unloading and ad-hoc starting. A long list of jobs may be filtered by job name and/or various properties, helping you to find what you are looking for in an instant.
…and the details But LaunchControl is not just another.plist editor. It provides a dedicated interface for every single launchd configuration key. The interface is adaptive. It displays only information that is relevant for the selected job.
Absolute freedom While the default editing mode in LaunchControl supports all documented features of launchd, you may sometimes need to use unofficial features. Switch to 'Expert Mode' and you're set. Both modes are fully synchronized. Changes in one editor will instantly show up in the other one.
Say good bye to launchctl Don't waste time trying to figure out why a job does not behave as expected. LaunchControl performs exhaustive analysis of your job and chances are that it will find the problem in an instant and tell you how to fix it. It provides most of the functionality of the launchctl command line utility, everything you need to create, edit, remove or debug launch services and even includes a log viewer, so you don't have to fire up Console.app and build custom queries.
Jobs at your finger tips Sometimes it is desirable to quickly load, unload, start or stop a job on demand without hunting it down in LaunchControl every time. QuickLaunch is a small menu extra living in your menu bar. It contains a list of selected jobs and their respective status. To add a job to this menu select it in LaunchControl and select Job>QuickLaunch from the menu. This menu item will be checked to indicate that the job has been added. Clicking it again will remove the job from the QuickLaunch menu again.
Discover what is possible launchd currently supports some 36+ documented keys. LaunchControl makes it easy to discover them. Every key in the palette panel is annotated, so you don't have to consult the man page. Search them by category, name or description. Once found, drag an item from the palette section to the configuration section to add this key.The lasting legacy of climate change will be heat. The land, the oceans, all of it. It’s the tie that binds and while the global average temperature is the defining metric, the increasing incidence of heat waves and longer lasting extreme heat is how the world will experience it.
All eight papers dealing with extreme heat events in this year’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s attribution report show a clear climate change signal that made them more likely, more hot or both. In fact, of the 22 studies scientists have submitted to the annual review over the past four years, only one didn’t find that climate change increased the odds or severity of extreme heat.
"Global warming is the most obvious, well-documented effect of climate change,” Stephanie Herring, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and organizer of this year’s attribution issue, said. “As a result, the signal is very strong so we can more easily detect it amongst noise of natural variability compared to other types of extreme events."
In the case of a strong signal, 2014 stands out as particularly notable. It was the hottest year on record, though this year is on track to top last year’s record (and signs are already pointing to 2016 continuing the record heat parade).
Climate change has helped shift the odds of extreme heat.
Credit: WXshift
The lift in background temperatures makes extreme heat more likely. “The underlying processes that relate climate change to heat wave intensity and frequency are fairly straightforward to understand: if you increase the average temperature by even a modest amount, then it turns out that you dramatically increase the area under the extreme positive ‘tail’ of the distribution,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State who wasn’t involved in any of the new studies, said in an email.
Put another way, it’s like having Steph Curry on your basketball team. He doesn’t always guarantee a win, but he sure as heck increases the odds of a victory.
Unfortunately, rising temperatures are not a game and can have dangerous consequences. Heat at last year’s Australian Open had players hallucinating on the court and this year’s heat wave in India killed thousands.
Maximum temperature anomalies for Australia's May 2014 heat wave.
Credit: Australia Bureau of Meteorology
Researchers looked at heat waves and longer-lasting extreme heat events in Korea, Australia, Argentina, Europe and warm ocean temperatures in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic. In all cases, they found that climate change played a role in increasing the likelihood of extreme heat.
The May 2014 heat wave in Australia included some of the most dramatic results, with climate change increasing the likelihood an eye-popping, sweat-inducing 23 times.
For that study, researchers zoomed down to the city-level in Adelaide and Melbourne. Mitchell Black, the study’s lead author and Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne, said it is likely the first time such a localized analysis has been done.
Climate change is also making extreme heat even hotter. It’s not just a game of odds when it comes to extreme heat, it’s also one of intensity. An analysis of Europe’s incredibly warm year in 2014 shows that human greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for roughly half of the extra warmth added to the system.
It’s tougher to tease out these intensity connections, but in addition to Europe’s hot year, the May 2014 Australian heat wave and a December 2013 Argentinian heat wave also got a boost in strength from global warming.
The findings could be moving from academia to the public discourse. The new findings show that it isn’t a question of if climate change is influencing extreme heat, it’s basically a question of how much of an influence it has on a particular event.
“Heat is the one event that is most ready for the science community to have a discussion of whether or not every heat attribution assessment necessarily needs to go through the peer review process,” Herring said.
There are already some efforts underway to do get these types of analyses out to the public sooner rather than later, including World Weather Attribution, a project at Climate Central that involves the University of Oxford Environmental Change Institute, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the University of Melbourne, and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. Herring also noted an effort by the U.K. Met Office to do real time attribution of this summer’s heat wave in Europe as an example of government agencies providing that information directly.
One of the challenges remaining for the science is reducing the range of uncertainty around how much global warming is increasing the odds of extreme heat and whether 1-in-1,000 year events will now be 1-in-100 year events or 1-in-5 year events.
Society could benefit from improved climate change and heat predictions. With heat waves likely to continue increasing in frequency and intensity, their impact on people around the world will continue to grow.
For example, danger days—when the heat index tops 105°F—are becoming more common in the U.S. and are set to rapidly increase in just 15 years.
Herring believes that quantifying the extreme heat-climate change connection could be a next step to making these types of analyses useful to society.
“I don't think there is a lot of value from the perspective of decision makers to simply say climate changes impacted the risk of an extreme event,” Herring said. “But there’s a real opportunity to be able to deliver heat information in a more timely fashion.”
This article is reproduced with permission from Climate Central. The article was first published on November 5, 2015.The concerns about “Islamic indoctrination” in Williamson County involve nearly every part of this process. In her October resolution, Burgos wrote that social-studies classes should cover all world religions equally, “except to the extent necessary to accurately reflect the Judeo-Christian heritage expressed by our Founding Fathers.” She argued that students should not be tested on their knowledge of religion, meaning that the state wouldn’t be able to measure whether middle-school students had met its learning standards for the religion components of sixth- and seventh-grade social studies. And during a school-board meeting, she questioned the textbook used by the county, alleging that it includes disproportionate coverage of Islam compared to other religions and omits historical facts about Muslims persecuting and converting others.
“In Williamson County, I can say, without any hesitation at all, that there is no slant toward Islam in our curriculum or in our teaching,” said Tim Gaddis, the county’s assistant superintendent of teaching, learning, and assessment, in an interview. He said the textbook does not mention Islam more than Christianity and Judaism, and all teachers are trained to talk about religion in historical and cultural terms, rather than spiritual or theological ones. But perhaps more importantly, there just isn’t a lot in the curriculum about religion, period.
“All of our middle schools … covered [the Islamic World] unit in a week this year,” Gaddis said. “It’s a survey course—you don’t get deeply into anything when you’re going from earliest civilizations all the way through the fall of Rome.”
Some of the concerns about Islam in Williamson County have been about the way individual teachers make assignments and lesson plans, allegedly framing Islamic beliefs as truth, rather than part of culture or history. This was the charge the ACLJ raised in Union Grove, Wisconsin. Gaddis said he’s seen rumors of those kinds of assignments floating around the Internet, but it’s simply not something that’s happening in the county. “We would know,” he said, referring to the county superintendent’s office. “We’re in Williamson County, Tennessee. Our population of our county is overwhelmingly Christian, and our teachers reflect that. So the concept that anyone is trying to convert someone to Islam through some means is not only not true; it’s difficult for me to understand where something like that could even come from.”
It’s a fascinating question: How has Islamic indoctrination become a point of controversy in a county that’s chock full of churches? On one level, the concerns are about substance, such as whether Islam is being taught accurately and in proportion to lessons about other religions. But these questions seem to hint at something deeper and darker: fear. Perhaps that fear is all the more powerful in a place like Williamson County because the religion is largely an abstraction. In the absence of Muslim neighbors, it’s easier to see those who practice Islam as fundamentally foreign, and to elide their faith with violence.Early season soccer, no matter the league, is almost always choppy and low-scoring. We saw some of that this past weekend as the 22nd edition of MLS kicked off with a few scoreless draws, a number of bad penalties, and not-a-whole-lot of sustained or sustainable build-up play (though I'm tipping my hat to NYCFC and Columbus for at least tilting in the direction of "possession over all" at least a little bit).
Early season soccer is also usually very, very slow and methodical, but that was clearly less so in 2017. Even a sock could see as much:
Is it just me, or has #MLS started at a much faster pace this season? — W. Knutt Megg Esq. (@MLSmuppet) March 6, 2017
This was probably inevitable as we're now well into the era of full-field pressure and the high press itself as a default tactical/strategic choice. Lots of teams just want to crank it up to 11, and the numbers bear that out – there were 815.2 passes per game in 2016's opening weekend, and 850.1 per game in 2017. That's an increase something short of game-breaking but well into the realm of "noticeable."
Compared to three years ago, it's almost 100 more passes per game. In other words the pace of MLS has picked up over 10 percent in the last 36 months.
This is not inherently a good thing (I know an anonymous person who we'll call "My Boss Greg Lalas" to protect his identity who prefers the long ball to lots of possession), but it is a tactical trend worth noting, and I suspect it's something that may even be worth disrupting. Tactics in soccer tend to be cyclical, and the one team that figures out how to zig when everybody else is zagging could have a built-in advantage for however long it takes the rest of the league to catch up.
Onto the Week 1 games:
ATLiens
Don't let this article distract you from the fact that Atlanta United lost 2-1 to the New York Red Bulls by conceding a pair of late goals and utterly failing to adjust to Jesse Marsch's subs or the tactical shift of the visitors (RBNY played what I'd call a 4-1-4-1 for the last 20 minutes). Atlanta were fast and fun and relentless and very promising, if predictably expansion-y in their debut.
"We talked about it at halftime just giving a little bit more, being a little bit clearer tactically, making a couple adjustments but being a little bit sharper physically, putting more into the game and now taking the crowd out play by play," is what Marsch said afterward, and none of that sounds wrong to me. "I thought for the most part, in the second half the effort was really good, obviously, a great comeback and a lot of spirit within the team."
The fast, fun and relentless part for Atlanta was putting New York in that position in the first place. Their flock of fleet-footed attackers who always threatened to get past RBNY's defense, and often managed the it outright. Atlanta had an identity from the first whistle: They're a high-pressure, mid-level pressing team who wanted to coax RBNY into turnovers up the gut and then hit into space behind the back line. This was a modern-looking team embracing the most modern of philosophies, that games are won and/or lost in transition, and for a group that'd never played together before they made real headway in convincing neutrals (including me) that they'd be, at the very least, "adequate" at applying this approach.
This is lovely, and is exactly how you want to punish a team that's playing too narrow:
The "expansion-y" aspect is what led to the loss, though, and it did so in predictable ways. One was lack of backline depth, as sub Anton Walkes was victimized on the game-winner. The other was the more ambiguous and harder-to-pin-down concept of "fit" – as in, there were at least a few players on that field asking to fill roles they're maybe not 100 percent meant to.
First and foremost on the list, by my reckoning, is Paraguayan DP Miguel Almiron. He had moments when he was electric, including a second-half breakaway that was just missing the final touch. But that lack of a final touch is why I remain dubious as to Almiron's ability to be a high-level playmaker in MLS. His best years in Argentina were on the wing, and his best moments for Paraguay have come on the wing, and his vision when he's played centrally just hasn't looked to be game-breaking.
Which will allow me to circle back to my original thought, that Atlanta are, as constructed, a "modern" team built upon forcing transitions. Teams like that tend to live by the axiom that the press is the best playmaker, and in that situation field coverage is arguably more important than raw creativity.
What Almiron lacks in the second category he more than makes up for in the first, and there remains a very decent chance that Tata Martino will be able to fully weaponize both his speed and workrate as the days, weeks and months go along. Transitions are already very clearly important to Atlanta, and in the near future they could well become decisive.
Not so, however, in Week 1. Atlanta's debut was promising but predictably painful, and the weeks to come will demand more work and constant reassessment.
Two Dope Boyz
It's probably fair to say that nobody in the league needs a hot start more than the San Jose Earthquakes. I'm not willing to call a 1-0 home win over the Impact "hot" necessarily, but it was very clearly a step in the right direction and an upgrade over the Quakes of 2016.
Anibal Godoy deserves the most praise – he's not quite my Player of the Week, but it's close. Defensively he was a noose around Montreal's midfield and it was his work that led to the game's only goal (which he finished with a perfect chip after a nice lay-off from Chris Wondolowski). Godoy and Fatai Alashe lack a bit of elegance in the middle of the pitch, but they've had a natural partnership since they set foot in central midfield two summers ago and it's smart of Dom Kinnear to keep them together.
The same should, I think, be said of Homegrowns Tommy Thompson and Nick Lima. Thompson had his finest two-way game in MLS on Saturday:
Like, you may not care about this, but I do, and his teammates do, and Dom Kinnear does. This is making skill functional. #SJvMTL pic.twitter.com/1JeaOA0GfA — Matthew Doyle (@MLSAnalyst) March 5, 2017
Here's the thing: Breaking up that attack would have been a nice job, and of course having skill is a wonderful thing. What Thompson did there, though, was use his primary skill – quick feet, balance, comfort on the ball – to turn a routine track back into a recovery and chance to break in the other direction. It didn't happen in that moment as the Quakes were playing a bit conservatively by the hour mark, but there's a real difference between beating the attacker to the corner and booting the ball into touch vs. beating the attacker into the corner and then playing it calmly upfield.
Thompson has made his skill (never in doubt) fully functional (in doubt from Day 1, as it should be for any young player). You could see it in heady plays like that or in perfect crosses that, in a just world, would've resulted in goals.
As for Lima, he was handed just about the hardest job a rookie can get in his pro debut: Stop Ignacio Piatti.
He managed it. Here's Piatti's chalkboard from Saturday:
Green arrows are complete passes, and red are incomplete. Yellow arrows are "key passes" – passes that lead to a shot – but as you can see, Piatti didn't have any of those. The second- or third-best player in the league last year just maybe doesn't have his sea legs under him yet, but even so, Quakes fans were justifiably singing Lima's praises loudly and proudly.
That certainly does make this feel like a new era for San Jose, doesn't it? The 4-4-2 was still there, but this team put a pair of Homegrowns out there for 160 minutes, and they pretty thoroughly outplayed their opposite numbers in Piatti and Cameroon international Ambroise Oyongo.
It's not perfect, and things can go very wrong after Week 1. But the strength of this San Jose team is suddenly in its 21-through-27-year-old cohort, and inertia has been replaced with momentum. It's a good start.
A few more things to ponder...
9. I'd argue that nobody had a better result in Week 1 than the Chicago Fire, who went to Columbus and got pounded for a half, then regrouped, reorganized, and rebounded for a 1-1 draw on Saturday afternoon. A point on the road under any circumstance is wonderful, but when it comes from behind against a conference foe? That's golden.
As for Columbus, it was a replay of 2016's nightmare as shoddy finishing and a late concession made for two dropped points right out of the gate. Newcomer Mohammed Abu was particularly culpable thanks to his wayward passing.
8. I wrote about Minnesota's 5-1 loss to Portland on Friday, and focused on the Loons. Like Atlanta they have lots of work and reassessment in front of them.
Portland have a lot of goals in front of them, and I thought Fanendo Adi was the Player of the Week. I also thought Adrian Heath gave us the Face of the Week at poor Diego Valeri's expense:
Pretty sure Adrian Heath locked up "Face of the Week" after Valeri got hit in the cubes. pic.twitter.com/DkQLc5t1zA — Matthew Doyle (@MLSAnalyst) March 4, 2017
7. If Kellyn Acosta is really as good as he's looked through Dallas's first three games he'll be starting for the USMNT soon enough. His goal was the highlight of FC Dallas's 2-1 win at the LA Galaxy.
I'll wait at least a week before I decide |
Byrd stays in Buffalo.
Chicago and Washington would be great nests for Byrd. The Bears have been rolling with Chris Conte and Major Wright -- and if you watched Week 17's showdown versus Aaron Rodgers and the Packers, then you know upgrading the safety position would be a major plus for this team.
Meanwhile, the Redskins will finally have some breathing room with regard to the cap -- more than $20 million, we might add -- after going into the 2013 offseason with nothing. This team has been looking for an answer at safety since Sean Taylor's tragic death. Having a ballhawk back there to give Robert Griffin III some short fields could have tipped the balance on some games the 3-13 Redskins lost in 2013.
The Eagles might be a factor in the market for Byrd, as they have fewer soon-to-be free agents to re-sign than most teams, will have approximately $20 million in cap space, and aren't expected to Wang (Patrick) Chung any longer.
Jason Hatcher, DT, Dallas Cowboys
Potential suitors: Cleveland Browns, Indianapolis Colts, Jacksonville Jaguars
The Cowboys pretty much can't afford plastic cups and paper plates right now. Per the usual, they are up against the cap... and Hatcher wants to get paid.
Now, my colleague Marc Sessler predicted an unpredictable offseason in Cleveland, and I agree with his forecast. If newly minted GM Ray Farmer does indeed pursue a funky strategy, it could include signing a guy like Hatcher, who can play 3-4 defensive end for the Browns. He can also be a very effective inside rusher in a four-man front on passing downs. Hatcher excelled as a 4-3 defensive tackle in 2013 in Dallas, piling up 11 sacks. Don't forget how frequently new Browns coach Mike Pettine mixed up fronts when he was the Jets' defensive coordinator under Rex Ryan.
The Colts also could potentially use Hatcher in the multifaceted role (playing him at defensive end in a 3-4 while moving him inside on passing downs). Indy has many free agents to re-sign, yet should also carry $30 million in breathing room. That said, I don't anticipate the Colts going on any spending sprees; that's not GM Ryan Grigson's M.O. AFC South foe Jacksonville could, however. Signing Hatcher to play inside would instantly upgrade the Jags' defense. Coach Gus Bradley would love to employ a line rotation that could pummel some quarterbacks, and the organization figures to have well over $40 million in cap space to do just that.
Follow Elliot Harrison on Twitter @HarrisonNFL.The creator of the Lechal smartshoes says we may leave the house without a smartwatch, but we'll never leave the house without shoes
Smartshoes could be the next big thing in wearable technology, an Indian startup claims, revealing a pair of internet-connected shoes that connect to Google Maps and guide the wearer with small vibrations.
The shoes from Ducere Technologies connect to a smartphone using Bluetooth.
“The shoes are a natural extension of the human body,” Krispian Lawrence co-founder and chief executive of Ducere Technologies told the Wall Street Journal. “You will leave your house without your watch or wristband, but you will never leave your house without your shoes.”
Blending in with existing apparel
The challenge faced by Google Glass and other wearable technologies is that they rely on the user being prepared to wear an extra item of apparel. Smartglasses are particularly noticeable, and have caused much debate over whether they could ever become a mainstream piece of technology.
Ducere believes that simply adding to the shoes people already wear in a more subtle and non-intrusive way, wearable technology can fit into everyday lives.
Insoles will be available to turn any existing shoes into smartshoes. Photograph: Lechal
The Lechal shoes - which means “take me along” in Hindi - were originally developed to help navigation for the visually impaired, but applications for fitness and the sighted were quickly realised.
Taking directions from the smartphone, the left or right shoe buzzes when walkers need to turn at a junction or fork, but are also packed with sensors to record distance travelled and calories burned.
The small module that records data and connects to smartphones that slots into the heal of the shoe or insole. Photograph: Lechal
The shoes and removable insoles containing the electronics and will be available for around £80 in September, are compatible with iPhones, Androids and Windows and are charged by an interactive charger that reports its charge status at the snap of your fingers.
• Google smartwatches reviewed: LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live are a promising step in the right direction“I know it was a hard fight on my part, and I am quite heroic.”
–Mina Harker, Dracula
Count Dracula’s powers are not to be underestimated. He possesses superhuman physical strength and terrifying psychic abilities, and can change into a mist, bat, or wolf at will. These powers make Dracula incredibly elusive when he does not want to be found, but they also make him a terrifying foe to confront face to face. Nevertheless, if you want to defeat the Count, you must be brave enough to engage in at least one brutal, life-and-death battle against him.
In our third edition of Fury of Dracula, combat has been revised to make your encounters with Dracula more streamlined and decisive than ever before. In today’s preview, you’ll learn about the combat system from developer Frank Brooks and discover the rules of engagement with Count Dracula.
Frank Brooks on Creating a Fair Fight
When I was working on the game I compared first and second editions to see what had changed. Combat in the first and second editions of Fury of Dracula more or less utilized the same system and it was quite thematic, but unless a player was very familiar with the game, it was quite difficult to know how the cards would interact. Those complex interactions, combined with a roll of dice, meant that it was incredibly difficult to predict the outcome of an attack. Combat could often last round after round without any damage being dealt. But the combat system captured the sense of mystery and uncertainty that the hunters had when dealing with Dracula. I liked that sense of mystery, and tried to maintain it as much as possible.
Now, more than at any other time in tabletop history, it is likely that when players take a game to the table, there will be one or more players that have never played the game before. So it has been a goal of ours to make games more accessible and create situations where a brand-new player can compete on some level with an expert player. The expert player will still have more knowledge of the best strategies and all the possible interactions in the game, but the new player will have enough of an understanding to make informed decisions. With this mindset, we created what was essentially a complex version of Rock, Paper, Scissors to give the hunter players more knowledge of what their actions will do. I removed the dice entirely. I feel that, because you don’t know what card your opponent will pick, there are enough random and unknown factors in combat.
Weapons of Body and Mind
To make things clearer for the hunters, each combat card now bears icons indicating which of Dracula’s cards it counters and what effect happens if Dracula doesn’t stop you. To keep some mystery in Dracula’s workings, the hunters do not at first know which of Dracula’s cards will stop the card they play. But after a few fights, even new players will start to catch on to how Dracula can respond to their actions.
Dracula also now has a random subset of cards at the start each fight, so the Dracula player needs to work with what he has drawn to get the hunter into a bad position. If he could choose his hand freely, he would definitely have the powerful combination of Mesmerize and Fangs in hand. But now a hunter doesn’t know whether to defend against Mesmerize early or gamble that Dracula doesn’t have it at all, so there's more tension for the hunters at the start of any fight. Dracula may also stall by playing Plotting or play Strength early on to break a weapon. With an unfixed set of cards, the opening moves for Dracula are always unclear.
Dracula’s cards also do not return to his hand like the hunters’ cards do. This tracks the rounds of combat so that it reliably ends after six rounds. The hunter can now guess which cards Dracula has access to. Since there are two copies of each Dracula Combat card (except for the single Escape as Mist ), after he has played one, the hunter knows that there is only one left. The mystery of Dracula lessens over the length of the fight.
I feel good about the changes I’ve made to the combat system in Fury of Dracula and hope that you find it as engaging and as fun to play with as I do.
Thank you, Frank!
Dancing with the Un-Dead
Combat in Fury of Dracula is a kind of dance with death, in which you must make your next move without knowing all of your opponent’s options. Hunters take into hand all their weapons (items with red banners) along with one each of the Punch, Dodge, and Escape combat cards. Dracula shuffles his combat cards and draws a random hand of five. The involved players each select a card, play it facedown, and simultaneously reveal them. If multiple hunters are confronting the Count, he selects one to engage.
When cards are revealed, you will check if the engaged hunter’s card cancels Dracula’s. If not, the effects on Dracula’s card are resolved, then the effects on the hunters’ cards. The cards from that round remain facedown in the play area, and Dracula draws back up to five cards. After the next round, the hunters will be able to recover the cards they played the first round. Combat continues until either party escapes, wins the game, or until Dracula has played six cards.
Let us say that Dracula attacks Mina Harker and Lord Godalming. He moves into their location during the night, so the fight takes place in the first hours of day, when he is at a disadvantage. Arthur is armed with a Rifle and Garlic, while Mina has only a Crucifix. If Mina is bitten, she will die, so she plays her best weapon: the Crucifix. Lord Godalming takes a shot at the count with his Rifle, and Dracula, knowing Mina’s vulnerability and hoping to eliminate her in one battle, plays Mesmerize and chooses to engage her.
The Crucifix breaks Dracula’s spell, so Mina remains safe and deals the Count three damage, while Godalming’s Rifle deals him two more. The round is over; another begins. Dracula draws a Claws card into his hand, but chooses to play Fangs instead and recover some damage, engaging once more with Mina. Godalming closes in with the Punch card, and Mina seeks to Dodge any blows that Dracula intends for her. The result is that Dracula takes Godalming’s blow and suffers one point of damage, while Mina remains unscathed. The hunters can now use the Rifle and Crucifix again. Dracula, already having taken six points of damage, recognizes that he is unlikely to win the battle at this point, and so plays Escape as Mist to end the fight.
The Count Approaches
We’ve received news that a ship filled with mysterious containers is progressing towards us. Its sailors have reported feelings of inexplicable dread, visions of green mists at night, and the unprecedented presence of black vampire bats, even in the middle of the ocean numberless miles from land. Dracula is on his way.
Pre-order Fury of Dracula from your local retailer today!Google Glass may have dropped off the radar, but Google is still hard at work on the project behind closed doors. The tech giant has recently filed for a new patent that enables the wearable head-gear to display holographic projections.
Instead of the flat display beamed into the wearer’s eye with the current generation, the new patent would allow for a device to overlay CGI on top of the real world, to create a three dimensional heads up display. This technology would open up Google Glass as an augmented reality platform, offering something a little closer to Microsoft’s Holo Lens. The new design also apparently allows for a wilder field of view, is more efficient and easier to wear.
Augmented reality has plenty of useful and entertaining applications. Examples could include real time in-view navigation or traffic tips, 3D interactive user interfaces for work or social platforms, and, of course, playing games in your living room.
Google seems pretty heavily invested in the idea of augmented reality, heaving led a half-billion funding round for Magic Leap, a company that works in augmented reality gaming content production. The company released its SDK with support for a number of 3D game engines earlier in the year. Perhaps Magic Leap will end up designing content for Google’s holographic headset.
Of course, patents don’t always result in final products. While it is likely that Google is experimenting with this type of technology right now, it may or may not end up in a future consumer version of Google Glass.NRC drawing of containment building.
[1] Reactor Unit 3 (right) and Unit 4 (left) of Fukushima Daiichi on 16 March 2011. Three of the reactors overheated, causing meltdowns which released large amounts of radioactive material into the air.
A containment building, in its most common usage, is a reinforced steel or lead structure enclosing a nuclear reactor. It is designed, in any emergency, to contain the escape of radioactive steam or gas to a maximum pressure in the range of 275 to 550 kPa (40 to 80 psi)[citation needed]. The containment is the fourth and final barrier to radioactive release (part of a nuclear reactor's defence in depth strategy), the first being the fuel ceramic itself, the second being the metal fuel cladding tubes, the third being the reactor vessel and coolant system.[2]
Each nuclear plant in the US is designed to withstand certain conditions which are spelled out as "Design Basis Accidents" in the Final Safety Analysis Report (FSAR). The FSAR is available for public viewing, usually at a public library near the nuclear plant.
The containment building itself is typically an airtight steel structure enclosing the reactor normally sealed off from the outside atmosphere. The steel is either free-standing or attached to the concrete missile shield. In the United States, the design and thickness of the containment and the missile shield are governed by federal regulations (10 CFR 50.55a), and must be strong enough to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner without rupture.[3]
While the containment plays a critical role in the most severe nuclear reactor accidents, it is only designed to contain or condense steam in the short term (for large break accidents) and long term heat removal still must be provided by other systems. In the Three Mile Island accident the containment pressure boundary was maintained, but due to insufficient cooling, some time after the accident, radioactive gas was intentionally let from containment by operators to prevent over pressurization.[4] This, combined with further failures, caused the release of up to 13 million curies of radioactive gas to atmosphere during the accident.[5]
While the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant had operated safely since 1971, an earthquake and tsunami well beyond the design basis resulted in failure of AC power, backup generators and batteries which defeated all safety systems. These systems were necessary to keep the fuel cool after the reactor had been shut down. This resulted in partial or complete meltdown of fuel rods, damage to fuel storage pools and buildings, release of radioactive debris to surrounding area, air and sea, and resorting to the expedient use of fire engines and concrete pumps to deliver cooling water to spent fuel pools and containment. During the incident, pressure within the containments of reactors 1-3 rose to exceed design limits, which despite attempts to reduce pressure by venting radioactive gasses, resulted in breach of containment. Hydrogen leaking from the containment mixed with air into an explosive mixture which resulted in explosions in Unit 1,3 and 4, complicating attempts to stabilize the reactors.
Types [ edit ]
If the outward pressure from steam in a limiting accident is the dominant force, containments tend towards a spherical design, whereas if weight of the structure is the dominant force, designs tend towards a can design. Modern designs tend towards a combination.
Containment systems for nuclear power reactors are distinguished by size, shape, materials used, and suppression systems. The kind of containment used is determined by the type of reactor, generation of the reactor, and the specific plant needs.
Suppression systems are critical to safety analysis and greatly affect the size of containment. Suppression refers to condensing the steam after a major break has released it from the cooling system. Because decay heat does not go away quickly, there must be some long term method of suppression, but this may simply be heat exchange with the ambient air on the surface of containment. There are several common designs, but for safety-analysis purposes containments are categorized as either "large-dry", "sub-atmospheric", or "ice-condenser".
Pressurized water reactors [ edit ]
For a pressurized water reactor, the containment also encloses the steam generators and the pressurizer, and is the entire reactor building. The missile shield around it is typically a tall cylindrical or domed building. PWR containments are typically large (up to 10 times larger than a BWR) because the containment strategy during the leakage design basis accident entails providing adequate volume for the steam/air mixture that results from a loss-of-coolant-accident to expand into, limiting the ultimate pressure (driving force for leakage) reached in the containment building.
Early designs including Siemens, Westinghouse, and Combustion Engineering had a mostly can-like shape built with reinforced concrete. As concrete has a very good compression strength compared to tensile, this is a logical design for the building materials since the extremely heavy top part of containment exerts a large downward force that prevents some tensile stress if containment pressure were to suddenly go up. As reactor designs have evolved, many nearly spherical containment designs for PWRs have also been constructed. Depending on the material used, this is the most apparently logical design because a sphere is the best structure for simply containing a large pressure. Most current PWR designs involve some combination of the two, with a cylindrical lower part and a half-spherical top.
The spent fuel pool is outside of the containment building in most PWR designs.
Modern designs have also shifted more towards using steel containment structures. In some cases steel is used to line the inside of the concrete, which contributes strength from both materials in the hypothetical case that containment becomes highly pressurized. Yet other newer designs call for both a steel and concrete containment - which is in decades long use in the current German PWR-designs - notably the AP1000 and the European Pressurized Reactor plan to use both; which gives missile protection by the outer concrete and pressurizing ability by the inner steel structure. The AP1000 has planned vents at the bottom of the concrete structure surrounding the steel structure under the logic that it would help move air over the steel structure and cool containment in the event of a major accident (in a similar way to how a cooling tower works).
Three Mile Island was an early PWR design by Babcock & Wilcox, and shows a 'can' containment design that is common to all of its generations
A more detailed image for the 'can' type containment from the French Brennilis Nuclear Power Plant
The twin PWR reactor containments at the Cook Nuclear Plant in Michigan
A German plant exhibiting a nearly completely spherical containment design, which is very common for German PWRs
The Russian VVER-1000 design is mostly the same as other modern PWRs in regards to containment, as it is a PWR itself. However, the VVER-440-type has a significant more vulnerable containment, in form of a so-called bubble condensor with relatively low design pressure.
Light Water Graphite Reactors [ edit ]
Light Water Graphite power reactors were build only in the USSR. RBMK designs used secondary containtment-like structures, but the reactor's top plate was a part of the protective structure. During the Chernobyl accident in 1986 the plate suffered a pressure beyond the predicted limits and lifted up.
Boiling water reactors [ edit ]
Cross-section sketch of a typical BWR Mark I containment. DW = drywell, WW = wetwell, SFP = spent fuel pool
In a BWR, the containment strategy is a bit different. A BWR's containment consists of a drywell, where the reactor and associated cooling equipment is located, and a wetwell. The drywell is much smaller than a PWR containment and plays a larger role. During the theoretical leakage design basis accident the reactor coolant flashes to steam in the drywell, pressurizing it rapidly. Vent pipes or tubes from the drywell direct the steam below the water level maintained in the wetwell (also known as a torus or suppression pool), condensing the steam, limiting the pressure ultimately reached. Both the drywell and the wetwell are enclosed by a secondary containment building, maintained at a slight sub-atmospheric or negative pressure during normal operation and refueling operations.
Common containment designs are referred to by the names Mark I, Mark II, and Mark III. The Mark I is the oldest, distinguished by a drywell which resembles an inverted lightbulb above the wetwell which is a steel torus containing water. The Mark II was used with late BWR-4 and BWR-5 reactors. It is called an "over-under" configuration with the drywell forming a truncated cone on a concrete slab. Below is a cylindrical suppression chamber made of concrete rather than just sheet metal. Both use a lightweight steel or concrete "secondary containment" over the top floor which is kept at a slight negative pressure so that air can be filtered. The top level is a large open space with an overhead crane suspended between the two long walls for moving heavy fuel caskets from the ground floor, and removing / replacing hardware from the reactor and reactor well. The reactor well can be flooded and is straddled by pools separated by gates on either side for storing reactor hardware normally placed above the fuel rods, and for fuel storage. A refueling platform has a specialized telescoping mast for lifting and lowering fuel rod assemblies with precision through the "cattle chute" to the reactor core area.[6] The Mark III uses a concrete dome, somewhat like PWRs, and has a separate building for storing used fuel rods on a different floor level. All three types also use the large body of water in the suppression pools to quench steam released from the reactor system during transients.
The Mark I containment was used in those reactors at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant which were involved in the Fukushima I nuclear accidents. The site suffered from a combination of two beyond design-basis events, a powerful earthquake, which may have damaged reactor plumbing and structures, and 15 meter tsunami, which destroyed fuel tanks, generators and wiring, causing back up generators to fail, and battery-powered pumps also eventually failed. Insufficient cooling and failure of pumps needed to restore water lost to boiling off led to partial or possible complete meltdowns of fuel rods which were completely uncovered by water. This led to releases of significant amounts of radioactive material to the air and sea, and hydrogen explosions. The thin secondary containments were not designed to withstand hydrogen explosions, and suffered blown out or destroyed roofs and walls, and destruction of all equipment on the refueling floor including cranes and refueling platform. Unit 3 suffered a particularly spectacular explosion which created a plume of debris over 300 m high which resulted in a collapse of the north end of the top floor, and buckled concrete columns on its west side as can be seen by aerial photographs. Although they were fitted with modified hardened vent systems to vent hydrogen into exhaust stacks, they may have not been effective without power. Even before the Fukushima incident, Mark I containment had been criticized as being more likely to fail during a blackout.[7][8]
From a distance, the BWR design looks very different from PWR designs because usually a square building is used for the secondary containment. Also, because there is only one loop through the turbines and reactor, and the steam going through the turbines is also radioactive, the turbine building has to be considerably shielded as well. This leads to two buildings of similar construction, with the higher one housing the reactor and the long one housing the turbine hall and supporting structures.
A representative one-unit German BWR showing containment around both the turbine and reactor buildings
A typical two-unit BWR at the Brunswick Nuclear Generating Station
Modern plants have tended towards a design that is not completely cylindrical or spherical, like this painted containment at the Clinton Nuclear Generating Station
CANDU plants [ edit ]
CANDU power stations, named after Canadian-invented Deuterium-Uranium design, make use of a wider variety of containment designs and suppression systems than other plant designs. Due to the nature of the core design, the size of containment for the same power rating is often larger than for a typical PWR, but many innovations have reduced this requirement.
Many multiunit CANDU stations utilize a water spray equipped vacuum building. All individual Candu units on site are connected to this Vacuum building by a large pressure relief duct which is also part of containment. The Vacuum building rapidly draws in and condenses any steam from a postulated break, allowing the reactor building pressure to return to subatmospheric conditions. This minimizes any possible fission product release to the environment.[9]
Additionally, there have been similar designs that use double containment, in which containment from two units are connected allowing a larger containment volume in the case of any major incident. This has been pioneered by one Indian HWR design where a double unit and suppression pool was implemented.
The most recent CANDU designs, however, call for a single conventional dry containment for each unit.[10]
The Bruce B Generating Station, showing a large vacuum building serving 4 separate units that have a BWR-like shielding around them individually
The Qinshan Nuclear Power Plant is two-unit site where the containment system is autonomous for each unit
A single unit of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, showing a slightly different shape from a typical PWR containment, which is mostly due to the larger footprint required by the Candu design. The vacuum building can be seen partly obscured on the right.
Design and testing requirements [ edit ]
NRC image of Containment area inside a Containment building.
In the United States, Title 10 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Part 50, Appendix A, General Design Criteria (GDC 54-57) or some other design basis provides the basic design criteria for isolation of lines penetrating the containment wall. Each large pipe penetrating the containment, such as the steam lines, has isolation valves on it, configured as allowed by Appendix A; generally two valves.[11] For smaller lines, one on the inside and one on the outside. For large, high-pressure lines, space for relief valves and maintenance considerations cause the designers to install the isolation valves near to where the lines exit containment. In the event of a leak in the high-pressure piping that carries the reactor coolant, these valves rapidly close to prevent radioactivity from escaping the containment. Valves on lines for standby systems penetrating containment are normally closed. The containment isolation valves may also close on a variety of other signals such as the containment high pressure experienced during a high-energy line break (e.g. main steam or feedwater lines). The containment building serves to contain the steam/resultant pressure, but there is typically no radiological consequences associated with such a break at a pressurized water reactor.
During normal operation, the containment is air-tight and access is only through marine style airlocks. High air temperature and radiation from the core limit the time, measured in minutes, people can spend inside containment while the plant is operating at full power. In the event of a worst-case emergency, called a "design basis accident" in NRC regulations, the containment is designed to seal off and contain a meltdown. Redundant systems are installed to prevent a meltdown, but as a matter of policy, one is assumed to occur and thus the requirement for a containment building. For design purposes, the reactor vessel's piping is assumed to be breached, causing a "LOCA" (loss Of coolant accident) where the water in the reactor vessel is released to the atmosphere inside the containment and flashes into steam. The resulting pressure increase inside the containment, which is designed to withstand the pressure, triggers containment sprays ("dousing sprays") to turn on to condense the steam and thus reduce the pressure. A SCRAM ("neutronic trip") initiates very shortly after the break occurs. The safety systems close non-essential lines into the air-tight containment by shutting the isolation valves. Emergency Core Cooling Systems are quickly turned on to cool the fuel and prevent it from melting. The exact sequence of events depends on the reactor design.[12][13]
Containment buildings in the U.S. are subjected to mandatory testing of the containment and containment isolation provisions under 10 CFR Part 50, Appendix J. Containment Integrated Leakage Rate Tests (Type "A" tests or CILRTs) are performed on a 15-year basis. Local Leakage Rate Tests (Type B or Type C testing, or LLRTs) are performed much more frequently[citation needed], both to identify the possible leakage in an accident and to locate and fix leakage paths. LLRTs are performed on containment isolation valves, hatches and other appurtenances penetrating the containment. A nuclear plant is required by its operating license to prove containment integrity prior to restarting the reactor after each shutdown. The requirement can be met with satisfactory local or integrated test results (or a combination of both when an ILRT is performed).[14]
In 1988, Sandia National Laboratories conducted a test of slamming a jet fighter into a large concrete block at 775 km/h (482 mph).[15][16] The airplane left only a 64-millimetre-deep (2.5 in) gouge in the concrete. Although the block was not constructed like a containment building missile shield, it was not anchored, etc., the results were considered indicative. A subsequent study by EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute, concluded that commercial airliners did not pose a danger.[17]
The Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station was hit directly by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Turkey Point has two fossil fuel units and two nuclear units. Over $90 million of damage was done, largely to a water tank and to a smokestack of one of the fossil-fueled units on-site, but the containment buildings were undamaged.[18][19]
See also [ edit ]Chelsea striker Alvaro Morata said his team had shown they are in the fight for the Premier League title after dismantling Stoke 4-0 on Saturday.
Morata, 24, hit a hat trick at the bet365 Stadium to take his Premier League tally to six goals in as many matches.
The £58 million striker was happy to prove his ability after the exit of Diego Costa to Atletico Madrid, and thanked Chelsea supporters after they changed the words to a controversial chant about him.
"It's football. Sometimes the ball doesn't [go in], like against Arsenal, and today, we had two chances and made two goals," he told the club website of Chelsea's first-half display.
"We sent a good message to all the Premier League. Chelsea is in the fight for the title and it's the thing that we want.
"The most important thing is we won today. It's a difficult place to come, but we won and now we can look ahead to the Champions League."
Follow @ESPNFC on Twitter to keep up with the latest football updates.The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced today that, beginning with next week’s April general conference, no one will be admitted into a conference session without a special, single-use, conference recommend.
“We wanted to make conference an even more special experience,” explained church spokesperson Dale Overtsen. “When members realize they need to be spiritually prepared and worthy to attend these sacred gatherings, they tend to understand that these are not ‘just another meeting.’ ”
The construction of the Conference Center, completed in 2000, has made it possible for many more church members to attend conference sessions. As with all things, Overtsen explained, “perhaps familiarity and availability have made conference seem like something routine and mundane. The Brethren feel the new recommend policy will go a long way towards reversing this perception.”
As in years past, members wishing to attend must have a valid ticket for a specific session. This April, members wishing to secure tickets must meet with their bishop and stake president to assess worthiness and ensure willingness to adhere to church standards while in attendance. Members traveling from other locations can obtain a recommend from a special kiosk just south of the Salt Lake Temple, where there will be bishops and stake presidents specially set apart for temporary recommend duty.
When asked what questions are asked for the recommend, Overtsen declined to provide specifics but said, “Generally speaking, we want to make sure that members are dressed appropriately and covenant to maintain a reverent, spiritual atmosphere inside the Conference Center.”
Overtsen suggested that the recommend questions might be compared to Brigham Young University’s Honor Code, in which students agree to maintain dress and grooming standards and follow the church’s teachings and commandments. “We haven’t seen a lot of flip-flops or facial hair at conference,” Overtsen said, “but it happens. And we certainly want to avoid any unseemly displays or outbursts in what should otherwise be a very reverent and spirit-filled meeting.”
Asked if the recommend requirement reflects the church’s concern with rumors that an organized group of dissenters plans to oppose the sustaining of church leaders, Overtsen was emphatic: “We don’t change our policies because some loud-mouths, probably in flip-flops and beards, think they can get attention by publicly opposing the Lord’s anointed. This has nothing do with that at all. In fact, I hadn’t even heard of such a plan until you mentioned it just now.”
Overtsen said he was “confident” that there would be no trouble at the conference this year, “other than those so-called Christian yay-hoos outside the gates. Inside, everyone will be facing the same way, as always.”
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedStar Trek fans cheered the news earlier this month that -- in advance of the July 24 release of Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season One on Blu-ray – TNG would be celebrated with Star Trek: The Next Generation 25th Anniversary Event, a one-night-only, in-theater experience to be held on Monday, July 23, at theaters nationwide. Well, now we’ve got an exclusive First Look at the trailer for Star Trek: The Next Generation 25th Anniversary Event.
Star Trek: The Next Generation 25th Anniversary EventTNG Where No One Has Gone Before Datalore Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season One Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Two
Buy tickets now for Star Trek: The Next Generation 25th Anniversary Event at FathomEvents.com.
Meanwhile, click HERE to enter the Star Trek: The Next Generation Movie Spectacular Sweeepstakes for a chance to win a pair of tickets to Star Trek: The Next Generation 25th Anniversary Event and the collectible movie event poster.Image caption Richard Dawkins said the Bible was not a'moral book'
Leading atheist Richard Dawkins says he supports the plan to put a Bible in every English school.
The privately funded distribution of King James Bibles began this month to mark its 400th anniversary.
Prof Dawkins, writing in the Observer, said: "It is not a moral book and young people need to learn that important fact because they are very frequently told the opposite".
Critics have said it is unlikely that schools do not already have a Bible.
Education Secretary Michael Gove supported the plan, saying the text had had "an immense influence" on the English-speaking world.
He said pupils should learn about its role in the nation's history, language, literacy and culture.
Prof Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford, said: "A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian."
"People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality."
He added: "I have even heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that, without the Bible as a moral compass, people would have no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem.
"The surest way to disabuse yourself of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself."
KING JAMES BIBLE 54 scholars, all members of the Church of England, were chosen to work on the translation and 47 completed the task in 1611
They drew heavily on the work of William Tyndale, who was one of the first to translate the Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek
It was all at the request of King James I, who was unhappy with existing translations. He frequently visited the scholars at work
Phrases we still use include: No peace for the wicked (Isaiah 57:21), The blind leading the blind (Matthew 15:13) and God forbid (Romans 3:6)
Although he questioned whether any child would actually read it, he said: "Whatever else the Bible might be - and it really is a great work of literature - it is not a moral book and young people need to learn that important fact because they are very frequently told the opposite."
He added: "Not a bad way to find out what's in a book is to read it, so I say go to it. But does anybody, even Gove, seriously think they will?"
In the same way that Mr Gove wanted pupils to learn about its wide influence, Prof Dawkins emphasised the Bible's contribution to literature.
"The whole King James Bible is littered with literary allusions, almost as many as Shakespeare (to quote that distinguished authority Anon, the trouble with Hamlet is it's so full of cliches)."
Among the examples he used to illustrate his point were: the salt of the earth; go the extra mile; I wash my hands of it; filthy lucre; through a glass darkly; wolf in sheep's clothing; hide your light under a bushel; and no peace for the wicked.
The Bible distribution costs of £370,000 are being funded by charities and philanthropists.A reporter for the New York Times revealed this week she had a scoop on Donald Trump first launching his presidential campaign in June 2015, but turned it down.
"Somebody close to [Trump] called me last May, it was like late May or early June, and they said, 'Trump is going to announce on June 16 and we want you to break it.' And I said, 'No.' They seemed confused," the Times' Maggie Haberman said in a podcast interview this week with former Obama advisers Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer.
"I said, 'You know, I went through this... with Trump in 2011 when he talked about running and I'm not doing — and I treated it |
are safe.
Corey Saylor, a leader at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that this organization is waiting on Trump to speak out, after a significant rise in anti-Muslim incidents over the past year.
“It is [Trump’s] duty to repudiate bias. President Bush went to a mosque to push back against anti-Islam sentiment in 2001,” Saylor told HuffPost in an email. “We are still waiting for President Trump to demonstrate the same leadership.”
Carlo Allegri / Reuters People take part in a rally called "I am Muslim Too" in Times Square Manhattan, New York City, on Feb. 19.
Trump’s inability to understand the fears and concerns of American Muslims was apparent even before he won the election. During a presidential debate, when an American Muslim asked him directly how he would combat Islamophobia, he turned the question into an opportunity to rant about “radical Islamic terrorism” ― glazing over the woman’s concerns about anti-Muslim bigotry.
This week, American Muslims saw that attitude reappear in the White House. A reporter asked White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer about the rise in anti-Muslim hate groups during a press conference this week. But Spicer dodged the question, speaking instead about “radical Islamic terrorism.” Like his boss, he ignored the fact that Islamophobic groups are fueling hatred and even calling for violence against American citizens.
Catherine Orsborn is the campaign director of Shoulder to Shoulder, an interfaith organization dedicated to ending anti-Muslim bigotry. She told HuffPost that it’s clear from Spicer’s comments that “there is a huge disconnect between what our fellow Americans are facing, in terms of anti-Muslim hate incidents, and how the administration is thinking about these issues.”
“They’re not demonstrating any level of concern for American Muslims to live in peace and security,” Orsborn said. “And we need our government to not only speak out against attacks on Muslims, but also show by their actions that they do indeed respect the rights and freedoms of American Muslims as part of the fabric of our country.”
Carlo Allegri / Reuters A man dressed as Trump takes part in the "I am Muslim Too" rally in Times Square.
At the same time, anti-Semitism has also been on the rise. The Anti-Defamation League has recorded a troubling rise in hate speech against Jewish journalists online. After the election, several schools and universities reported anti-Semitic vandalism on their campuses. And since Jan. 9, at least 69 bomb threats have been called into 55 Jewish Community Centers across the country. While no bombs were recovered from these locations, the repeated phone threats have caused fear and aggravation in the Jewish community.
Rabiah Ahmed, communications director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told HuffPost that she holds Trump and his administration accountable for the increase in hate crimes against Jews, Muslims, and other minorities.
“It is their divisive rhetoric that has emboldened many to act out on their biases and feel justified in doing so,” Ahmed wrote in an email. “And it is their responsibility to undo this increasing tide of hate that we are witnessing.”
The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect is one of the Jewish organizations that have been calling for the administration to speak out on the rise of anti-Semitism in the country. The center called Trump’s statement against anti-Semitism a “pathetic asterisk of condescension.”
Just as we saw the President denounce anti-Semitism earlier this week, albeit far overdue, we demand and expect the same be stated when it comes to anti-Muslim bigotry. Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner
And like CAIR, the center is also waiting for Trump to speak out against the abuse that Muslims have had to face.
“The President’s Islamophobia, marked by his repeated phony portrayals of Muslims as more prone to terrorism than others, is responsible for creating the incubator of hate that foments the crimes we are seeing against Muslims in America today,” executive director Steven Goldstein told HuffPost.
Goldstein said that he was “devastated”, but not surprised, by the President’s silence in condemning anti-Muslim attacks. He called it the silence a “double-barreled danger” to Jews and Muslims.
“We have no pecking order in which we fight Antisemitism first, and Islamophobia and other hatred second,” he said. “We have to save every Anne. Never again must mean never again to anyone. Never again is now.”
Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, also called out Trump’s silence on anti-Muslim bigotry.
“Just as we saw the President denounce anti-Semitism earlier this week, albeit far overdue, we demand and expect the same be stated when it comes to anti-Muslim bigotry,” Pesner told HuffPost.
Orbsorn said that while a condemnation of Islamophobia is critical, interfaith activists like her need to see “more than words.”KiVa cut bullying in Finnish schools by teaching children the role of groups in perpetuating bullying, the importance of empathising with victims, and how to support the bullied. Where bullying does occur, a team of three teachers trained by KiVa instructors engage victims and bullies in discussions to resolve outstanding issues. Thanks to funding from the Ministry of Culture and Education, KiVa now operates in hundreds of schools across Finland and cut bullying by 20% in a large randomised controlled trial covering 117 schools.
KiVa has been replicated in Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
KiVa relies on each school administration getting behind the project. If teachers aren’t actively committed to the program, its impact is likely to be limited. Some schools felt the time commitment was too much. Thanks to endorsements from the Finnish Ministry of Culture and Education, however, the reception by many schools was enthusiastic.
The Finnish Ministry of Culture and Education made KiVa free for all schools between 2009 and 2011. Costing estimates vary between schools, but for an average Finnish school, the founder estimates a cost of around $350 per school, or around 80 cents per student. To use KiVa internationally, a licence must be sought. The fee is agreed in the licensing process.
To become a KiVa school, selected school personnel go through two day-long face-to-face training sessions with KiVa trainers. Some are trained to spot harmful behaviours and to reconcile bullies and victims, while others are trained in preventative techniques. KiVa is delivered through 20 hours of lessons spread over the year and delivered to all students in a specified age bracket. Lessons cover three broad topics: how groups can encourage and maintain bullying; the need for empathy; and practical strategies to support and include victims of bullying. The evaluation studies measured the fall in bullying through self- and peer-reports provided by students.
KiVa cut bullying by 20% in intervention schools compared to control according to one large randomised controlled trial in the first nine months of implementation. The effect of KiVa is cumulative: according to its founder, bullying in KiVa schools in Finland has fallen by around half since large-scale roll-out in 2009. Verbal, physical and cyber bullying all fell. Positive effects on academic attainment were also recorded. KiVa demonstrated more significant impact among children aged between 10 and 12 than those between six and nine or 13 to 15.
The Story
Teaching children practical strategies to prevent bullying is now standard practice in hundreds of Finnish schools. The KiVa program cut bullying by 20% in a large-scale randomised control trial of 117 schools.
KiVa comprises a 20-hour program of workshops delivered across a school year. The course covers three key topics: how groups encourage and perpetuate bullying, the importance of empathy in combatting bullying, and finally, practical strategies to reduce bullying that schoolchildren can take.
To become a KiVa school, school personnel attend two intensive, face-to-face training sessions on bullying prevention and reconciliation. Whenever a child is bullied, the teachers are trained to engage the bully and victim in a series of discussions to work through issues and prevent on-going tensions. Pro-social, popular children are approached to encourage inclusion of the bullied child by influential peers.
“The main goal of KiVa is to make students aware that they are all part of it: that they can make a difference,” explains Christina Salmivalli, Founder of KiVa and Professor at the University of Turku.
The program isn’t just a pep-talk, however. Part of the work is helping children to understand how their behaviour might contribute to the bullying of another.
“When children know bullying is happening, they may join in or laugh. They provide different verbal and non-verbal cues that suggest that this behaviour is ok, fun, or even cool.”
“Bystanders can maintain bullying, or they can make small positive changes that make a big difference – it’s in their power to decide that bullying won’t be tolerated.”
KiVa is far from the first anti-bullying program, but its strong evidence base is rare. Salmivalli believes the strength of the program is its structure.
“It’s systematic: it’s not just giving a folder to teachers with a selection of exercises. We have built a clear curriculum so that each month there is a lesson, a game and information that goes to parents and staff. Each lesson builds on the last,” she added.
Since KiVa’s humble beginnings—the impetus came from Salmivalli’s masters’ and doctoral theses—the program has spread to some thousand schools across Finland, and replications are running in around 19 other countries.
The Finnish Ministry of Culture and Education were vital partners in scaling KiVa nationwide. The Ministry provided subsidies that made KiVa free for all Finnish schools who chose to implement it.
Despite “variation in how ready they were and concerns over the time required to deliver the lessons”, in Salmivalli’s words, the roll-out encountered relatively few hurdles. Salmavilli cites the government’s financial support and public endorsement for removing financial concerns or worries about the credibility of the project.
The research and thinking behind KiVa is far from finished. While children aged 10 to 12 demonstrated the strongest reduction in bullying—around 30%—results for older age groups are more mixed.
KiVa does not eliminate bullying from schools, but in reducing its prevalence and improving teachers’ responses, the Finnish project offers promising routes into child-led violence prevention.
(Picture credit: Pixabay)Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears at a campaign rally in Miami, Florida, U.S., September 16, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar
By Emily Stephenson
MIAMI (Reuters) - Donald Trump on Friday called for disarming the bodyguards who protect his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, and mused about the consequences of such a move by saying "Let's see what happens to her."
The Republican presidential nominee was speaking at a rally in Miami, where he contrasted his supporters, who he said back police and want crime reduced, to Clinton, who he derided as someone who "lives behind walls and raises money from hedge funds."
"I think that her bodyguards should drop all weapons. They should disarm. I think they should disarm immediately, what do you think, yes?," he said.
"Take their guns away, she doesn't want guns. Take them, let's see what happens to her. Take their guns away, okay. It will be very dangerous."
Both candidates have been protected by the Secret Service for months, but Trump's latest take on Clinton's security detail brought swift denunciations, particularly from Clinton allies.
"Tonight, Donald Trump once again alluded to violence against Hillary Clinton,” said Elizabeth Shappell, spokeswoman for Correct The Record, a pro-Clinton media watchdog group.
“This is a truly deplorable comment that betrays our nation's most fundamental democratic values," Shappell said in a statement.
Stuart Stevens, a Washington-based political consultant who worked on Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, tweeted: "The Secret Service should investigate this threat"
Trump made a similar comment about Clinton and her armed protection in May while accepting the endorsement of the National Rifle Association, when he said Clinton would end the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms.
"Let's see how they feel walking around without their guns or their bodyguards," he told the gun lobby group, speaking about Clinton and her Secret Service detail.
Trump was criticized by opponents last month when he suggested that gun rights activists could act to stop Clinton from nominating liberal U.S. Supreme Court justices, a comment some interpreted as encouraging a political assassination.
"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks," Trump told a rally in North Carolina on Aug. 9. "Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know," he continued.
Clinton has called for tighter access to guns, including universal background checks, but has never said she planned to get rid of the Second Amendment.
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said Friday's remarks fall into a pattern of Trump inciting people to violence.
"Whether this is done to provoke protesters at a rally or casually or even as a joke, it is an unacceptable quality in anyone seeking the job of Commander in Chief," Mook said in a statement.
(Reporting by Emily Stephenson; Writing by Eric Walsh; Editing by Mary Milliken)As Howard University Turns 150, Students Find Inspiration In Its History
Hide caption A few of the famous Howard University graduates from the past 150 years (from left): Stokely Carmichael, Thurgood Marshall and Toni Morrison. Previous Next Getty Images/NPR
Hide caption Howard University graduates (from left): Kamala Harris, Carla Hall, Taraji P. Henson. Previous Next Getty Images/NPR
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Hide caption Historical artifacts on display at Howard's Founders Library. Previous Next LA Johnson/NPR
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Before Thurgood Marshall became the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court...
Before Toni Morrison became a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Nobel laureate...
Before Kamala Harris was elected to the United States Senate...
They were all students at Howard University. They roamed The Yard in between classes, they studied in Founders Library. Whether they knew it or not, these students would become part of Howard's history as a jewel of African-American education and culture.
The Washington, D.C., campus is ranked at or near the top of the nation's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
This week, Howard celebrated its 150th anniversary. The celebration came in a tumultuous week in which HBCU presidents came to Washington to meet with President Trump.
NPR Ed visited the campus to talk to students about Howard's history, and what going to school there means to them.
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Megan Preston: Sophomore, biology major
For Megan Preston, actress and Howard alumna Taraji P. Henson has been one of her biggest inspirations. Henson worked two jobs and became a mother while finishing her degree at Howard. She went on to Hollywood, most recently appearing in the Oscar-nominated film, Hidden Figures.
Preston says she chose to attend Howard because she wanted to be in an environment where black students were achieving greatness, like Henson did.
"I feel like it's different than being at a PWI [predominantly white institution] because white people are known for doing great things," Preston says. "So to be around black people doing that, it's inspiring for me. It makes me want to do better."
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Angel Mitchell: Junior, computer science major
Angel Mitchell applied to other HBCUs, like Hampton University and Tuskegee University. But Howard was at "the top."
Mitchell says there are "so many people who have been through Howard and made it what it is. They hold us to another standard that might not happen at other HBCUs or other schools, period."
So when Mitchell got her scholarship, her decision was easy. One of her favorite professors at Howard is Greg Carr. She says his Intro to Afro-American Studies class was an opportunity to learn cultural content that she wouldn't have learned otherwise.
Celebrating Howard's birthday "feels like I'm a part of history," she says.
"I definitely feel like I'm part of paving the way for other people because other people have paved this way for me too," Mitchell explains. "I just want them to have the same experience or better."
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Tyler Ellis: Junior, sports medicine major
Tyler Ellis came to Howard to play soccer. The university's culture and diversity is more than just "a lot of black kids," he says.
Ellis is planning to take a spring break trip to Ghana this semester, which he hopes will teach him more about civic engagement.
"I just think it's excellent, man," Ellis says about the anniversary. "It just shows that Howard's been doing a lot of great work despite what people may think."
Ellis is also a member of Phi Beta Sigma, the same fraternity that Alain LeRoy Locke belonged to. Locke, who taught at Howard, was the first African-American Rhodes scholar.
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Cameron Clarke: Senior, biology and community health majors
Speaking of Rhodes scholars, meet Cameron Clarke — one of four Howard students to receive the scholarship to attend the University of Oxford.
The original plan was to "go anywhere else but here." Clarke says his brother graduated from Howard last year and he wanted to avoid following in his brother's footsteps. Now, he says, "it's probably the best decision I could have made."
To Clarke, the history of the campus' activism around social justice is part of what makes Howard special.
Recently, there have been protests critical of the university's president for a private meeting he had with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. On Tuesday, graffiti appeared on campus, including a walkway on The Yard that read: "WELCOME TO THE TRUMP PLANTATION. OVERSEER: WAYNE A. I. FREDERICK."
Clarke says he expects that kind of activism. "I'm actually excited by the fact that students are engaged and passionate and willing to go straight up to the president and call him out when he's doing things that we object to from a moral or ethical standpoint," he says. "I think that bodes well for us lasting another 150 years."(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The lobbying organization for the nation's health insurers finally stepped into the debate over the future of American health care on Tuesday, calling for a stable transition as President-elect Trump and Republican policymakers fulfill their promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
Details about when and how the healthcare law, commonly known as Obamacare, would be repealed -- or how broad and sweeping a repeal would really be -- have remained largely unanswered. That has created deep uncertainty about the long-term future of health insurance for millions of Americans, right in the midst of the open enrollment period, when people sign up for 2017 health coverage in the exchanges set up by the law.
"Millions of Americans are selecting and purchasing individual health plans now – and will continue to do so through January 2017," America's Health Insurance Plans says in its list of priorities, which was described by a spokeswoman as a framework for the conversations it is having with policymakers. "Millions more have enrolled in Medicaid. Making sudden, significant changes now or mid-year will jeopardize the coverage they depend on."
If a replacement of the law is not immediate, policymakers will depend on health insurers to continue to participate in the exchanges. The white paper from America's Health Insurance Plans provides, for the first time, a clear bullet-point list of their recommendations and priorities.
To maintain stability after a possible repeal, the insurers recommended preserving two programs that have been blasted by Republicans in the past: cost-sharing reductions and reinsurance. House Republicans have sued the Obama Administration over the legality of the cost-sharing reductions, the payments to insurers that help defray out-of-pocket costs for low-income Americans. Republicans have also lambasted the reinsurance payments, which provide money to insurers who cover the sickest and most expensive patients, calling them a "bail out."
Insurers maintain that those payments will stop some companies from fleeing the exchanges, which currently insure about 11.4 million people, in 2018.
The exchanges have already been challenged by not enough healthy people signing up, the high-profile withdrawal of some large insurers and premium increases. In the name of stability, insurers recommend that Congress fund programs that help the exchanges function and make coverage affordable through at least Jan. 1, 2019.
Among the group's other requests:
Sufficient funding for Medicaid to cover people and insulate states from any sudden budget impact
Replace Obamacare's fine for not carrying health care insurance, with "strong incentives," such as "late enrollment penalties and waiting periods"
Elimination of certain taxes and a reduction of rules and regulations, such as the requirement to cover an adequate network of health care providers
Later filing deadlines for insurers to offer insurance in 2018. Currently, they must make filings by May of next year.
"Uncertainty in early 2017 may discourage plans from submitting bids for 2018 – which could mean most people have no pathway to purchase the coverage they need," the white paper says.
But the most prominent theme woven throughout the document is a caution about just how long it can take for health insurers to prepare for whatever comes next. The trade group reminds policymakers that companies require at least 18 months to create and file plans with state regulators -- and they warn that mid-year changes to regulations could be disruptive.
The health insurers' white paper is only one example of the health care industry's efforts to sway future policy in an administration where many specific policy positions remain unclear.
Hospital groups released a report this week detailing the financial harm repealing the law could have on the industry, and they have written letters directly to leaders in Congress and to the president-elect.
"Given that health care represents a significant portion of the economy and essential public services, we urge you not to make any abrupt changes that could lead to significant instability for patients, providers, insurers and others," Richard Pollack, president of the American Hospital Association wrote to Trump.
Read More:
What researchers found when they went looking for the jobs Obamacare killed
Skyrocketing Obamacare premiums still lower than employer-sponsored insurance
The striking difference between states that expanded Medicaid and the ones that didn’tLast week, I posted about how the Franklin County School Board in Tennessee was debating whether or not the Parent-Teacher Organization should be praying at meetings:
The school board’s attorney suggested that a moment of silence would be okay, but a prayer crossed the line — Since the PTO was a school-sponsored group, it was violating the law.
Well, the school board has finally figured out how to handle this.
Oh, they’re still allowing the prayers. But they’re also telling teachers that they can’t be on the board of the Parent-Teacher group:
The School Support Organizations policy now reads: “Parent organizations and Parent-Teacher Organizations are neither school-sponsored clubs nor student initiated clubs. They are considered independent, ‘outside clubs or groups,’ which must meet the terms of this policy to be able to use the name, mascot or logo of a school or the school district to solicit or raise money, materials, property, securities, services, or other things of value. Neither principals nor teachers of any school shall be on any parent organization or Parent-Teacher Organization board of directors.”
You read that correctly: Teachers (and principals) can’t help run the Parent-Teacher Organization. And the PTO is no longer sponsored by the school.
Which I guess keeps the district above the law, but basically defeats the whole purpose of have a parent-teacher group in the first place.
Franklin County, Tennessee: Where public school teachers are told to get out of the car because Jesus needs to take the wheel.
(Thanks to Brian for the link)A fire erupted at a Midtown sushi restaurant last night after a worker haphazardly carried gasoline in soy sauce containers, sources said.
“I was pouring a round of Jack Daniels,” said ENO restaurant bartender Adele Mackenzie. “The next thing I know the bus boy was on fire.”
Mackenzie said that 10 Upstate New York tree trimmers who were in town for hurricane Sandy relief efforts and who happened to be eating at ENO, tackled the busboy to put out the flames.
In addition to the busboy, the chef and a server were also burned in the 10 p.m. blaze. The three workers were taken to Cornell Burn Center for 1st and 2nd degree burns, according to witnesses and fire officials.
Sources said the fire started as a worker carried two 5-gallon sauce containers filled with gasoline from the basement into the kitchen. Somehow, the fuel spilled on the kitchen floor and ignited, according to Deputy Chief Thomas McKavanagh.This Saturday “Swift” Jarrett Hurd will face fan-favorite Austin Trout in his first defense of the IBF World Title he won just a few months ago. While a glance at Trout’s resume would suggest that he’s lost three of his step-up fights (Canelo, Lara, Charlo), nuance tells a story of a man that never had Lady Luck’s favor when it came to the scorecards.
Three of the four fighters in the main and co-main events on Showtime’s talent-packed answer to SuperFly may carry more fan-recognition than Hurd: “Cinnamon’s Bane” Erislandy Lara faces unknown amateur stand-out Terrell Gausha in what appears to be a mismatch while Jermell Charlo takes on meteoric prospect Erickson Lubin. And of course, Trout has been in the ring with some of the sport’s best.
With names like Lara and Charlo, it could be easy to gloss over the opening fight of Saturday’s card. The idea of a young champion facing an aging veteran would make it seem easy to sleep on Jarrett Hurd’s first title defense, but as is often the case in boxing, the devil is in the details.
Hurd made waves coming up the ranks in 2015, blitzing through all of his opponents, stopping all three in seven rounds or less. 2016 went just as spectacularly; Hurd fought twice and continued his stoppage streak. The impressive string of victories and fan-friendly style earned Hurd Prospect of the Year honors.
Hurd lands an uppercut on MX Olympian Oscar Molina
Hurd’s first fight of 2017 was originally set to be a final eliminator against Tony Harrison to challenge then-champion Jermall Charlo. Jermall opted to move up to 160, upping the stakes of the fight to the vacant title itself. Had Hurd’s time arrived?
Harrison seemed off to a great start; his movement was giving Hurd problems. It appeared that Hurd was on his way to his first loss, but with the application of steady pressure and a powerful right hand, Hurd managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
Counter sends Tony Harrison to the canvas
Where most fighters would take an easy first defense, Hurd has opted instead to take one of the better challengers available: Austin Trout. Of those few who can claim a W over Trout, they are all names any boxing fan would know immediately: Lara, Charlo, and Canelo (all of which where Trout made a good showing of himself).
Rather than take the easy way out and fight someone from the obscure pages of BoxRec for a soft touch, Jarrett Hurd instead looks to add himself to the Trout Mount Rushmore. The promise of a knockout victory is as lofty a promise as Hurd’s career appears to be. Beating a skilled, battle-tested vet in a manner boxing’s elite couldn’t is exactly what a young champion like Hurd needs for the boxing world to put some respect on his name."Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" gasped Jenni.
"I think so," smiled Sophia. "The Dawntreader?"
"But…" Jenni continued, mind trying to grasp exactly what was being implied.
"For those of you who don't know," grinned Sophia, wicked grin flashing eerily over her face as she spoke to the shuttle, "The Dawntreader was a legacy-class logistics carrier. The Austraeus is used to ship things to and from the frontier, the Dawntreader was used to assist other ships warping to the frontier. If the other starships stayed within the Dawntreader's spatial compression, they used to be able to benefit from the Dawntreader's legacy drive. In addition, the Dawntreader could also refuel these ships mid-warp - it was basically a fuel tank, fusion rockets and a legacy drive.
The Dawntreader went MIA 700 kilohours ago. It was last seen headed towards a gas giant to extract tritium and refill its fuel tanks. Based on Overwatch's SONAR scans, Jenni and I reckon it's here, underneath the clouds of Carlyle. I bet Carlyle - the station, that is - isn't doing any fuel refining at all - just siphoning fuel out of the Dawntreader's fuel tanks through that pipeline.
So! The IMC forces at Outpost 207 need that fuel! All we have to do is shut down Carlyle's orbital defences and steal the Dawntreader!"
There was a brief silence.
"Easier said than done," remarked Bonerhead.
"And I can do it," grinned Sophia. "Jenni, I've studied the design of the Dawntreader. If you let me jump out the shuttle when we reach that gas pipeline, I can get inside the Dawntreader and reboot its AI. I can take that starship."
"You sure?"
"Positively."
The Dawntreader was a Hammond-built starship, she thought. If I get in front of any camera mounted on that ship all I have to do is speak my name and let it see my bone structure and the Dawntreader's mine.
"You guys, on the other hand," Sophia continued. "Should stay in the shuttle and jump upwards towards Carlyle. Disable carlyle's orbital defence railguns, release the gas pipeline and jump back towards the Dawntreader and we've got ourselves enough fuel to power a small fleet."
"And you're sure that hunk of metal down there is the Dawntreader?"
"Absolutely. The SONAR measurements match perfectly."
"Okay…"
"Now, once we have the Dawntreader, I think we should ditch our original plan. Our soldiers back in the Venice system are probably about to steal the starships from Kodai; in a short while they'll be jumping towards us to fuel the Austraeus's fuel tanks from Carlyle's fuel reserves. I think we should use the Dawntreader to meet them halfway. They'll spot our warp signature and disable their warp drives to avoid a collision with us; at which point we can refuel the Austraeus and jump straight into the Sticez system. Adjust our trajectories slightly and we'll be at Outpost 207. Easy."
"You, ah, seem to have put some thought into it," muttered Jenni. "Okay, I like this plan." She pointed at two soldiers. "You and you. What are your names?"
"John, Ma'am."
"Lisa, Ma'am."
"John and Lisa, you're escorting Sophia. Overwatch, how long till we reach the pipeline?"
"ETA to gas pipeline: Five minutes," displayed the monitor.
"Okay you three. Got your magnetic boots on?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Yeah."
"Then get your helmets," ordered Jenni. Threw them three oxygen cylinders. "These'll give you six hours of oxygen. Will that be enough?"
"Once we turn the Dawntreader's AI on it should start the life support systems automatically," answered Sophia, pushing her helmet onto her head and connecting the oxygen cylinder. "We'll be fine."
She grabbed her Smart Pistol, checked that the safety was on and that it was loaded before stepping into the airlock with her two escorts. Tapped her radio.
"Can you hear me?"
"Loud and clear," replied Jenni. "Overwatch, ETA?"
"ETA to pipeline: two minutes."
"Good luck," said Jenni. "Alright, the rest of you soldiers! Get your helmets on, too! We'll be under carlyle soon!
The guard coughed, splattered blood upon the stone floor of the prisons. Crimson dripped from gaping bullet holes in his legs and thighs.
I'm not gonna live much longer, huh…
Zeta sauntered over, kicked the carbine from his weak hands. Pointed the Wingman at his head.
"I'm looking for five men who were arrested today."
The guard laughed softly, raised his eyes to look at her.
"And you honestly think I'll tell you?"
"I'd hoped so, yeah."
"Too bad," he smiled, the smile of a dead man laughing in the face of his killer. Resigned to his fate, yet determined to take something back.
"I've got a better idea," said Zeta. Pulled a spare can of Stim off her hip.
"You tell me where my friends are, and I'll give you this can of stim. You've actually got a chance of survival if you do."
Another laugh.
"Survival?"
He began to giggle.
"You. Ha. Ha, ha. Do you really think, heh, that I still want to live?"
"Most people do?"
"Not when they have nothing to live for. And you just killed off my reason to live. My happiness."
Zeta put the can back onto her hip.
"Answer me and I'll give you anything you wish for. Survival, Stim - hell, I'll leave you to die alone if you want."
There was a long, pregnant pause as the man thought, high on pain, adrenaline and a lack of oxygen to his brain.
"I will tell you the location of your comrades. After you give me the Stim and that carbine."
"Huh?"
"I'm going to avenge my comrades, killer. I'll give you the location of the five men in exchange for another chance to kill you."
"Very well."
She handed the man the can.
"Do you know how to use it?"
"Inject it straight into an artery," he said, jamming a needle attached to the side of the can into his armpit, wincing from the pain. Attached the can to the end and pushed down on the button on the top. Watched the yellow liquid shoot into his arm with morbid fascination.
"So this is what it's like being a Pilot, huh-"
His eyes widened as the drug hit his brain.
"Guuugh- AUGGHHHAAAAAA!"
He collapsed onto the floor gnashed his teeth clenched his fists breathed screamed gasped fists clenching forearms rippling legs twitching pain subsiding oxygen returning he stood with blood spurting from his wounds but stopping suddenly as the stim formed clots and he took a step forward his carbine on the floor
"Your friends," he growled, "are in blocks C and D."
He bent downwards fingers touched the handle of his carbine and he pulled it up to his chest flicked off the safety
"Cells C9," he continued raggedly, "and D1 through 4."
"Thank you," replied Zeta sincerely.
"Die, bitch." He muttered raising the carbine upwards taking aim and Zeta's head filled the scope and his fingBANG THwummmm
Ba-dum, Ba-dum, Ba-du
Zeta stood over the man's corpse - now with one more Wingman wound than before - and continued through the underground prison.
Bish opened his eyes. Found himself sitting at a desk - huh, so there's gravity here - in front of a computer.
Am I in a centrifuge?
"Hello, Bish," said a voice from behind him. He turned his head, saw a man standing with his arms folded.
"Oh, it's you, Mr. Ireton."
"Indeed. We're ready to begin testing you now. In a few moments, that computer will be connected to a power source. When that happens, you'll be connected to a replica of Kodai Industries' network; the network we already broke into. We want you to break into the replica's network. Without setting off any tripwires or alarms. Understand?"
"No. What do you want me to find? You can't just ask me to 'break into their network', any idiot can do that."
"Find us the root password to their network, the launch codes to their starships, hell, I dunno, Kodai's director's infonet mail account. Get into their network deep enough and we'll consider it a pass. But remember - no tripwires, no alarms. If you're the real Bish, you can do this silently."
"Aw, I dunno abo-"
"Our informants tell us you hacked into OSET in an hour. Quit stalling."
"Oh, okay. Fine. I'm ready. Turn the computer on already."
"Not yet," said Ireton. "We'll connect it in our own time."
Bish rolled his eyes. "You Contractors are odd, y'know that?"
Bruce glared at her for a second, then,
"Hello, Zeta."
A voice of betrayal and disbelief left his mouth.
I did this, thought Zeta. I failed to keep an eye on Plus and it fed Menelaus too much information.
"Bruce," she began, "I imagine you don't trust me too much at the moment."
He raised an eyebrow, motioned to the iron bars of his cell.
"But I'm here to bust you out."
His eyebrows fell into a frown. "Wha-"
"We don't have much time, so I'll explain along the way." She drew back her katana, lined it up with the cell's lock. A sharp clang! later and the long fell away from the deadbolt.
"I'm going to lift this deadbolt up," Zeta said. "And when I do, this door will be able to swing freely. I know that you are an IMC Pilot. You can probably kill me with your bare hands. When I open this deadbolt, I trust that you won't."
He said nothing.
She took a deep breath.
Those guards did not deserve to die.
This man does not deserve to be here.
Menelaus is the problem.
She lifted the bolt, stepped away as the cell door swung open.
Bruce took a step forward. Through the open door.
"Can I have a gun?" he asked. "I heard gunshots earlier and I don't want to be unarmed."
"Sure," she smiled softly, handed him her Wingman. He ran his fingers over the surface.
"This'll do," he murmured.
Zeta frowned and suddenly she was staring down the |
a playoff spot with Cam as your guy, it's in spite of him, not because.
Jay Cutler, Bears: So the Bears are really reeling. I'm telling you this because if you just look at Jay Cutler's facial expressions, you may not be able to tell. They are. Brandon Marshall being banged up isn't going to help, and, among ways in which Cutler is struggling, his deep completion percentage has dropped to 31 percent (30th among 32 qualified quarterbacks). This is not a cakewalk, as over the past five weeks, the Vikings have limited opposing quarterbacks to just 12.3 fantasy points per game while facing quarterbacks that included Aaron Rodgers, Matthew Stafford and RGIII. Yes, Stafford was without Megatron, but still. With two weeks to prepare for a Chicago team searching for answers, I expect a lot of Matt Forte in this game and for Jay Cutler to finish outside the top 10.
Ryan Tannehill, Dolphins: So the Bills record a sack on 9 percent of opposing dropbacks, the second-highest rate in the league. Like many quarterbacks, Ryan Tannehill struggles under pressure, completing only 42 percent of his attempts under pressure (18th in the league). Add in the fact that the Dolphins just lost elite left tackle Branden Albert, so now they are figuring out a new offensive line scheme on a short week and I expect Tannehill to be under pressure all night long in a low-scoring game.
Running Backs I Love in Week 11
Honestly, this week is so brutal for running backs, it's hard not to love anyone with a pulse. But here's some guys who are a cut above.
Alfred Morris, Washington: Media reports, schmedia reports... You know who's thrilled RGIII is back? Alfred Morris, and Alfred Morris owners. In the two full games Griffin has played this season, Morris averages over 90 rushing yards a game and had two total scores. The threat of RGIII's running opens up lanes for Morris and I expect Washington to either win this game or be very competitive. In their three wins this season, Morris has averaged 13 fantasy points per game, including three rushing touchdowns. Meanwhile, the Buccaneers have allowed five rushing touchdowns in their four road games this season.
Mark Ingram, New Orleans: The word's first post- post- post- post-hype sleeper, Ingram has finally become what his supporters thought he could be. With everyone else hurt in the Saints' running game, Sean Payton has fed Ingram. I mean, really fed him. Over the past three weeks, Ingram has 19 more carries than any other running back in the league, breaking the 100-yard mark in all three games. Lots of work against a Bengals squad giving up the most rushing yards before contact this season.
Steven Jackson has looked good against bad run defenses, and that's exactly what he'll face on Sunday at Carolina. Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Steven Jackson, Atlanta: Come on everyone, and party like it's 2009. Back-to-back weeks of 18 touches, Jackson has run hard, averaging 2.2 yards after contact per rush (eighth-most among qualified running backs over the last three weeks.) I expect him to continue to get that kind of workload on the road and be effective against a Panthers team than has allowed 1.9 yards after contact per rush, fourth-most in the league this season.
Frank Gore, San Francisco: You're welcome, America. Last week, I had Gore on the hate list, mentioning how Gore had gotten 20 carries only one time this season. My putting him on the hate list was clearly the thing that motivated the 49ers coaching staff to finally give him 20 carries for only the second time all season. Big game for him last week, I expect another heavy load for him as they try to win the time-of-possession battle on the road facing a Giants team that just got gashed by Marshawn Lynch and has given up the most rushing touchdowns in the NFL this season.
Rashad Jennings, New York Giants: I am assuming he plays, and I am assuming he plays well, as prior to his injury, he was fourth among running backs in total yards, averaging 101 per game and trailing only DeMarco Murray, Le'Veon Bell and Matt Forte. With Aldon Smith back for San Fran (and Patrick Willis out), I expect a heavy run dose from New York to try to take some pressure off Eli Manning. I have him in a number of leagues, and I am starting him in all of them.
If you're desperate: As of this writing, it's not looking good for Giovani Bernard to play, so expect another heavy load for Jeremy Hill, who actually ran well last week when they gave him the ball. What are they gonna do on the road at New Orleans? Let Andy Dalton throw it? Exactly.... Be sure to watch "Fantasy Football Now" on Sunday at 11 a.m. ET on ESPN2 and WatchESPN for the latest updates, but as of right now, C.J. Anderson would be the Broncos running back I'd start against a St. Louis team that has played solid run defense of late.... Charles Sims got 10 touches last week and I expect that number to increase this week, maybe into the 13-to-15 range. Against Washington, that should be enough for desperation flex play status.... same goes for Jonathan Stewart, who I could see getting enough work against the Falcons to be not horrific in a "I'm stuck at my flex and just need a warm body with some upside" kind of way.
Running Backs I Hate in Week 11
Lamar Miller, Miami: The Bills' run defense has sprung some leaks recently, giving up 342 yards and four touchdowns to opposing running backs the past three weeks, but how many carries does Miller really get here? He is banged up, running behind a reimagined offensive line on a short week against a Bills team that has been pretty stout against the run for the season (on the year they have given up the third fewest fantasy points to opposing running backs), and it held Miller to just 53 yards and no scores in Week 3. Too risky for me as a top 20 play.
Bobby Rainey, Tampa Bay: I expect him to lose carries to Charles Sims here, and his odds of scoring are not great, as Rainey has not received a carry inside the opponents' 10-yard line in the last four weeks. While Washington's run defense has certainly struggled since Brian Orakpo went down, I don't have high hopes for Rainey as a top-20 play this week.
Fred Jackson, Buffalo: Watch tonight's game be a shootout and then everyone reading this on Friday have a good laugh, but I am expecting a low-scoring affair. With Jackson listed as questionable, coming off his own injury and no certainty that he gets a decent amount of work, I wouldn't want to start him tonight, on the road, on a short week, against a Dolphins defense that has given up just one rushing touchdown to an opposing running back in the past six games.
Tre Mason, St. Louis: I don't care how desperate you are. Since taking over the lead back duties in Week 7, Mason has averaged only 1.4 yards after contact per rush, which is 31st among 41 qualified backs during that span. And I don't think it will take long for him to see contact when he is handed the ball. The Broncos are the No. 1 run defense and have allowed the fewest rushing yards after contact in the league this season.
Wide Receivers I Love in Week 11
Roddy White, Atlanta: After a slow start, Roddy has started to come on, averaging 11.7 fantasy points per game in the last three, tied for 16th among wide receivers during that span. Tends to kill the Panthers (last four against them he's averaged eight receptions and 115.3 yards per game with five touchdowns), and that was when the Panthers were a good defense. Which, in case you haven't been paying attention, they aren't anymore. Like, at all.
I'm apparently all-in on guys named Jackson this week. Rob Carr/Getty Images
DeSean Jackson, Washington: You stand in front of a locker room and declare love and support for the quarterback, you're getting the ball. Helps that's he's already been wildly productive with it, recording five 100-plus yard receiving games this season. The only wide receiver with more? Demaryius Thomas. The Bucs are no match for him, giving up the most fantasy points to opposing wide receivers this season and ranking 31st against the pass.
DeAndre Hopkins, Houston: With at least 60 yards in five of his last six, the only wide receivers with more 60-plus yard games than Hopkins this season are Antonio Brown and T.Y. Hilton. It remains to be seen how he fares with Ryan Mallett throwing the ball, but I expect Joe Haden to be on Andre Johnson at least some of the time, meaning Hopkins will get to exploit the rest of a subpar non-Joe Haden secondary.
Golden Tate, Detroit: Even with Calvin Johnson back, he saw 12 targets. Leading all wide receivers in yards after the catch this season, he gets a nice matchup here, as the Cardinals have allowed the most such yards to opposing wide receivers this season. Detroit will struggle to run against Arizona, so if they are moving the ball, it's through the air, and that means Calvin and Tate. Plus, I am playing against him as well in the War Room league, so you know he is going off alongside Big Ben.
If you're desperate: Having watched all of Mike Evans' games at Texas A&M, I loved him coming into the season, so no, I don't think this is a fluke. He may not be this good consistently, but he should be able to keep the good times rolling against Washington.... I'm buying the "Brandin Cooks is good on the turf" thing (over 78 yards a game and three scores in five games on the turf this season) so, at home, against Cincy, I'm rolling with him.... With at least 90 yards and a score in three of his past four, Anquan Boldin is a fantasy vampire. He cannot be killed. Against a banged-up Giants secondary, he shall continue to suck the fantasy blood out of your opponent. Keep moving. Nothing to see here. Move along.... Bad matchup and definitely high risk, high reward, but of the four touchdowns John Brown has caught this year, three of them came from Drew Stanton, who has played in only two full games and parts of two others.
Wide Receivers I Hate in Week 11
Sammy Watkins, Buffalo: This could be a long Friday for me, but yeah, I'm going all-in on hating the guys in Thursday's night game. Still banged-up, on a short week, on the road, and -- as Mike Clay and I discussed on my podcast this morning -- a decent chance Brent Grimes shadows him all game. The Dolphins have allowed the fourth-fewest fantasy points to opposing wide receivers this season. You may not have better options this week, and he has the ability (and will get the targets) that a touchdown is not out of the realm of possibility, but this is the least confident I've felt about him since Kyle Orton took over, so he makes the hate list.
Andre Johnson, Houston: Catching only 60 percent of his targets this season, he's on pace for his lowest reception rate since 2005. Now whether that's his fault or if it had something to do with the deposed Ryan Fitzpatrick remains to be seen, but as I said in the Hopkins writeup, I expect Joe Haden to be on him at least some of the time, and who knows what we will get out of Mallett? They'll probably run more and be conservative in his first start, and you don't love his chances at scoring with just one touchdown on the year and just five red zone receptions all season. Outside my top 20 in standard scoring.
Marques Colston, New Orleans: Three straight games without reaching 50 yards, targets are going to Jimmy Graham and Cooks and giving some love to the run game with Ingram going so well. No confidence in him whatsoever. The Bengals have allowed the fewest receiving yards to opposing wideouts this season.
Michael Floyd, Arizona: Welcome to Dumpsville. Seriously, he has the skill set and offense to have a big game at any point, but what could possibly make you feel good about starting him against Detroit with Drew Stanton throwing him the ball?
Tight Ends I love in Week 11
Greg Olsen, Panthers: Even with Cam struggling, he still finds a way to get the ball. An elite fantasy tight end that is worth the price in daily leagues, he should find the end zone against a Falcons team that has allowed tight end touchdowns in two of the last three weeks. (The one game they didn't was the Detroit game where the Lions didn't have any healthy tight ends).
Dwayne Allen, Indianapolis: Two first names, always a crowd-pleaser. Especially when a guy averages 14.4 yards per reception, second-highest rate among qualified tight ends. That tends to also please crowds. He's scored in seven of nine games this year, and I don't see this being a low-scoring clock-control slugfest, you know? The Patriots have allowed the most yards after the catch to opposing tight ends.
Mychal Rivera, Oakland: Depends which side you fall on, but I'm falling on the side of "tons of targets from a QB that's throwing the ball almost 40 times a game" versus the fact that the Chargers defense have played the tight end position well this year. Some of it is junk time, to be sure, but it still counts. To give you an idea of what Rivera is doing (still available in almost 60 percent of leagues), over the last three weeks, the only tight ends with more fantasy points than Rivera are Jimmy Graham and Rob Gronkowski. And for what it's worth, in their last game, the Chargers did allow 79 yards and a touchdown to opposing tight ends. Very solid No. 2 tight end.
If you're desperate: Only three teams give up more receptions to opposing tight ends than Tampa Bay, so Jordan Reed (despite Week 9's debacle) should be a very strong PPR start and a decent standard league option.... It appears Kyle Rudolph is back and if Chase Ford can have success in this offense, I like my chances with Rudolph.... Austin-Seferian Jenkins has scored in two of the past three and got eight targets from Josh McCown in his first start back.... Jared Cook could easily see some junk time against a Broncos team that has permitted the second-most receptions to opposing tight ends this season.
Tight Ends I Hate in Week 11H.R. McMaster speaks to reporters in the White House briefing room in Washington. Thomson Reuters
The memo at the heart of the latest blowup at the National Security Council paints a dark picture of media, academics, the "deep state," and other enemies allegedly working to subvert U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a copy of the document obtained by Foreign Policy.
The seven-page document, which eventually landed on the president's desk, precipitated a crisis that led to the departure of several high-level NSC officials tied to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. The author of the memo, Rich Higgins, who was in the strategic planning office at the NSC, was among those recently pushed out.
The full memo, dated May 2017, is titled "POTUS & Political Warfare." It provides a sweeping, if at times conspiratorial, view of what it describes as a multi-pronged attack on the Trump White House.
Trump is being attacked, the memo says, because he represents "an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative." Those threatened by Trump include "'deep state' actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans."
The memo is part of a broader political struggle inside the White House between current National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and alt-right operatives with a nationalist worldview who believe the Army general and his crew are subverting the president's agenda.
Though not called out by name, McMaster was among those described in the document as working against Trump, according to a source with firsthand knowledge of the memo and the events. Higgins, the author, is widely regarded as a Flynn loyalist who dislikes McMaster and his team.
"It was about H.R. McMaster," the source said. "So, when he starts reading it, he knows it's him and he fires [Higgins]."
The story of the memo's strange journey to the Oval Office captures the zeitgeist of what has become the tragicomedy of the current White House: a son trying to please his father, an isolated general on a mission to find a leaker, a right-wing blogger with a window into the nation's security apparatus, and a president whose closest confidante is a TV personality.
The result is an even wider rift between the president and his national security advisor, marking what may be the beginning of the end of the general's tenure, and a radical shift of power on the NSC.
The controversy over the memo has its origins in a hunt for staffers believed to be providing information to right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich, who seemed to have uncanny insight into the inner workings of the NSC. Cernovich in the past few months has been conducting a wide-ranging campaign against the national security advisor.
"McMaster was just very, very obsessed with this, with Cernovich," a senior administration official told FP. "He had become this incredible specter."
In July, the memo was discovered in Higgins's email during what two sources described to Foreign Policy as a "routine security" audit of NSC staffers' communications. Another source, however, characterized it as a McCarthy-type leak investigation targeting staffers suspected of communicating with Cernovich.
Higgins, who had worked on the Trump campaign and transition before coming to the NSC, drafted the memo in late May and then circulated the memo to friends from the transition, a number of whom are now in the White House.
After the memo was discovered, McMaster's deputy, Ricky Waddell, summoned Higgins, who was told he could resign — or be fired, and risk losing his security clearance, according to two sources.
Higgins, who agreed to resign, was escorted out of the building. He later learned from his colleagues still at the NSC that his association to this now-infamous memo was the reason he was removed.
Then White House National Security Advisor Flynn walks down the White House colonnade at the White House in Washington Thomson Reuters
Following Higgins's departure, McMaster set out to clean house, a source close the White House said — getting rid of NSC staffers linked to the memo, perceived as loyal to his predecessor, Michael Flynn, or simply those with whom he'd butted heads over foreign policy. Among those fired was Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the NSC's top intelligence official, and Derek Harvey, who handled the NSC's Middle East portfolio.
In the meantime, however, the memo had been working its way through the Trump White House. Among those who received the memo, according to two sources, was Donald Trump Jr.
Trump Jr., at that time in the glare of media scrutiny around his meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower during the presidential campaign, gave the memo to his father, who gushed over it, according to sources.
In a comedy of errors, Trump later learned from Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and close friend of the president, that the memo's author had been fired. Trump was "furious," the senior administration official said. "He is still furious."
The memo lays out what it described as a concerted campaign to undermine the president.
"The administration has been maneuvered into a constant back-pedal by relentless political warfare attacks structured to force him to assume a reactive posture that assures inadequate responses," it reads. "The president can either drive or be driven by events; it's time for him to drive them."
The purpose of the memo, said a source familiar with the document, was to educate others in the White House about just what the president is allegedly up against.
"The memo maybe reads a little crazy, sure, but it's not wrong and Rich isn't crazy," an administration official said.
Many inside the White House had only seen the first page or two of the memo — or had only read the excerpts published in the Atlantic, which first reported the existence of the memo, several sources said.
The memo's repeated references to the Muslim Brotherhood — which is grouped among "key international players that includes the European Union and the United Nations — surprised few inside the NSC familiar with what had been a Flynn obsession. "Oh look, it's the newest member of the Muslim Brotherhood," was a common joke among those critical of Flynn loyalists, and what they regarded as a conspiracy theory, a source close to the NSC said.
This 3,500-word memo was written in a personal capacity, according to a source familiar with its drafting. The source described it as a "technical assessment" of the current political situation, and said it was never disseminated from the NSC in any official manner, but shared with personal contacts from the Trump campaign.
"While opposition to President Trump manifests itself through political warfare memes centered on cultural Marxist narratives, this hardly means that opposition is limited to Marxists as conventionally understood," the memo reads. "Having become the dominant cultural meme, some benefit from it while others are captured by it; including 'deep state' actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans."
"It's not wrong per se," said another official. "Actually, it's not wrong at all. The not-wrong part is just, well, buried a bit I guess by some of the wackier parts."
The memo calls out those pushing for rights "based on sex or ethnicity," which is a "direct assault on the very idea of individual human rights and natural law around which the Constitution was framed." It also says that "transgender acceptance" is "denying a person the right to declare the biological fact of one's sex."
Contacted by FP, Higgins declined to comment on the memo or his departure from the NSC.
The recent NSC shake-up appears to go beyond concerns about the memo. The recently ousted NSC staffers had been brought in by Flynn, who resigned for allegedly lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the substance of a December phone call he had with a Russian official.
Flynn is now under investigation for, among other things, failing to report income for lobbying on behalf of Turkey shortly before he became involved in the campaign.
The elimination of Higgins, Cohen-Watnick, and Harvey has helped McMaster assert control of the NSC, which was staffed during the early days of the administration by those loyal to Flynn and Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist.
Late last week, McMaster also planned to put at least four other NSC staffers on the chopping block, but was prevented from doing so by newly installed Chief of Staff John Kelly, according to two sources. All but one of those staffers had ties dating back to the campaign or transition.
A source close to McMaster denied those planned firings.
The White House press office did not respond to FP's request for comment. A NSC spokesman declined to comment, citing a policy against speaking about internal personnel issues.
Despite Higgins's firing, McMaster's difficulties inside the White House aren't going away anytime soon — though he might.
McMaster "doesn't really have any allies," said a source familiar with the NSC staff. "It doesn't seem as though he has the ear of the president, which is obviously essential to his survival."
Kate Brannen and Jenna McLaughlin contributed reporting to this article.David Magnum, 37, of Dexter, Missouri, is shown in this undated police booking photo provided by the Stoddard County Prosecutor's Office in Bloomfield, Missouri on September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Stoddard County Prosecutor's Office/Handout via Reuters
By Carey Gillam
(Reuters) - A Missouri man was arraigned Thursday on charges that he recklessly infected a sexual partner with the virus that causes AIDS, and a prosecutor said he potentially could have infected 300 more people in two states.
David Mangum, 37, faces a felony charge in Stoddard County Circuit Court in southeastern Missouri accusing him of exposing a 29-year-old man to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes a life-threatening failure of the immune system commonly known as AIDS, according to court documents.
As well, Mangum admitted to having unprotected sex with more than 300 partners in Missouri and Texas since learning he was HIV positive in 2003, some of whom he had met through ads on the Craigslist Internet site, the court documents said.
"This situation is a serious public health concern, Russell Oliver, Stoddard County Prosecuting Attorney, said in a statement. "There are potentially 300 or more unknown victims that have been unknowingly exposed to HIV in this region. If any of those 300 individuals contracted the virus, all sexual partners of those victims have potentially been exposed."
Mangum, who worked in a grocery store in Dexter, Missouri, was arrested after his former partner learned in July that he was HIV positive. The man told police that Mangum had lied about having the virus.
Dexter Police Detective Cory Mills said Mangum told him he hid his HIV status from sexual partners because he feared they would reject him.
Mangum was assigned a public defender and his bail was set $250,000.
(Reporting By Carey Gillam in Kansas City; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)Minister Chovanec has not been sparing in his criticism of a proposed amendment to the EU firearms directive which aims to tighten controls on the legal acquisition and possession of firearms as one means of fighting against the threat of terrorism. He claims the idea is totally misguided since no terrorist act committed in Europe was committed using a legally-held weapon and compares it to banning water in the event of a fire.
“As proposed, the tightened EU firearms directive would hurt Czech firearms holders, according to our calculations it would affect some 1,000 thousand legally held weapons. We are prepared to fight this and we would file a lawsuit against such as directive as soon as it was approved.”
The interior minister is pushing a different approach in the Czech Republic– one that would enable Czechs with a firearms license to use their weapon against perpetrators of terrorist attacks and thus assume greater responsibility for national security in the event of a crisis. His proposal has evoked a mixed response with the government divided on the issue. In cases where the government neither supports nor rejects a proposal the battle shifts to Parliament ground. Minister Chovanec says he has tested the waters and believes that there is a good chance of securing the 120 votes that a constitutional amendment requires in the lower house. He says criticism of the idea has been hugely exaggerated both at home and abroad.
“This will be no Wild West, no “weapon in every family” policy as it has been described, merely a standard approach to firearms possession; a clause in the Constitution of the Czech Republic saying that possession of firearms is part of this country’s culture and is the right of every Czech citizen.”
According to the present draft amendment the right to use legally-held weapons against terrorists would only apply to Czech nationals and firearms holders would have to undergo stricter periodic tests. Opponents have criticized it as incredibly risky and unnecessary since the country’s constitution already enables people to use a legally held weapon in defence of their life and property, be it in adequate measure to the risk posed.
Meanwhile, the government on Monday received a petition signed by 50 thousand firearms holders and hunters unions who fear the EU firearms directive will severely restrict their rights. A number of Czech MEPs, among them Jiří Pospíšil and Stanislav Polčák say that while they do not approve of Minister Chovanec’s strategy they will do their utmost to soften the proposed amendment to the EU firearms directive which is due to be debated in the European Parliament in March.Rex Features
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“PLEASE don't take your organs to heaven,” reads the American bumper sticker. “Heaven knows that we need them here on earth.” Last year more than 7,000 Americans died while awaiting an organ transplant—almost double the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since 2003. In Europe, too, thousands of people whose lives could be extended or transformed (by having sight restored, for example) through transplants forfeit the opportunity for want of available organs.
Research by the World Health Organisation (WHO) has found that only one in ten people in need of a new kidney, the body part most in demand, manages to get one. In the poorest places, of course, a complex transplant—which in the American health system costs $500,000—is unthinkable for most people anyway. But the gap between supply and demand for organs affects the poor too, by creating a market in body parts where abuses are rife.
In prosperous and middle-income countries, the waiting lists for organ transplants grow ever longer as ageing populations, hypertension and obesity (a big cause of diabetes-driven kidney failure) take their toll. The problem has been exacerbated by a fall in road deaths in rich countries, which—along with strokes and heart attacks—are the main source of organs for transplant. Small wonder that people scour the globe to procure the organs they or their loved ones need; or that unscrupulous intermediaries offer help.
The latest of many organ-harvesting scandals is now raging in India, one of several poor countries where the sale of organs used to be legal but has now been banned, with the apparent effect of driving the trade underground. A doctor, Amit Kumar, is awaiting trial after reportedly confessing to having performed hundreds of illegal transplants for rich clients from America, Britain, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Greece. He has been accused of luring labourers into his clinics with job offers; victims were then offered up to $2,000, a princely sum, to part with a kidney. Some who refused are said to have had kidneys removed anyway after being drugged.
Another kidney racket flourished in South Africa between 2001 and 2003. Donors were recruited in Brazil, Israel and Romania with offers of $5,000-20,000 to visit Durban and forfeit a kidney. The 109 recipients, mainly Israelis, each paid up to $120,000 for a “transplant holiday”; they pretended they were relatives of the donors and that no cash changed hands.
At least until very recently, a key destination for such “transplant tourists” was China, where—according to human-rights groups—there used to be a ready supply of organs plucked from the bodies of the thousands of people who are executed every year. China insisted that the prisoners' organs were only used with their “consent”. But under global pressure, it agreed a year ago to stop the practice; in theory, only blood relatives of the executed can now get their organs. The sale of any human body part was banned in 2006. Before the change, about five Australians a year bought organs from the bodies of Chinese who had been executed, according to Jeremy Chapman, the Australian head of the International Transplantation Society.
Knowingly or unknowingly, Europeans may have benefited from another racket, operating on their doorstep, in a region where the West claims to be upholding human rights. Carla del Ponte, until recently the chief prosecutor at the war-crimes court for ex-Yugoslavia, claims in a new book* that in 1999, guerrillas from Kosovo harvested the organs of 300 captive Serbs at a secret site in Albania. The authorities in Kosovo and Albania have hotly denied the story.
Just why is there such a lack of donors in rich countries, given that, according to opinion polls, most people like the idea of donation and are ready in principle to participate? One big factor has been a stream of media reports that give people the impression of widespread malpractice by the medical profession and the funeral and biomedical industries.
These reports of shady activities do not always involve life-saving organs such as kidneys, hearts and livers. Michael Mastromarino, the leader of a New York body-snatching ring, was recently jailed for at least 18 years after stealing bones, skin, arterial valves, ligaments and other tissues from corpses nabbed from funeral homes. Most of these parts were used for dental implants, or hip or knee replacements. To avoid detection, the bodies would be “boned” below the waist; PVC piping was then sewed back on in time for open-casket wakes. The parts were afterwards sold on, without proper screening for disease, and used in more than 20,000 transplants. Mr Mastromarino, an ex-dental surgeon, made millions of dollars from the scam. Among his victims was Alistair Cooke, a British broadcaster who died in New York in 2004 at the age of 95.
Court hearings arising from the Mastromarino case, replete with gore, will run and run. Next month four employees of his biomedical firm, and the directors of three funeral homes that colluded with him, go on trial. In September a Philadelphia court was packed with relatives who were aghast as two brothers who ran funeral homes admitted selling their loved ones' parts to the Mastromarino ring. Separately, recipients of body parts from the racket have begun lawsuits on grounds that their lives have been endangered by “diseased” organs.
The risk of decrepit or diseased body parts being given to unsuspecting patients was highlighted by the revelation earlier this year that two American patients had died, and another two were undergoing chemotherapy, after getting organs in 2007 from a teenager who was thought to have died from meningitis but was later found to have had a rare form of cancer. The two recipients of his pancreas and his liver died from the same cancer. The publicity such cases attract—rare as they may be—risks discrediting the very idea of transplants.
And yet transplants were long viewed as one of the most glamorous and obviously benign areas of medical science. The first successful transplant of a body part—a cornea—was done in Austria just over 100 years ago. It took another half-century before the first live kidney transplant, between identical twins in America. More “firsts” followed: the pancreas (in America, 1966), liver (in America, 1967), heart (South Africa, 1967), lung (Canada, 1983), hand (France, 1998), face (France, 2005) and penis (China, 2006). The range of organs and tissues that can be transferred (there are now 37 possibilities), plus the emergence of better anti-rejection drugs, has led to a surge in demand.
In America, nearly 30,000 organ transplants are now carried out per year: an average of 82 a day. The number of available organs is not keeping up. A record 100,000 Americans are on waiting lists, with 4,400 names being added each month. True, some sign up with two or more transplant units. But more than a quarter have been on waiting lists for at least three years; one in seven for five years or more. And the toll of avoidable deaths goes up and up.
Among American campaigners for organ donation, there were groans of dismay after an investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that four notorious Japanese criminals got transplants at the Medical Centre of the University of California Los Angeles, apparently jumping a queue of needy Americans. Without commenting on the report's details, the centre defended itself, saying it abided by the rules of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a federally-mandated arrangement. This allows for some non-American recipients (up to 5%), since there are some non-American donors. The centre also pointed out that it has no mandate to make moral judgments about the people who get organs. But for Americans who might hope to bequeath their parts to a deserving compatriot, it is horrible to imagine a foreign gangster benefiting.
Most of the time, at least, America's 254 transplant centres stick to UNOS's strict rules on the use of organs. As in most countries, priority generally goes to children. Then several other factors come into play: compatibility between donor and recipient; geography (some organs last only a few hours after extraction); the urgency of need; the likely improvement in quality and length of a recipient's life. (A new kidney can extend the life of a robust patient by as much as 20 years.)
On this set of criteria, the over-70s are relegated to the back of the queue. But they are now the fastest-growing group on American waiting lists. In desperation, some turn to children or grandchildren for the kidney or liver part they need, according to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an American medical anthropologist and campaigner against abuses in the organ trade. Normal selection criteria do not apply to voluntary donations between relatives. For sufferers from kidney failure, dialysis is possible—but at a cost of huge personal disruption and a gigantic bill.
In Britain more than 7,600 people are now waiting for various organs—nearly 50% up on just a decade ago. Despite a record 3,235 transplants in the 12 months up to March, nearly 500 patients died before a suitable donor was found. Three in four Britons tell pollsters they are ready to donate their organs when they die, yet only around a quarter are registered donors—and far fewer end up actually donating their parts. With barely 13 deceased donors per 1m, Britain's rate of “cadaveric” donation (ie, after death) is less than half Spain's or America's, and well below that of many other rich countries.
This partly reflects the high objection rate among British donors' relatives. When their loved ones die, 40% of Britons refuse to let their organs be removed, even if that is the express wish of the deceased. In Portugal, the refusal rate is only 6%.
In Britain, just as in America, news reports have sapped confidence in the transplant business. In recent weeks, eyebrows were raised after it emerged that part of a liver obtained through the National Health Service was used for a private patient, a Kuwaiti boy, at King's College Hospital in London. The surgeon involved was cleared of any wrongdoing after explaining that he had given most of the liver to an NHS patient, while reserving the left lobe for the boy, who was critically ill.
A general British wariness about the abuse of body parts dates from a scandal at the Alder Hey children's hospital in Liverpool where Dick van Velzen, a Dutch pathologist, cut thousands of parts from children who died between 1988 and 1994, without their parents' knowledge. Although the parts were taken for research, not transplants, the outrage was huge.
A government-mandated inquiry into British transplants noted that despite a rise in living donors (mainly of kidneys) there has been a fall since 2002 in one critical indicator: the number of donations from bodies that are |
’s partially because you’re so used to sitting that standing is physically exhausting. When you start incorporating more standing in your life, you’ll probably feel quite tired at first. But keep at it! You’ll become accustomed to your new lifestyle soon enough, and will reap the benefits of standing up more.
How do you force yourself to stand up? Did we miss your favorite tips? Let us know in the comments, on Facebook, or Tweet us @SuperheroYou!
Photo Credit: kelly cree via Compfight cc
Written by Sasha GraffagnaWith the advent of 16-bit consoles, RPGs really began to take off in Japan and began to garner cult support in the western world. Sadly, this cult status meant that Western fans wouldn't get most of the RPGs that came out on those systems. One of the few that came through the rift of translation was Breath of Fire. The first Breath of Fire game wasn't a vast improvement over the already established RPG formula, and its story was nowhere near as developed as that of Final Fantasy IV, which had already aged considerably by then. It did, however, establish a flavor all of its own that would be carried over for the entire series to some extent, and some very enjoyable gameplay elements.
Breath of Fire takes place during the waning years of a great civil war between the White Dragons and the Black Dragons. The White Dragons are dwindling, and their last hope rests in a young boy named Ryu, who sets out on an adventure to save his people. Along the way, he meets many colorful companions, who have undergone some drastic name changes due to the 4-character text limitation for menu entries, but some of it is just plain bad translation. Indeed, Breath of Fire's strongest point is its characters. They are far more interesting than their counterparts in more typical Final Fantasy-style RPGs, and each has their own unique skill they can use either on the world map or in battle.
Characters
Ryu The main hero of the game. He's mute, spunky, a bit rugged, and has all the qualities of your average RPG hero, aside from the not so common ability to morph into a dragon. He can also fish. Fishing for actual fish isn't rewarding at all, but when used in certain secret spots, his ability nabs him some of the best items in the game. Nina The first companion Ryu meets. A young, winged princess who's introduced in quite an original fashion. Instead of simply joining the party, the story actually diverts from the hero's quest for quite a while and centers on Nina's mission to save her father from illness. The player follows her without really knowing who she is, and when she runs into trouble, the player must retrace her steps as Ryu and rescue her. Later on, she becomes a crucial element to the story and gains the ability to turn into a giant bird. Bo / Gilliam Bo (Gilliam in Japan) is a wolf person from a small village in the west. After Ryu helps him save his village, he joins the party. Other than that, he remains rather quiet. His initial bit of backstory is all the backstory you'll ever get for him. While on the overworld map, Bo can "hunt" by firing arrows at wild animals. He's not very good at this and frankly, it's quite useless even if you get the hang of it. In battle, however, he's one of the better characters throughout the game, learning a host of useful magic and boasting the highest amount of HP until Ox comes along. Karn / Danc Karn is a thief the party meets while heading through some less-than-savory criminal territory. You need his lockpicking skills to get through certain areas in the game, meaning he's going to be in the party quite a bit. Aside from being pretty fast, he later on gains the ability to fuse himself to Bo, Ox, and Gobi, transforming into various hideous, but extremely powerful mutant creatures, making him one of the best characters in the game. Gobi / Manillo Gobi is a fish man, identical to all those merchants met along the quest. He allows the party to travel underwater to the city where all of the fish merchants originate. This is one of the cooler and more original parts of the game. Gobi is pretty useless in battle, but thanks to his money-grubbing, fast-talking demeanor, he's a really likable character. A bit later he can transform into a giant fish, enabling him to reach all sorts of new areas. Ox / Builder Ox is the big, tough, muscle-bound guy that every RPG seems to have, and as his name implies, he looks like a cross between a man and an ox. Like almost every character in the game, he has an issue, and when Ryu helps him resolve it, he joins the party. Ox's crucial skill is his ability to smash through cracked walls by punching them. It can also be used to knock fruit out of trees, something that's required to trigger a certain story event much later on in the game. In battle, he's got tons of HP and does heavy damage, but he's rather slow. Bleu / Deis Bleu is an amusing character. Aside from having the upper torso of a busty woman and the lower torso of a snake, she's some sort of all-powerful deity (later on revealed to be a Goddess in Breath of Fire III). However, she's also complete slacker and a pervert. Her status as Goddess is implied with her magic selection, consisting of the most powerful magic in the game. Unlike all the other characters, she has no unique skill. Mogu Like Nina, the final member of the party is introduced in a very original way. Before you even know who this mole-man is, you must travel inside of his mind and rid his subconcious of his own fears and demons by litterally killing them. Afterwards, he joins your party, and then all kinds of neat stuff happens. Mogu's ability to burrow into certain patches of dirt is one of the most rewarding abilities in the game. If you have a good enough memory to recall where you've encountered strange symbols on the ground throughout the world map, you can find some of the most powerful weapons and spells in the entire game underneath.
Despite this incredible cast of characters, playing Breath of Fire isn't always fun. What really drags the game down is the battle system. There's no variety at all, and it's very traditional. The odds are always stacked against you as well. It seems every little minor battle in a new area or dungeon requires massive amounts of recovery spells and items afterwards. Since you have a limited number of spaces in your inventory, it's not uncommon to have your supplies nearly exhausted by the time you reach the boss of a long dungeon. And the dungeons in Breath of Fire are LONG. The boss battles in the game can also be a bit frustrating. They're not so much hard (many bosses are less dangerous than the lackeys who inhabit their lairs) as they are extremely well protected. They seem to live forever. It's almost depressing to watch their health meter deplete at barely noticable rates. Even when they die, they're not dead. They inexplicably regain their composure after they lose all their HP and stick around for a few more rounds before they finally depart from this world. In addition, many bosses have the ability to heal themselves.
The true fun of Breath of Fire lies outside of the battles. The dungeons in this game are huge. Not content to merely be places where enemy encounters occur as Final Fantasy's are, the dungeons in Breath of Fire are complex labyrinths full of traps, puzzles, and all sorts of treasures. Some of the puzzles in this game will inspire nostalgic feelings of playing Zelda. Also, as you venture through the dungeons of Breath of Fire, you may notice areas that can't be reached. You may see an unattainable treasure chest behind a cracked wall or a locked door. If you remember these locations later on when you meet new characters with abilities that can overcome those obstacles, you can backtrack and get yourself some amazing items. This adds a whole new level of depth to RPG dungeon crawling previously unseen. If it weren't for all the random encounters, dungeon crawling in this game would be an adventure all on its own.
Outside of the huge dungeons is an even larger world map, one of the largest for that era. Once again, Breath of Fire goes beyond the simple Final Fantasy aproach and adds a level of interactivity with the world map that hadn't really been seen in those days. The world map in Breath of Fire isn't just a flat, scrolling surface where your gargantuan character stomps around and enters towns merely the size of his face. It has wildlife, varied terrain, dozens of secrets, and even a night and day engine that has a real-time effect on the activity of monsters and NPCs in towns.
In the visual and audio departments, Breath of Fire stands up fairly well. The graphics are decent. At their worst, they're a bit too colorful. It is, however, one of the earlier SNES RPGs that had fully animated enemies, and the characters in battle were proportionate in comparison to most RPGs where they remain super deformed in almost every instance. Breath of Fire sports a pretty catchy soundtrack of synthesized orchestral tunes with a heavy emphasis on flute, a bit reminiscent of the Ghosts 'n Goblin games (also developed by Capcom). The best of these is a particularly haunting piece that usually plays in forests. The two later world map themes are also very nice.
Capcom, who developed the first Breath of Fire for Super Famicom in 1993, had never attempted to translate a game with dialogue of this density before, and even their attempts at translating games with very little dialogue had infamously poor results. Not only this, but Capcom had already begun work on Breath of Fire II. So, they decided to have Square, already known for the most massive dialogue translation at that time, bring the game over to US audiences. Despite Square working on the title, Breath of Fire still wasn't translated very well. Square obviously didn't put much effort into it, and understandably so, as development of their next big Final Fantasy title was already well under way. Breath of Fire didn't make it to US store shelves until 1994, making it even less impressive now that huge games like Secret of Mana and Final Fantasy III (AKA VI) were making a name for themselves. However, RPGs were still few and far between in America, so gamers jumped at every opportunity to experience them. This made Breath of Fire a cult hit in America, ensuring that it would not be a one-trick pony.
Overall, Breath of Fire is a pretty good RPG, but I'd recommend it more to a fan of Zelda than a fan of Final Fantasy, because the emphasis clearly isn't on story. It is, however, just the beginning of a great series of RPGs. It's there to set the groundwork and for the most part, nothing more.
In 2001, Capcom decided to port their cult RPG hit to Nintendo's powerful little handheld shortly after it was released. Sadly, it doesn't seem that Capcom utilized that power too well. It's very much the same game, with the only visual improvement being some spiffy new artwork and character portraits displayed during dialogue. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to retranslate any of the text, so the writing is still pretty lame. However, the gold and experience gained after battle has been increased, so the game's a bit less difficult. As with most SNES-to-GBA ports, the soundtrack in Breath of Fire suffers dramatically, as it now sounds scratchy and muffled.
Cameos, References, Easter Eggs and other Nonsense
Street Fighter II - Yes, the kenpo-using, street-fighting babe Chun Li makes an infamous cameo appearance in Breath of Fire. This takes place in the Town of Thieves. There's a small house in the corner of the town where a man will ask you if you want to see something cool. If you say yes, you'll peep through and see Chun Li practicing her Hanretsu Kyaku.
Ghosts 'n Goblins - If you look closely at all the portraits hanging on the walls of houses in this game, you'll see that they are in fact of Arthur, the heart-patterned boxer shorts-wearing hero of the Makai Mura games. It actually seems to be the face of his sprite from Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts.
Mega Man V - One of the bosses, Goda, has an uncanny resemblance to Stone Man from Mega Man V. It's not simply that they're both made of similar brick-pattern stone, but he even has the very distinct Wilybot style eyes that all Wilybots have.
George Romero - Earlier in the game, there is a town called Romero. Considering that if you go to the town during the evening, there are zombies all over the place, it's quite obvious that this is a reference to George Romero, director of legendary zombie thrillers such as Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and many others. This is the same in both the English and Japanese versions - apparently, one of the staff members was a fan.【ケントギルバート】
漢字を廃止して
表音文字だけにした韓国
70年前の書籍や新聞を読めず
真実歴史に向き合えない。悲劇か喜劇か
【ケントギルバート】
私はブログとフェイスブックに載せる記事を、原則として日本語と英語の２カ国語で書いている。
記事の題材や資料が英語の場合、先に英語で書いてから日本語に翻訳する。
この場合はあまり苦労を感じない。
しかし、参照する資料などが日本語だった場合、
先に日本語で記事を書いてから英語に翻訳する場合が多い。
このパターンは少々やっかいだ。
日本語は漢字という１種類の 表意文字と、ひらがなとカタカナという２種類の表音文字 を組み合わせて表記できる。
しかも、「助詞」をうまく使えば、日本語は文の中で語順を入れ替えることすら自由自在だ。
他方、英語はアルファベットという２６文字だけで全てを表現しなければならない。
便利な「助詞」は存在せず、倒置法などは限られる。
ちなみに、日本語の仮名は「五十音」と言われるが、「がざだば」行の濁音、「ぱ」行の半濁音、「ぁ」行と「っゃゅょゎ」 という捨て仮名を入れると、ひらがなは７６文字。カタカナは「ヴ」も使うから７７文字ある。
加えて、常用漢字は２１３６字／４３８８音訓もあり、同じ言葉でも、どの文字種を使うかで微妙に意味を変えられる。
従って、日本語で文章を書くときの自由度の高さは、英語とは比較にならない。
うまい皮肉を日本語で思い付いても、英語で表現しようとすると本当に大変なのだ。
世界に誇るべき日本語の表現力だが、
前回の連載で、君が代の変遷について書く際に、
日本の初代文部大臣の森有礼（ありのり） について調べていたら、驚くべき事実を知ってしまった。
森は１０代で英国に留学しており、英語が非常に堪能だった。
この日英バイリンガルの大先輩は
「日本語を廃止して、英語を日本の国語にすべきだ」と考えていた。漢字の複雑さを特に問題視していたようだ。
確かに、明治初期の漢字は今よりも複雑で数も多かった。話し言葉は口語、書き言葉は漢文という不自由な習慣もあった。
西洋に後れた政治や経済、科学などの学習に必要不可欠な英単語は、日本では概念すら存在しないものが多かった。
例えば、「社会」「存在」「自然」「権利」「自由」「個人」「品性」「人格」「情報」「近代」「美」「恋愛」「芸術」
「彼・彼女」などの言葉は、江戸時代の日本にはなかった。明治期の先人が苦労を重ねて生み出したのだ。
もし、これらの言葉が使えなかったら、日本語の文筆作業は相当もどかしい。
だから、当時の森の気持ちも理解できるが、 現代から見れば、満４１歳で暗殺された森の考えは若気の至りだった。
ところが、本当に漢字を廃止して、独自の表音文字だけにした国が、日本の近くに存在する。
結果、国民の大多数が、
わずか７０年前の書籍や新聞を全く読めず、
真実の歴史に向き合えない。
悲劇と呼ぶべきか、喜劇なのか。それが問題だ。
■ケント・ギルバート 米カリフォルニア州弁護士、タレント。１９５２年、米アイダホ州生まれ。７１年に初来日。
８０年、法学博士号・経営学修士号を取得し、国際法律事務所に就職。８３年、テレビ番組「世界まるごとＨＯＷマッチ」にレギュラー出演し、
一躍人気タレントとなる。現在は講演活動や企業経営を行っている。最新刊は『不死鳥の国・ニッポン』（日新報道）。
http://www.zakzak.co.jp/society/domestic/news/20150325/dms1503251140002-n1.htm
http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/abechan_matome/imgs/5/d/5db02221.gif
日本が世界でも一・ニを争う技術大国になれたのは、
表意文字と表音文字を併用した日本語に寄るトコロが大きいだろう。
外来語を素早く表音文字のカタカナで取り込み、
意味を把握したら表意文字の漢字で造語を創る。
初めて見るような単語でも漢字であれば、
単語の意味をイメージし易い。
技術書はちょっとハードルが高いが
http://www.nedo.go.jp/hyoukabu/articles/201312kogakugiken/index.html
↑このくらいの技術系ニュースは誰でも簡単に読み理解する事が出来る。
また、漢字の特徴の一つとして高い造語能力がある。
表意文字の漢字同士を組み合わせる事によって
未知の知識、西洋からの概念群(科学・哲学・技術・思想・社会・軍事・経済等すべての分野)
に対応する造語を造り出す事ができた。
もし、これらの造語創出が無かったら、
世界の多くの国が抱えている問題に日本も直面したことだろう。
それは、世界の多くの国では母国語で大学以上の高等教育を行っていない。
なぜなら、母国語では、高等教育における科学技術や
専門学等で使われる多量な学術用語が不足している為、
大学レベル以上の科学や技術、専門学等に使われる教科書は
英語やフランス語、ドイツ語等の外国の教科書に頼らざるを得ない。
(韓国の理系教科の高等教育は英語です)
海外から入ってくる言葉を片っ端から母国語にして、
そして、全て母国語で思考する。
コレは、新概念を理解し、創造性の拡張にとって有利です。
【日本語の優位性】その１日本が世界でも一・ニを争う技術大国になれたのは、表意文字と表音文字を併用した日本語に寄るトコロが大きいだろう。外来語を素早く表音文字のカタカナで取り込み、意味を把握したら表意文字の漢字で造語を創る。初めて見るような単語でも漢字であれば、単語の意味をイメージし易い。技術書はちょっとハードルが高いが↑このくらいの技術系ニュースは誰でも簡単に読み理解する事が出来る。また、漢字の特徴の一つとして高い造語能力がある。表意文字の漢字同士を組み合わせる事によって未知の知識、西洋からの概念群(科学・哲学・技術・思想・社会・軍事・経済等すべての分野)に対応する造語を造り出す事ができた。もし、これらの造語創出が無かったら、世界の多くの国が抱えている問題に日本も直面したことだろう。それは、世界の多くの国では母国語で大学以上の高等教育を行っていない。なぜなら、母国語では、高等教育における科学技術や専門学等で使われる多量な学術用語が不足している為、大学レベル以上の科学や技術、専門学等に使われる教科書は英語やフランス語、ドイツ語等の外国の教科書に頼らざるを得ない。(韓国の理系教科の高等教育は英語です)海外から入ってくる言葉を片っ端から母国語にして、そして、全て母国語で思考する。コレは、新概念を理解し、創造性の拡張にとって有利です。
【日本語の優位性】その２
日本語による全脳活動
「右脳の優れている点」
図形などを読み取る能力。
音楽などを聞き取る能力。
全体を見る力。直観力。
「左脳の優れている点」
言語の読み取り能力。
言語の聞き取り能力。
分析力。思考力。
世界中の人々は、表音文字の読み取りの時、左脳の方がよく働きます。
日本人も表音文字の平仮名＆片仮名の読み取りの時は、左脳の方がよく働きます。
しかし、表意文字の漢字の読み取りについては、
一字一字の漢字を読み取る時、右脳の方がよく働いているのです。
漢字は意味を持った図形だからでしょう。
そして、表音文字の平仮名＆片仮名と表意文字の漢字の混ざった文章の読み取りになると
左脳と右脳が共に働く状態になります。
漢字＆片仮名＆平仮名の文章を読む行為は、
右脳と左脳を共働させるという効果があるのです。
右脳と左脳を共働状態に置く事によって、
脳の持つ能力が最大限に発揮出来るのです。
この全脳活動は、文章を読む時、
新概念のより早い理解や創造性の拡張に役立っているのです。
1982年5月、イギリスの科学専門誌「ネイチャー」に
心理学者リチャード・リン博士の論文が発表され、
それは世界中に大きなセンセーションを巻き起しました。
その論文とはリン博士を中心とする
世界の先進トップ5ヶ国「日・英・米・仏・西独」の学者達が協力して、
それまでにない大規模な知能テストを行い、
それぞれの国の子供達の知能検査を比較したのですが、その結果は、
「日本を除く欧米4か国の子供達の平均IQが100以下だったのに対し、
日本の子供達の平均IQだけが111もあった」という学者達にとって予想外な結果でした。
平均IQ差に11点以上もの開きがあるというのは大変な事です。
また、リン博士は「知能指数が130を超える人は、
欧米では２％未満なのに対し、日本では10％にも達する。
日本の約8割(77％)の人のIQは、米国人の平均IQより高い」などと指摘しました。
世界中(特に欧米)がこれを問題にしたのは当然でした。
中には「テストの実施に何か手落ちがあった為ではないか」という懐疑的な意見もありましたが、
多くの学者はこの事実を素直に認め、
日本の子供達の知能が何故これ程までに高いのか？
その原因究明に真剣に取組みました。
その結果、欧米の学者達の大方の意見は
「漢字の学習がその原因になっているのではないか」というものでした。
日本人には欧米人には無い
漢字脳という特別な脳領域があるのです。
この漢字脳の有無が
日本人の平均IQと欧米人の平均IQの
歴然とした優劣差になって現れるのです。
(漢字文化圏は平均IQ105以上で世界で最も平均知能指数が高い地帯である)
http://i.imgur.com/fjEP8.jpg
【日本語の優位性】その３1982年5月、イギリスの科学専門誌「ネイチャー」に心理学者リチャード・リン博士の論文が発表され、それは世界中に大きなセンセーションを巻き起しました。その論文とはリン博士を中心とする世界の先進トップ5ヶ国「日・英・米・仏・西独」の学者達が協力して、それまでにない大規模な知能テストを行い、それぞれの国の子供達の知能検査を比較したのですが、その結果は、「日本を除く欧米4か国の子供達の平均IQが100以下だったのに対し、日本の子供達の平均IQだけが111もあった」という学者達にとって予想外な結果でした。平均IQ差に11点以上もの開きがあるというのは大変な事です。また、リン博士は「知能指数が130を超える人は、欧米では２％未満なのに対し、日本では10％にも達する。日本の約8割(77％)の人のIQは、米国人の平均IQより高い」などと指摘しました。世界中(特に欧米)がこれを問題にしたのは当然でした。中には「テストの実施に何か手落ちがあった為ではないか」という懐疑的な意見もありましたが、多くの学者はこの事実を素直に認め、日本の子供達の知能が何故これ程までに高いのか？その原因究明に真剣に取組みました。その結果、欧米の学者達の大方の意見は「漢字の学習がその原因になっているのではないか」というものでした。日本人には欧米人には無い漢字脳という特別な脳領域があるのです。この漢字脳の有無が日本人の平均IQと欧米人の平均IQの歴然とした優劣差になって現れるのです。(漢字文化圏は平均IQ105以上で世界で最も平均知能指数が高い地帯である)
【日本語の優位性】その４
第二次大戦後、GHQの占領政策の一つに、
漢字、平仮名、片仮名を廃止して、
日本語を全てローマ字表記にしようとする政策がありました。
この政策は途中で中止になりましたが、
もし、漢字、平仮名、片仮名を取り上げられていたら
今日の様な世界の先頭を走る高度な技術発展は
まず望め無かったただろうし、
資源の無い日本は世界有数の最貧国になっていたかもしれません。
新概念のより早い理解や創造性の拡張には、
母国語で思考する事が大切です。
もし、日本の大学の物理科学技術等の教科書が
英語や若しくはローマ字表記の日本語で書かれていたら、
この分野で日本からノーベル賞受賞者が出る事は、まず無かっただろう。
見て意味が解る表意文字。
読まないと意味が解らない表音文字。
表意文字は読解力に有利です。
(例えばこのレスが漢字無しの平仮名片仮名だけで書かれていたら十倍以上の読解差が出る事だろう)
外国の科学・工学・技術等の語彙を全て表意文字の漢字に魔変換する事で、
表音文字オンリーの国々に対しアドバンテージを持つ。
日本が世界最先端の技術大国の地位を保つ必要条件だ。
特に、日本が今現在出遅れているIT産業と金融産業。
この分野の表音文字を表意文字に魔変換させる造語創出が待望されます。
【日本語の優位性】その５
グローバル化=英語化≠産業発展？
フィリピンなどは、長年、公用語に英語を使用しているが、
英語が絶滅的な日本と比べるまでもなく、
他の東南アジア諸国と比べても産業が発展してるとは言い難い。
例え日本人が学習によって英語を習得出来たとしても、
代々、歴史、伝統、風土、習俗、文化、宗教、日常的に英語を培って来た本家の英米には、
英語を使っての産業では永遠に適わないだろう。
外国語で思考する事で、
日本の科学技術産業の競争力低下は避けられません。日本のフィリピン化です。
グローバル化=英語化≠産業発展？？？
一石二鳥で、英米にとっては望ましい事だろうけど。
近頃の日本は、外国語を魔変換せず、
そのままのローマ字表記やカタカナ表記で止めてしまう事が多くなって来ています。
日本が外国語を表意文字の漢字に魔変換せず、
カタカナまでで止めてしまうのは、
他の表音文字オンリーの国々と同列となり、
技術立国の日本の弱体化に繋がるのではないかと危惧しています。
少なくとも科学技術産業分野での漢字表記の重要性を顧慮すべきです。
五万語ある漢字による組合せで魔変換出来ない世界の文字言語は無いだろう。
コレにより科学技術伝承の一方通行が出来る可能性があります。
(他国が漢字表記の専門造語を変換出来なくなる可能性)
この文字言語障壁で、日本の科学・技術の世界流出拡散が抑制されます。
【日本語の優位性】その６
日本語は読み手にとって優しい言語である。
同じ内容分量の速読では日本語が圧倒的に勝る。
(文字の瞬間認識において、漢字は世界最高という研究結果も出ている)
しかも外来語はカタカナを使えばそれと直ぐ解る。
非常に優れた文字言語である事を当の日本人が理解していないのは残念。
造語力の高い漢字と外来語を即日本語にしてしまう片仮名。
世界の文学書を読みたければ日本語を覚えろと言われたりします。
なぜなら日本語ほど他国の文学書が翻訳されてる言語はないからです。
日本が技術超大国の地位を維持するには、
小中学校で英語やダンスの授業よりも、
好きな本を読ませる「読書」「速読」の授業や
暗算で3桁までの四則演算が出来るよう「算盤」に力を入れるべきだな。
算盤式暗算は右脳開発にも効果があるからな。
今の日本社会では漢字をドンドン削減し替わりに日本人に英語を与え
欧米にとってフェアな競争環境を作ろうという機運が盛り上がってます。
日本人の英語が幾ら達者になっても仮にフィリピン人よりも英語が達者になったとしても
欧米にとっては脅威に成りません。
それよりも日本人が漢字学習でドンドンiQを高め、
欧米が太刀打ち出来なくなるほど差を付けて来る方が脅威なのです。
GHQの日本統治以降、日本のマスメディアは米国のプロパガンダ機関です。情報は支配されています。
米国にとって脅威に成り得る「漢字学習はiQを高められる」という情報は伏せられ、
替わりに「日本人のiQが高いのは魚をよく食べるから」とか「過酷な受験戦争があるから」などの情報が流されます。
日本人の知能指数をドンドン堕とされ
お馬鹿な家畜にされないよう気を付けて下さい。
(了)
8： オリエンタルな名無しさん＠転載は禁止 :2015/03/25(水) 13:27:13.65 ID: GZ36eybn ケントさん容赦無いな。ジャスティンアメリカ人の皆様ありがとうございます
2015/03/25(水) 13:27:13.65 ID: GZ36eybn 16 ： オリエンタルな名無しさん＠転載は禁止 : 2015/03/25(水) 13:30:31.34 ID: qzolzl/A いいコラムだね。
ただ仮に朝鮮人が漢字を捨てなくても基本的に嘘つきばかりだから、
歴史の捏造は相変わらずやってるよw
qzolzl/A 17 ： オリエンタルな名無しさん＠転載は禁止 : 2015/03/25(水) 13:30:49.68 ID: NqfBUAen 英語の様な表音文字なら、まだともかく、
ハングルは発音記号だからな。
SON と SUN は同じ発音で一見不便なようだが、
文字にすると、同じ発音でも 意味が違う。
人が発音し聞き分けれる音素は非常に限定されているが、
一方、記述文字は事実上無限。
何を言いたいかと言えば、 文字としての機能性は
漢字＞＞ラテン文字（ローマ字）＞＞ハングルの様な発音記号
但し、中国はピンインを使っても、漢字だけで 表音文字としての 国字がない不便。
日本語最強
◆◆◆◆◆◆
NqfBUAen 70 ： オリエンタルな名無しさん＠転載は禁止 : 2015/03/25(水) 17:22:06.06 ID: wS7zxJcM >>17
ハングルはただの発音記号にしかすぎない という言い方の意味がわからなかったが、
やっと納得。
wS7zxJcM 12： オリエンタルな名無しさん＠転載は禁止 :2015/03/25(水) 13:29:19.31 ID: HEaUYNgC ★国会可決はよｗｗ
これが後の世に語られることになるおちんちん法である
犯罪者のおちんちんを切ってしまいなさいｗｗｗ
☆理由 強姦致死等（死体遺棄も含む）、中学生、高校生、
大学生の未成年者の死亡が後を絶たない。
早急の抜本的な対策が求められるなか、解決策が無かった。
また未成年犯罪も含め、在日の犯罪も減らず、少子化は進む一方である。
●現在刑務所に拘束している性犯罪者の食事には抗生物質を混ぜる事。
●韓国人の性犯罪者は強制帰国させず、去勢刑を実施する。
●犯罪者（特に性犯罪）の子孫は根絶させる。
■その他関連シナジー効果
医療機関の特需、治安の良化、性犯罪者特有の遺伝子の国内除去
少子化の防止、１〜２年の犯罪率の激減
Q:なぜ男性器だけ切ればよいか？
A:女性は子供を産めるが男性は産めない。
■他の関連問題
国別犯罪で韓国が５７％ 国別一人あ |
not opposing the Government for the sake of it, to show that you do not treat politics as a game," the Prime Minister told the Opposition.
"Let us tomorrow vote for an election, let us put forward our plans for Brexit and our alternative programmes for government and then let the people decide.
"And the decision facing the country will be all about leadership. It will be a choice between strong and stable leadership in the national interest, with me as your Prime Minister, or weak and unstable coalition government, led by Jeremy Corbyn, propped up by the Liberal Democrats - who want to reopen the divisions of the referendum - and Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP.
"Every vote for the Conservatives will make it harder for opposition politicians who want to stop me from getting the job done.
"Every vote for the Conservatives will make me stronger when I negotiate for Britain with the prime ministers, presidents and chancellors of the European Union.
"Every vote for the Conservatives means we can stick to our plan for a stronger Britain and take the right long-term decisions for a more secure future.
"It was with reluctance that I decided the country needs this election, but it is with strong conviction that I say it is necessary to secure the strong and stable leadership the country needs to see us through Brexit and beyond.
"So, tomorrow, let the House of Commons vote for an election, let everybody put forward their proposals for Brexit and their programmes for Government, and let us remove the risk of uncertainty and instability and continue to give the country the strong and stable leadership it demands."
More to follow
Online EditorsTeam SoloMid's Peter "dupreeh" Rothmann spoke to theScore eSports about his journey to becoming a professional player, recent success and what it is like to play against the best.
For those who don’t know your background, how did you go from being a casual player to a top tier competitive player and were there any players who helped you along the way?
I’ve always enjoyed playing Counter-Strike, even the earliest versions when I was just a kid. I was introduced to the game by my older brother who had just acquired a new PC. He was studying a lot so whenever he was gone, I had time to settle down and play my favourite game! Obviously I knew nothing about playing the game competitively, so I was solely playing casual games. I was, without being cocky, the best player among my friends and I’ve always had a flair for playing video games.
A few years later I was introduced to Counter-Strike: Source and after countless hours of casual, I was introduced to a whole new aspect of the game by getting on my first team, where you actually played together and worked out strategies. I attended my first LAN with a bunch of friends a few months later, and I was completely hooked.
I never really had a major breakthrough career-wise in Counter-Strike: Source, maybe because I never had the chance on a top tier team or maybe because I just wasn’t good enough. However, by the end of the Counter-Strike: Source era, I had made a couple of new friends from the top tier teams, mostly the guys from former 3DMAX, smF, socN, xlo and gravity, and when CS:GO was released, their 5th decided to quit and smF split to another team, I was asked to tryout for them, and since I’ve been around the top tier scene in Denmark, until now, that I’ve made a breakthrough, also winning international titles. The guys from 3DMAX helped me by giving me the chance, to prove my worth, and the next big step was getting picked up by FeTiSh and allowing me to play with him, cajun and device, whom I still play in a team with! Not to forget, 3k2, has always been someone I’ve been looking up to, and a guy I’ve learned a lot from, so big thanks to everyone I’ve mentioned.
Was dupreeh the name you had before you went pro? How did you come up with it?
Ever since I started playing competitively I’ve been using the name dupreeh.
I actually stole it from my brother, honestly. He was playing Online Poker, with the name O.G. (Original Gangster) Dupree, and I thought Dupreeh was a cool name. So I added an ‘h’ to the end, to make it more my own. And that’s the story behind my name!
Prior to roughly seven months ago, your team had struggled to perform in big games. Do you think there was a reason you guys had so much trouble winning events prior to this year? You always had the talent, but what changed that helped you break into the current form you are in?
I believe that karrigan has made the difference by bringing a whole new aspect to our playstyle. I think a few of us always had problems with pressure, especially because it kept bugging us. We always seemed to face Ninjas in Pyjamas when they were at their peak, and we always, always lost to them, so it was just frustrating. The community also applied some sort of pressure by always talking about us choking, but indeed, we did choke when the games got close or we played important matches. However, we broke the curse when we won our first international title and it made us win three events in a row, defeating Fnatic over and over again. Whenever we lose now, I don’t think it’s about choking, but more about either adapting poorly to your enemies’ playstyle or the enemies playing extremely well. When we have confidence in our game, we’re deadly.
You and the rest of your team have been very happy with karrigan’s leadership as far as we’ve been told. What do you think he has done (or does) that helps you more than your previous leaders? How much of your current success comes down to him?
I’m gonna go as far and say that karrigan is the main reason why we have won titles in 2015. Not that karrigan is killing 30 every half, or does insane stuff all the time, but he’s willing to sacrifice himself for the team. He drops either me, device or cajun guns and all he asks for is a pistol. He doesn’t care, actually, he likes to run in first, and take all the attention and then the rest of us enters to clean up. The thing I like about karrigan, is that he plays very fluently. He like to roam around and love to come up with ideas how to approach the round or what to do, if we’re getting in troubles. He’s a brilliant IGL and he’s doing so much for the team, and he’s always open to new ideas and always tries to develop new strategies or think in new ways, that no one has ever seen before.
Then again, device has stepped up massively the last couple of months, and his performances is motivating the rest of us to perform too, so we’re getting a lot of confidence from him playing well.
TSM was probably the first choice as the favorites to win the last Major in Cologne, but you ended up going out in semis to EnVyUs. Why do you think you fell short?
I sucked of course, we felt that we could’ve won that game, but that’s not how it worked out. As for every match against EnVyUs, it’s about who’s hitting the most shots and doing the right mid-round calls, and they have as many talented players and a great IGL to perform it to perfection almost every time, so playing them is extremely difficult. However, I believe if we get our game going too, together with them, it’s extremely hard to predict who’s going to win.
I don’t think any of us has an advantage, it’s all about pure skill.
Does a loss in the semis make you even hungrier for a win here? How do you feel against other top teams in Cluj-Napoca?
As with all the other times, we just want to win. That’s the main goal, everything else is not acceptable. If we go out in another semi, I might start crying. This time, we want to win more than ever.
You are once again a popular choice as the potential winners and have been in good form recently. How will you be preparing for the Major and will you be doing anything differently than usual for it?
I can’t talk too much about it, but I can say that we’ve got some stuff that people will not be prepared for. Hopefully, we’ll win this time. That’s what is going to be done very differently, I hope.
Assuming you make it far in Cluj-Napoca, you will certainly face some hard opponents. What do you think the most important things are for a team when playing in the big matches late into an event? How do you get an edge when the competition gets as hard as possible and you are under pressure to perform?
We’re used to pressure, as we’ve tried it so many times before. You can’t think about it as a major, you just have to think that’s it’s a normal best-of-three in any other league, and play your game. If you let the pressure or the amount of people spectating hit you, you’re done. We’re not going to face an opponent that we do not know, as we’ve fought all of the top tier teams multiple times. Hit your shots, read them as well as you can and play as a team, that’s the key to victory.
Your team has a handful challengers in every event. Are there any teams or players in which you enjoy defeating more than others and why? When facing each opponent do you go into the game with a different mindset?
Fnatic will always be the funniest team to win against, mostly because we’ve done it a lot lately and I know it still bugs them. It’s a fun little rivalry, but however, Fnatic is still the better team this year, due to their amazing results throughout the entire year, so I have a massive respect for them. I love playing them as it’s always exciting and fun, and it can go either way. I would love a majors final against them!
It’s also fun beating dignitas, but I think it’ll be hard for both of us to face each other. It has to be in a quarterfinal then.
Fortunately, you were placed in a relatively easy group with mousesports, G2 and FlipSid3. Which of the three are you worried about the most and which do you think will likely, if all goes well, join your team in the Top 8 and why them?
I’m confident that we will win our groups, not easily, but still comfortably. The biggest challenger is probably going to be G2, as they have some really good individualists, but recently did a roster change, so I don’t know their current situation. mousesports is a team that can either hit really hard or simply fall short. I’m never going to count them out, because I’ve seen what damage they can cause once their individualists hits their shots, and gob b makes some beautiful calls. I’m confident that the 2nd place will be between mousesports and G2.
Flipsid3 on the other side, is somewhat the same as mousesports, they either perform decent or simply fail to deliver. I think they can cause an upset (hopefully not against us) but I still think they’ll place either third or fourth in the group.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Jacob Juillet writes about Counter-Strike for theScore eSports. Follow him on Twitter.America has reacted angrily to the asylum offer given to alleged leaker Edward Snowden in Russia.
Mr Snowden has been living in a transit lounge at a Moscow Airport for a month.
The move has caused relations between the US and Russia, already shaky, to be further strained.
Speaking at a press conference at the White House, spokesman Jay Carney makes it clear the Obama administration is not happy.
“We are extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and in private to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him. Mr Snowden is not a whistleblower. He is accused of leaking classified information and has been charged with three felony counts and he should be returned to the United States as soon as possible where he will be accorded full due process and protections.”
Jay Carney would not say if America will take steps in retribution, stating only the White House is re-evaluating whether President Obama will attend an upcoming summit with President Putin in September in Moscow.
The accusations against Edward Snowden include allegedly leaking details of US government surveillance programmes. He had been working with the National Security Agency.
Now that he is relatively safe, Snowden’s family are, not surprisingly, relieved. His father, Lonnie Snowden spoke on US television, and was grateful to both the Russian Premier and his son’s Russian lawyer.
“I am again thankful to the Russian people, President Vladimir Putin, and Anatoly Kucherena [Showden’s Russian lawyer], for the courage, the strength, the humanity that they have demonstrated and what I believe is this noble action of protecting my son and keeping him safe. It’s the honourable thing to do and as not just a citizen of the United States but a global citizen of this planet, an occupant of the earth, I am so thankful for what they have done for my son.
Protests around the world followed the disclosures about a massive global cyber surveillance programme.Mexican authorities arrested a member of The Knights Templar cartel, a nephew of one of its top leaders who is accused of murdering children to sell their organs, an official said Monday.
Manuel Plancarte Gaspar, 34, was arrested last week by state forces with a stolen vehicle and crystal meth and is “under investigation for the death of children, who drew their organs for sale,” said his attorney through his Twitter account.
According to the agency, Gaspar is the nephew of Enrique Solis, also known as “El Kike,” a top leader of the Templar, the cartel led by Servando Gómez Martínez — “La Tute” — that has terrorized the troubled state of Michoacan.
On March 9, soldiers shot dead Nazario Moreno “El Chayo,” or “El Más Loco,” whom the government of Felipe Calderón had presumed dead in 2010 but was secretly leading this cartel, La Familia.
This was the hardest strike by the Mexican government against the Templars after the capture of leaders Dionicio Loya Plancarte, or “Uncle,” and Jesus Macias Vasquez, known as “El Toro.”
Groups of armed civilians called AUC rose in February 2013 in Michoacan to fight the murders, kidnappings, extortion, and other violations of the Templars, and the government deployed a military operation to reinforce them in January.
The Associated Press reported that militia members had rescued several kidnapped children wrapped tightly in blankets in a refrigerated truck that was on its way to a rented home filled with medical equipment.
They had been on their way to a beach outing from their Mexico City school when they were abducted, and the militia returned them to their parents.
Since its birth, the militias have managed to corner drug dealers and take control in 20 villages south of Tierra Caliente and have claimed that recent government operations, as the abatement of “El Chayo”, were the result of information they provided.I posted yesterday about activist Justin Vacula‘s 18-month-long attempt to get an atheist ad on buses in the County of Lackawanna Transit System (COLTS) in Pennsylvania.
The ad he submitted to them wasn’t an attack on religion. Hell, it wasn’t really even a promotion of atheism. All the ad did was mention the dreaded “A” word:
(Maybe the COLTS leadership just hates periods?)
On Tuesday, in response to Justin, the COLTS Board of Directors passed a newly-revised advertising policy that bans all forms of religious advertising. The ban is so far-reaching that it effectively bans ads promoting churches, quoting Bible verses, and even mentioning religion.
COLTS will not accept advertising… … that promote the existence or non-existence of a supreme deity, deities, being or beings; that address, promote, criticize or attack a religion or religions, religious beliefs or lack of religious beliefs; that directly quote or cite scriptures, religious text or texts involving religious beliefs or lack of religious beliefs; or are otherwise religious in nature.
All this just to prevent an ad that says “Atheists.” from going on county buses.
Their refusal letter to Justin last week already went over-the-top when they said his ad “may offend or alienate a segment of [COLTS] ridership and [could] thus negatively affect its revenue” — as if Christian ads implying that non-Christians were hellbound were perfectly acceptable? — but this new policy is like killing a fly with a drone missile.
Also, I find it hard to believe that anyone would stop riding the bus because of a paid advertisement that said “Atheist.” (It’s like the COLTS board is saying, “Stop giving us money! You’re going to make us lose money!”)
It’s especially interesting to see this new policy go into effect when you consider that COLTS had no problem last year running messages saying “God Bless America,” suggesting a pro-life stance, or linking to a website promoting Holocaust denialism and white supremacy.
But, you know, “Atheist.” might offend someone.
Still, their fear of a mild atheist ad just eliminated every annoying religious ad on Lackawanna County public transit from now on. It wasn’t Justin’s intention, but I don’t think anyone will mind at all.
Just give it time, though. I suspect in a few weeks we’ll be hearing ironic whining from religious groups about how this new policy is anti-Christian.
(via Justin Vacula)CENTENNIAL — The judge had to decide whether former Arapahoe County Sheriff Patrick Sullivan should be treated the same as everyone else or fall under more scrutiny as a law enforcement officer in his meth-for-sex case.
In the end, Arapahoe County Chief District Judge William Sylvester chose somewhere in between.
Sullivan, 69, was sentenced Tuesday to 30 days in jail, placed on two years of probation and fined $1,100 after pleading guilty to felony possession of methamphetamine and soliciting for prostitution, a misdemeanor.
Two other charges were dropped in the plea deal.
The disgraced former sheriff, once heralded as a hero, was immediately taken into custody and moved to the county jail that bears his name to serve out his sentence.
“I apologize to this court, this county and my family,” Sullivan said, reading from a statement before Sylvester announced his sentence. “There is no excuse for my behavior.”
He was arrested in late November after an undercover sting set up by a gay lover of his and another gay man, all of whom had previously smoked meth together. The friends turned confidential informants asked Sullivan to come to an Aurora home and have sex in exchange for meth.
Colorado Deputy Attorney General Michael Dougherty, a special prosecutor who took over the case from the Arapahoe district attorney and who was on a task force investigating the former sheriff, said that after Sullivan went to the home, the former sheriff threw the meth on a bed and started getting undressed.
He said it was something Sullivan had done “time and time and time” again. Sullivan was then arrested.
“When a member of law enforcement is arrested, this disgraces the badge,” Dougherty said in asking for jail or prison time.
Even more shocking was Dougherty’s statements that after his arrest, Sullivan was asked whether he had ever had sex with a minor. But he could not tell them yes or no because he was under the influence of meth during those encounters.
“He may very well have had sex with underage individuals,” Dougherty told the court.
Investigators also found images on Sullivan’s computer that were “suspicious” with regard to whether they depicted minors. In the end, they couldn’t be “classified” as minors, Dougherty said.
Defense attorney Kevin McGreevy asked for probation, noting that similar plea deals typically lead to that outcome if the defendant does not have a criminal record.
“In 99 out of 100 cases, a person who is not Pat Sullivan sitting in the same chair receives probation,” McGreevy said.
He said until his arrest, Sullivan was a respected, retired law enforcement officer and had earned numerous honors for his service.
“He really does care for other people,” McGreevy said.
Sullivan was sentenced to 38 days in jail, with credit for eight days of time he served after his arrest, and two years of probation for the meth charge. Sylvester also sentenced Sullivan to 38 days in jail with credit for eight days served on the prostitution charge.
The sentences are to be served simultaneously.
The felony meth charge carried a presumptive sentence of a year in jail and, with aggravating factors, could have meant as much as three years behind bars. But it was ultimately left up to the discretion of the judge.
Dougherty said Sullivan repeatedly used his position as a former sheriff to gain the confidence of gay meth users, bought items for them such as clothing and tires, bailed one out of jail, then used them as he saw fit.
“He became a manipulator, someone who used his position,” Dougherty said.
Sullivan was sheriff in Arapahoe County for 18 years before he retired in 2002, then served as head of security for Cherry Creek Public Schools before leaving in 2008.
Sullivan had a storied law enforcement career and was named Sheriff of the Year by the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2001.
In 1989, the sheriff drove a Jeep through the fence of an Arapahoe County home to rescue two deputies and a wounded 17-year-old boy who had been taken hostage by a rape and murder suspect armed with a machine gun.
At least publicly, there were no hints of Sullivan leading a double life, and it’s not known when he began using meth.
“I plan to seek forgiveness from those that I have harmed,” Sullivan said.
Carlos Illescas: 303-954-1175 or [email protected] Bradford was great versus Packers, but O-line is holding Vikings back
By Sam Monson • Sep 19, 2016
Newly acquired quarterback Sam Bradford made a difference to the Minnesota Vikings offense, and the team is now 2-0, with a win over their main divisional rival the Green Bay Packers. But they won’t be Super Bowl contenders as long as the offensive line remains as bad as it has been.
Star running back Adrian Peterson went off injured against Green Bay with a knee injury that is expected to sideline him for some time but not shut him down for the season, but the way the offensive line is playing it might not make a huge difference.
Peterson gained 19 yards on 12 carries against the Packers, but he gained 20 after contact. He was being hit behind the line on average. Matt Asiata, Peterson’s replacement, gained 13 yards on six carries, 10 of which came after contact. Jerick McKinnon gained two yards on two carries. As a team, the Vikings rushed for 29 yards last night, and 30 after contact.
Peterson had two of his biggest gains (five and four yards) heading off right or left end – in other words, he was trying to get around the line entirely.
We have seen in the past that Peterson is capable of getting things done despite poor blocking up front, but at his age it likely can’t be relied upon, and now with his knee injury he himself can’t even be relied upon for the team.
It is possible to succeed with below-average or even bad offensive line play in today’s NFL, it’s just a lot harder. The Seattle Seahawks have been consistently doing it for years, but they have Russell Wilson, had Marshawn Lynch and the threat of the read/option to stress a defense and effectively “block” a free defender (because he had to hold in place waiting to see whether the quarterback kept the ball or not) when they wanted it done. The Vikings now have none of those elements, and what’s more concerning is that the line was even worse in pass protection than it was run blocking against the Packers.
As a unit they combined for 17 total pressures. Each lineman only had 36 pass-blocking plays to contend with, and yet every member surrendered pressure, and Joe Berger was the only one to escape without allowing multiple pressures. Through two weeks of action the Vikings now have three of their linemen rank in the bottom five of their position in PFF grade. Matt Kalil (36.9), Andre Smith (40.0) and Brandon Fusco (38.1) are all struggling badly, and expensive free-agent acquisition Alex Boone (54.2) isn’t much better than that level. Center Joe Berger has been the team’s best lineman, and his 73.6 grade is both hardly stellar and a massive drop from the 88.0 grade he had a year ago.
The line alone right now is a prohibitive cap on Minnesota’s prospects this season. You can win a Super Bowl with a line this bad, but it takes a QB playing at an unsustainably elite level in the face of pressure — like Giants QB Eli Manning was able to during the 2011 season. During that regular season, the Giants offensive line allowed a league-leading 222 total pressures. Right now, the Vikings are on pace to surrender 224.
The most optimistic Vikings fan on Earth would find it tough to imagine Sam Bradford going on the kind of run that Manning did in 2011. Manning himself has never come close to replicating it, and the Giants have never come close to contending again as a result.
Bradford is a quarterback capable of winning the Vikings games, as last night’s 87.2 game grade showed. With the impressive defense they have in place, and with a strong start to the season, they would be well placed to make a run, but their offensive line is simply too bad right now to think seriously about a Lombardi Trophy at the end of the season. It will need to take a significant step forward for that to happen.
Losing Peterson for an extended period of time is a big blow to this offense, but as things stand, Peterson was taking the hand off and then running into a brick wall of purple bodies at the line – if he was lucky. His average carry this season has seen him gain just 0.19 yards, or about seven inches, before being hit by defenders, and you’re just not going to get it done on the ground with that kind of blocking.
At 2-0, sitting atop the division and with the first showing from Bradford a very good one, there are several reasons to be happy for the Vikings. But if this team wants to be anything more than that, they need to be thinking seriously about what they can do to improve the performance from the O-line, because right now it’s what is going to curtail the success of the season.Share
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We all know that Advent means arrival and preparation. I would invite you to meditate with me about the prerequisites of the term and implications we hardly ever acknowledge.
On November 8, the Church remembered Blessed Duns Scotus (d. 1308), one of the greatest thinkers she has ever produced. One of his key ideas was that God’s perfect intellect is mirrored in the limitless openness and receptivity of the human mind. For the Franciscan, such receptiveness was a sign of human dignity: humans receive those truths they cannot achieve by their own powers. This sounds complicated but leads to some simple conclusions: all true knowledge comes from an encounter and arises from the receptivity of our mind and heart (intellectus passibilis). If we apply Scotus’s insight to Advent, we might realize that our receptivity to the Incarnate Word is impeded by something in our lives and that perhaps we do not desire a real encounter with the real God but rather one with our self-constructed god.
The root for this seems to lie at the beginning of our freedom, at a moment before we even choose between objects, and acquire a primordial stance to the world. Either we accept the order of being with God at the start or we reject it. If we decide for the latter, we impose our ideas on reality instead of discovering its teleological, hierarchical structure. We abuse things—be they persons or things—and lose sight of the whole. It is in sin where we pervert the goals of things most decisively and abuse them; instead of searching for the true, good, beautiful, and holy, we enslave ourselves to substitute goods, to the counterfeit. This primordial decision[1] doesn’t happen just once (like with the angels), but is demanded from us every time we encounter things that have objective ends. The Christian tradition has a word for acquiring the right disposition towards the created world and learning about its intrinsic order: asceticism. It frees us from ourselves and from humanly imposed demands to serve God. Our Blessed Mother is a good example: being immaculately conceived, she was without sin and always chose in absolute freedom because her entire being was oriented toward God and his will.
Yes, Advent is a time of asceticism. The latter originally meant “training.” The liturgical color violet should remind us of that, but also the practice of our Orthodox brethren to fast during this time. When we practice asceticism we stop treating things as ends for us and begin to accept God’s order again. We retrain ourselves, so to say; fasting is just one aspect of that retraining. True asceticism is a tool to prepare ourselves, to be open to receive the Word Incarnate, and goes beyond a mere giving up of some objects (alcohol, chocolate, etc.) but aims to recalibrate our entire focus towards reality. It aims at changing our desire, to turn it away from selfishness and toward the attitude of acknowledging God’s order, receiving it in obedience.
Wisely, the mystics remind us that such phases of giving up things are to be interrupted by phases of fulfillment, of action, like our breathing is a harmony of inhaling and exhaling. When we inhale, we fill our lungs with the oxygen we need. For that purpose, however, we have to be open: If our airways are blocked, we cannot inhale. We cannot do so in a vacuum, either, and the world around us is just that: an empty place that cannot (ful)fill us. Inhaling, however, is rather passive; we are filled with something. Asceticism works a bit like this. It removes blockages and directs us to sources of fresh air. It prepares us to be (ful)filled. Only when we exhale do we become truly active. We use the air stored in us to speak, to sing, for bodily action—we express ourselves. We come to ourselves and to the mystery of our own being, God, and meet him in our soul.
Asceticism is therefore not an end in itself, but is always a tool and a preparation for the supernatural gifts. These gifts only perfect what is already there, namely nature. By freeing us from our enslavement to our misconceptions and the world, asceticism helps us to grow in faith, hope, and especially love. Once the spectacles of selfishness are taken away from our sight, we gain a new perspective and begin to penetrate reality itself. In short, asceticism leads us to a heightened awareness, or as the Buddhist would say, mindfulness. This we can see best in children, who see mysteries adults have long forgotten: they still find a horse awe-inspiring, feel interest about the shape of a key, and hear the snowflakes falling. Asceticism leads to attention—toward attention to the central mystery of our life, God. Simon Weil beautifully summed up that “prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.”[2]
Advent is an invitation to regain the openness of our hearts and minds to the great mystery of the Incarnation. If we are truly open, we become receptive to God and his becoming incarnate in us.
Editorial Note: Throughout the month of December, Church Life Journal will explore the Catholic imagination as an eschatological imagination. By eschatological imagination, we mean the imagination that highlights Christ’s coming in to the world: in his second coming at the end of time; as he is manifest in the scriptures; made known through his Mother (both then and now); and in Jesus’s nativity, which we anticipate during this season of Advent. We seek to reflect, in other words, on the myriad implications of Christ’s Incarnation for this life and the one that is to come. As our authors explore the various dimensions of the eschatological imagination (please click the link for a list of the posts), we invite you to think along with us.
If you want to explore the theology of asceticism, then give the following longform piece by David Fagerberg a read:
Featured Image: Matthias Grunewald, Isenheim Altarpiece [detail], 1516; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100.
[1] I rely on the work of the German philosopher Hans-Eduard Hengstenberg (1904–1998), student of Max Scheler, and himself a teacher of the eminent Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann. See for example his Christliche Askese, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg, 1948).
[2] Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies,” in Waiting on God (London, Fontana Books, 1959), 66-76.
Ulrich L. Lehner Ulrich L. Lehner is professor of theology at Marquette University, and author of many books, including God Is Not Nice (2017) from Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN.Los Angeles, United States of America - The warden of the Guantanamo Bay prison continues to claim the detention facility may face threats from enemies foreign and domestic if he is compelled to reveal information in a June 3 sworn declaration he signed about the rationale behind a genital search policy prisoners are subjected to.
Colonel John V Bogdan said the declaration must not be revealed in full, that certain information about the prison’s operations must remain secret - otherwise "our enemies" could create a "blueprint" of Guantanamo’s "security operations" and "plan an attack". This statement was made in an August 2 declaration, which was also filed under government seal.
"Unrestricted dissemination of the information protected here, which is designated as sensitive but unclassified, would present risks to operational security and force protection in current detention operations, or if combined with other information, could create risks to national security or endanger US personnel," states Bogdan's August declaration - which you can read above this report.
Transparency battle
Bogdan's August 2 declaration was written in response to Al Jazeera's intervention in a lawsuit filed in June by attorneys of Guantanamo detainees, who challenged the legality of the genital searches, which prisoners were subjected to whenever they left their cells to meet or speak by telephone with their attorneys - and again upon their return.
Responding to the complaint, the US Department of Justice submitted - under seal in US District Court - a sworn declaration signed by Bogdan, the commander of the prison's Joint Detention Group, explaining why the policy was necessary. But federal Judge Royce Lamberth found the procedure to be "religiously and culturally abhorrent" and banned it, stating in a scathing 30-page order dated July 11 that it was a policy enacted to deter prisoners from meeting with their lawyers during the height of a mass hunger strike.
A few days after Lamberth issued his decision, Al Jazeera intervened in the case for the sole purpose of unsealing Bogdan's sworn declaration, on grounds that the public has a right of access to judicial records. According to Jeffrey Light, the attorney who prepared the filing, the motion to intervene likely prompted the government to quietly release a redacted version of Bogdan's declaration on the public record when it successfully sought a temporary stay of Lamberth's order a week later, allowing the searches to continue.
Still, the unsealing of Bogdan's June 3 declaration didn’t render the motion moot. The government was still obligated to reply - and did so on August 2. It also released a redacted copy of Bogdan's June 3 statement. The government explained in its own redacted brief that it could not release a complete, unredacted copy of Bogdan's declaration because some of the information in the warden’s declaration was so secret that if it were publicly disclosed it could be used by Al-Qaeda to launch an attack on the heavily guarded compound. The government’s response to Al Jazeera’s court filing cited a new sealed declaration signed by Bogdan on August 2 that was written to justify the secrecy of his original declaration.
Al Jazeera subsequently published a report detailing the government's response. The report also pointed out what appeared to be an important fact that the government had overlooked: the information that the government argued could be used by terrorists to attack Guantanamo had already been disclosed when it lodged a public version of Bogdan's June 3 declaration with the appeals court. Put another way - the government ended up releasing two different versions of Bogdan's June 3 declaration with two different sets of redactions.
Three days after Al Jazeera's report was published, the Department of Justice filed another brief in US District Court acknowledging that it had made an error in its previous filing and that it had already released an earlier version of Bogdan's declaration. The government's August 9 brief said it was submitting the earlier version of Bogdan's declaration filed with the appeals court to replace the newer version it had released in response to this reporter's motion to intervene because it contained fewer redactions.
Removing the black-out
Attorney Jeffrey Light moved on Al Jazeera's behalf to have Bogdan's second declaration unsealed. In an August 16 response to the government's opposition to un-redact blacked-out portions of Bogdan's June 3 declaration, Light argued : "It is puzzling, to say the least, how revealing the details of the procedure for searching detainees' groins would in any way enable Al-Qaeda to successfully free the detainees at the heavily fortified military detention facility at Guantanamo."
Al Jazeera had already reported that Judge Lamberth described the genital search procedure in detail in his July 11 order.
"The government cannot possibly mean what it seems to be suggesting - that it believes there is a substantial probability that 'our enemies' could successfully 'attack the detention facilities at Guantanamo' if only they knew that guards use their 'hand as a wedge between the [detainee's] scrotum and thigh,'" Light wrote.
"While the government raises exaggerated and hysterical concerns with respect to the June 3, 2013, Bogdan declaration, it can muster no more than a single conclusory sentence in a footnote in support of its request to maintain the August 2, 2013, Bogdan declaration under seal.
“The government contends that |
ists for gun industry groups, including the National Sports Shooting Foundation (NSSF), have been applying pressure to Senate offices over the last two weeks to oppose the vote.
Larry Keane, the senior vice president of NSSF, said his organization instead called for confirming the acting surgeon general, Rear Admiral Boris Lushniak, because "he has not injected himself" into the politics of gun control.
"We actually think the acting surgeon general is very capable and a better candidate because it has not become political," Keane said Monday. Read more here.
Tennessee makes big move on Medicaid: Tennessee has struck a tentative deal with the federal government to become the latest red state to expand Medicaid under ObamaCare, Gov. Bill Haslam (R) announced Monday.
Haslam said he has received "verbal approval" from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to move forward with a new pilot plan to help about 200,000 low-income Tennesseans gain coverage.
The state’s plan veers from the traditional route of expanding Medicaid, but is on track to receive a windfall of federal dollars. "We believe Tennessee has generally described an approach that could be approvable," an HHS spokesman wrote. Read more here.
SCOTUS says no to abortion drug case: The Supreme Court said Monday it would not intervene in a challenge to Arizona's law limiting access to medication abortions, leaving the rule blocked while the case proceeds through the lower courts.
The state is prevented from enforcing its 2012 law under a separate ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the justices decided not to take up an appeal from the state of that decision.
Supporters of abortion rights welcomed the high court's move, calling it a victory for women's health. Read more here.
Insurance deadlines delayed in two states: Minnesota became the second state to push back its deadline to sign up for healthcare coverage on Monday, citing "historic interest" in its program.
Officials from MNsure announced Monday afternoon that they will extend the deadline to Dec. 20 after receiving 1,600 calls per hour with an average wait time of 20 minutes in just one day.
New York became the first state to push back its deadline on Friday. Read more here.
Tuesday’s schedule:
The Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will hold a meeting of the Interagency Committee on Smoking and Health.
State by state:
Los Angeles porn actors must wear condoms, appeals court rules
Burwell makes ObamaCare pitch to Houston Baptists
Va. gov. to include Medicaid expansion in budget
Medicaid expansion could be months away in Alaska
What we’re reading:
Huge US child health study canceled after $1.3 billion
2014 Lie of the Year: Exaggerations about Ebola
Prolific prescribers of controlled substances face Medicare scrutiny
How the obesity epidemic drains Medicare and Medicaid
What you might have missed from The Hill:
HealthCare.gov faces crucial deadline
Senators spar over surgeon general nomination
CDC calls 2014 'unprecedented' for public health challenges
Cassidy given HELP Committee seat
Please send tips and comments to Sarah Ferris, [email protected], and Elise Viebeck, [email protected].
Follow on Twitter: @thehill, @sarahnferris, @eliseviebeckThis post was analyzed for mistakes and other content in January 2019, as part of an effort to engage in self-criticism. Some changes have been made.
On the heels of the orange menace’s aggressive posture toward the DPRK, threatening them with military action (and with diplomatic isolation) if they don’t remove their nuclear weapons, which are their main form of self-defense against the imperial beast, the U$ House of Representatives in a 419-1 vote passed new round of new sanctions against the DPRK, with only GOP Representative Thomas Massie voting against it, and 10 others not voting. As to date, Mr. Massie has not explained his reasons for voting against this legislation, which is currently being considered by the Senate’s Committee of Foreign Relations. Regardless, this legislation is a direct attack upon the DPRK, trying to coax it to surrender to U$ imperialists. This article aims to show how that is the case.
DPRK and Russia respond to the law with strong criticism
Yesterday, the Supreme People’s Assembly, the duly-elected unicameral parliament of the DPRK, sent a letter of protest to the U$ House, condemning the new sanctions. As PressTV describes it, showing that the Iranians undoubtedly feel similar about the legislation, the law targets the DPRK’s “exports and shipping industry” with the new sanctions banning “ships owned or hired by North Korea from operating in US waters or docking at US ports,” prohibiting “products originating from North Korea…from entering the United States,” and requiring the orange menace to report to the Congress within 90 of the legislation on whether the DPRK “has retreated on its activities or should be reinstated on the government’s list of “state sponsors of terror”” which, if put in place, would “trigger even more sanctions.” The KCNA, in an article titled “DPRK SPA Foreign Affairs Committee’s Letter of Protest to U.S. House of Representatives” reprinted the message of the SPA’s Foreign Affairs Committee on the subject:
The SPA Foreign Affairs Committee of the DPRK avails itself of this opportunity to strongly condemn and resolutely reject the “North Korea Interdiction & Modernization of Sanctions Act” (H.R. 1644) that the U.S. House of Representatives passed on May 4, 2017, and extends this letter of protest. The passage of the above legislation amounts to the most heinous act against humanity that not only infringes upon the sacred sovereignty of the DPRK as well as its people’s rights to existence but also arbitrarily violates universal principles of sovereign equality and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries which run through the United Nations Charter and international laws. That the U.S. House of Representatives passed the above legislation speaks volumes about the ignorance of U.S. politicians who know nothing about the root cause of the long-standing hostile relations between the DPRK and the U.S. and the essence of the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula; it is yet another product of hostile policy towards the DPRK. The hostile policy and acts of the United States of America targeting the DPRK – including but not limited to the abovementioned legislation – run counter to the efforts aimed at ensuring peace and security on the Korean peninsula; it will only further handicap the USA in its attempt to resolve the nuclear issue. If what the U.S. House of Representatives really wants is peace and security on the Korean peninsula and resolution of the nuclear issue, it would do well to delve into more relevant issues such as the establishment of lasting peace regime on the Korean peninsula, enactment of laws aimed at putting an end to the hostile relations between the DPRK and the USA, etc. There’s no denying that the DPRK is fully capable of safeguarding its sovereignty along with its rights to existence and development. The consequences will be dire if the U.S. House of Representatives, obsessed with inherent sense of disapproval towards the DPRK, misjudges the DPRK’s determination and capabilities and continues to meddle in other’s internal affairs and bring pressure to bear on another country by invoking its domestic laws. The U.S. House of Representatives should think twice. As the U.S. House of Representatives enacts more and more of these reckless hostile laws, the DPRK’s efforts to strengthen nuclear deterrents will gather greater pace, beyond anyone’s imagination. The DPRK will keep a watchful eye on the next moves of the USA and continue to take legitimate actions for self-defense to counter the hostile policy of the USA towards the DPRK. The SPA Foreign Affairs Committee of the DPRK takes this opportunity to reiterate its position that the U.S. House of Representatives must have [a] correct understanding of the essence of the current situation and make rational moves as regards the issue of the Korean peninsula.
The arguments that the law infringes on DPRK sovereignty, violates “principles of sovereign equality and non-interference” and tries to deny “the DPRK is fully capable of safeguarding its sovereignty along with its rights to existence and development,” among others in the above quote are completely valid. Similarly, within Russia, the reactions to the law have been broadly negative and rightfully so. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the upper house Committee for International Relations within the Russian Duma, argues that realization of this bill “includes a proposed force scenario in which the US Navy would conduct compulsory inspections of all ships. Such a scenario is simply unthinkable because it means a declaration of war.” In another translation of the same quote, Mr. Kosachev is more reserved, hoping that the bill is not implemented because it if it is, it “envisions a scenario of power with forced inspections of all vessels by US warships” which he argues is “beyond comprehension, because it means a declaration of war.” Other high-ranking Russian officials felt the same way. Frants Klintsevich, the deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee for Defense and Security, was more specific, saying what was important was “the list of nations where US congressmen want to have special control over sea ports” which he notes includes ports within Russia, China, Iran and Syria, showing that “the United States is again trying to expand its jurisdiction all over the globe.” He added that doing this is almost telling “Russia, China, Iran and Syria that these nations are suspects in crime, which is nonsense, according to international law.” Finally there was Andrey Krasov, the other deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee for Defense and Security, saying that “the US administration will receive a symmetrical adequate response to any unfriendly steps toward Russia and our allies. In any case, no US ship will enter our waters.”
The law itself
Looking at the text of the law, it is clear that concerns of the DPRK and Russian governments are well founded. The section 104 of the law that talks about imperialist monitoring shows this to be the case:
(a) REPORT REQUIRED.— ‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this section, and annually thereafter for 5 years, the President shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report— A) identifying the operators of foreign sea ports and airports that have knowingly— ‘‘(i) failed to implement or enforce regulations to inspect ships, aircraft, cargo, or conveyances in transit to or from North Korea, as required by applicable United Nations Security Council resolutions; ‘‘(ii) facilitated the transfer, trans-shipment, or conveyance of significant types or quantities of cargo, vessels, or aircraft owned or controlled by persons designated under applicable United Nations Security Council resolutions; or ‘‘(iii) facilitated any of the activities described in section 104(a) … “(b) SPECIFIC FINDINGS.— Each report required under subsection (a) shall include specific findings with respect to the following ports and airports: ‘‘(1) The ports of Dandong, Dalian, and any other port in the People’s Republic of China that the President deems appropriate. ‘‘(2) The ports of Abadan, Bandar-e-Abbas, Chabahar, Bandar-e-Khomeini, Bushehr Port, Asaluyeh Port, Kish, Kharg Island, Bandar-e-Lenge, and Khorramshahr, and Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport, in the Islamic Republic of Iran ‘‘(3) The ports of Nakhodka, Vanino, and Vladivostok, in the Russian Federation. ‘‘(4) The ports of Latakia, Banias, and Tartous, and Damascus International Airport, in the Syrian Arab Republic. ‘‘(c) ENHANCED SECURITY TARGETING REQUIREMENTS.— “(1) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in paragraph (2), the Secretary of Homeland Security may, using the Automated Targeting System operated by the National Targeting Center of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, require enhanced screening procedures to determine whether physical inspections are warranted of any cargo bound for or landed in the United States that— ‘‘(A) has been transported through a sea port or airport the operator of which has been identified by the President in accordance with subsection (a)(1) as having repeatedly failed to comply with applicable United Nations Security Council resolutions; … ‘(2) EXCEPTION FOR FOOD, MEDICINE, AND HUMANITARIAN SHIPMENTS —Paragraph (1) shall not apply to any vessel, aircraft, or conveyance that has entered the territory, waters, or airspace of North Korea, or landed in any of the sea ports or airports of North Korea, exclusively for the purposes described in section 208(b)(3)(B), or to import food, medicine, or supplies into North Korea to meet the humanitarian needs of the North Korean people. ‘(d) SEIZURE AND FORFEITURE —A vessel, aircraft, or conveyance used to facilitate any of the activities described in section 104(a) under the jurisdiction of the United States may be seized and forfeited under [certain laws]
While these sanctions show that the imperial monitoring of “the territory, waters, or airspace of North Korea” shall not apply to those vessels or planes which “import food, medicine, or supplies into North Korea,” the fact that there would be monitoring by the U$ Navy (and Air Force?) is undoubtedly an act of war.
Section 104(a), part of an anti-DPRK sanctions law which went into effect last year, mentioned in the above quote as part of the imperial monitoring, shows these efforts are aimed at the DPRK’s economy. An excerpt from this section shows this is the case, saying that President shall designate, except under certain circumstances [1], any person who he determines “knowingly, directly or indirectly” imported, exported, or re-exported the following to the DPRK:
“any goods, services, or technology” which could be used for “weapons of mass destruction [WMD] or delivery systems”
luxury goods
“a significant amount of precious metal, graphite, raw or semi-finished metals or aluminum, steel, coal, or software” which can be used in “industrial processes directly related to weapons of mass destruction” or for the Workers Party of Korea (WPK), the Korean armed forces, “internal security, or intelligence activities, or the operation and maintenance of political prison camps”
“any arms or related materiel”
This isn’t all. Also, any person engages in the following can be sanctioned as well:
provides training or other services for such “WMDs”
engages in “significant financial transactions” relating to the creation or use of such “WMDs”
facilitates or engages in DPRK “censorship”
responsible for purported “serious human rights abuses” by the government
money laundering to support the government
“the counterfeiting of goods or currency” by the government
“bulk cash smuggling” by the government
narcotics trafficking that supports the government
“significant activities undermining cybersecurity through the use of computer networks or systems against foreign persons, governments, or other entities” on behalf of the government
Considering that the country’s industries focus on military products, building of machines, mining of coal, iron ore, and numerous other “precious metals,” along with food processing and tourism, while importing “metallurgical products, manufactures (including armaments)…and fishery products” if the CIA World Factbook is to be given any credibility on this matter [2], these sanctions are not “targeted” but are rather meant to strike a dagger in the DPRK’s economy. Furthermore, these sanctions strike at the country as a whole by attempting to stop any measures of self-defense (restricting arms transfers, cyber-defense, necessary censorship), or further development (stopping importation of purported “luxury goods”). This is followed by with the common slurs against the DPRK, including its purported “serious human rights abuses,” and other “new” ones including money laundering, counterfeit “goods or currency,” “cash smuggling” and narcotics trafficking by (or supporting) the DPRK’s duly elected government.
The use of narcotics as a slur against governments declared “communist” by imperial elites is nothing new. In his book, Strength of the Wolf, Douglas Valentine writes that while there were Chinese gangs in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, with the profits from opium allowing Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government/KMT (Kuomintang of China) to survive, working directly with the drug traffickers, the New York Times alleged that Arnold Rothenstein used some of his drug money to finance “communist-sponsored strikes” in New York City’s garment district, the first time in U$ history that “politicians and policemen were linked with Bolsheviks and drug traffickers.” [3] That’s not all. He added that Chiang’s government, which came to power violently in 1927, which depended on drug smuggling profits, had created an “opium monopoly”/syndicate and paid for individuals to serve as part of their Communist suppression unit, such as Du Yue-sheng. [4] Adding to this, Henry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, was unwilling to acknowledge this reality. As it was evident that the Chinese Communists were engaged in “anti-narcotics activities,” not the Nationalists, Mr. Anslinger dismissed this, continuing to seek evidence that “would link the Communist Chinese to drug rings in Japan, Korea, and China” although no such evidence existed, with later anti-China propaganda asserting that all of the “illicit dope” that reached Japan came from Communist China or People’s Republic of China (PRC) while the U$ backed the Nationalists. [5] Anslinger made these claims even though he knew they weren’t true as part of a smear campaign against the PRC as the CIA and other entities worked with the KMT in their drug smuggling operations.
Getting back to the law, other provisions show the sanctions are even more extensive section 105, prohibits DPRK vessels (or vessels of any of the DPRK’s allies, like Russia, China, Syria, or any country not complying with sanctions on the DRPK) from entering or operating in “the navigable waters of the United States” and section 106 requires a report on the “coordination” between Iran and the DPRK. Adding to this, section 107 puts in place a report delineating if UN Security Council Resolutions are being followed by other countries, section 108 denies financial messaging services to the DPRK, and sections 201 and 202 put sanctions on the DPRK for “human rights violations.” Section 203 also rewards informants who allow them to implement murderous sanctions, section 204 declares the DPRK as a “state sponsor of terrorism,” and section 103 broadens an arms embargo on the country. Finally, section 102 limits financial interactions with the DPRK, section 101 modifies and expands sanctions on the Korean populace of the DPRK. [6]
The illegality of anti-Korean sanctions
Recently, in a post criticizing the orange menace’s imperialist act of aggression against Syria, revisionist Stephen Gowans wrote that some say that military strike was illegal because it did not have UN Security Council approval and it “represented an unauthorized act of war,” only unilaterally ordered by the White House. However, he says that such discussion of illegality is “academic” because the United States has “amassed a sizable record of crimes in Syria…[including the] intrusion of US military personnel on Syrian soil” which is an act of war. Hence, he concludes that since the US is “at liberty to violate international law with impunity” as an imperial monster, with “no higher authority capable of enforcing international law through the threat of a force” greater than the Pentagon, and that, as a result, expecting the US to “yield to international law is naïve and therefore any discussion of whether this or that act of the United States violates international law is a discussion of no consequence.” While I agree that holding the U$ accountable for violating international law is near impossible, I do think it is important to highlight if acts are illegal or not, as it shows the corrupted nature of the murderous empire. So, that’s where I disagree with Gowans.
This horrible law violates many international agreements, showing that the law, in and of itself, is illegal. While the legal status of blockades is murky, there is no doubt that this law violates the Kellogg-Briand Pact which basically bans war “as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another,” the UN Charter which requires all member states to refrain from the threat or use of force against other member states while preserving state sovereignty, even as it has not acceded to the 1952 International Convention for the unification of certain rules relating to Arrest of Sea-going Ships or the 1999 replacement, both of which Syria is a party to. Even more, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the DPRK has seemingly withdrawn, prohibits “any propaganda for war” which this law has engaged in, even if you take into account the typical imperial reservations by the U$ Congress. Inspection and monitoring required by this act would undoubtedly violate the 1988 Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against Safety of Maritime Navigation which prohibits individuals from unlawfully and intentionally seizing and taking control of “a ship by force or threat thereof or any other form of intimidation; or…[destroying] a ship or [causing] damage to a ship or to its cargo which is likely to endanger the safe navigation of that ship.” Since the DPRK, Iran, Russia, Syria, and China, all of which acceded to the previous convention, just like the U$, are serious about defending themselves from outside threats, there is no doubt they will defend themselves, meaning that U$ actions to take commercial vessels will become an act of war since those ships cannot, by any means, be considered warships.
There are many more treaties I could consider here in this section, but I do not wish to do that at this time. [7] There is no doubt that the use of force against a state would be illegal as any act of war or forceful action has to be approved by the UN Security Council but also violates the US Constitution which requires that war can only be declared by Congress, with this law basically giving that power to the President, once again. I know that citing the U$ Constitution may seem like a bourgeois approach, but it is only used here to show that the law is illegal in many forms. Hence, it isn’t worth going through every single international law since the U$ will likely never be held to account for it.
A conclusion
With all of these approaches, it is evident that the DPRK was right to say the law is “the most heinous act against humanity” and the Russians to call it “simply unthinkable” as it will lead to a declaration of war with further ban on U$ ships entering sovereign Russian waters. After all, as the murderous empire, the U$ has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which has been ratified by the Russians and Chinese while the DRPK and Iran have signed the agreement, with the Syrians neither signing or ratifying it. Hence, the U$ may feel it has the “right” to enter the sovereign waters of Russia, China, Syria, and Iran so they can suffocate the DPRK’s government, making in “bow” in submission.
The DPRK is stuck in a difficult situation. Recently, the DPRK has foiled an attempted joint CIA-South Korean IS (Intelligence Service) attempt to assassinate Kim Jong Un. The Ministry of State Security of the DPRK said on May 5 that both forces “hatched a vicious plot to hurt the supreme leadership of the DPRK…[using] biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance,” handing the perpetrator, part of a terrorist group that was within the country, $20,000 to commit the act. [8] This shows that the DPRK’s efforts at self-defense on its islands, with its power stations, while standing up to the U$ imperialists with “deterrence for self-defence.” These ideals are, in a sense, echoed by the 25% of Russians who believe that nuclear weapons can be a “deterrent for the most aggressive forces in the world” with the “fear of mutually assured destruction encourages peaceful conflict resolution” and honored even by the Zimbabwean state paper, The Herald. If this isn’t enough, just like Syria, to an extent, the DPRK, is surrounded by enemies (Japan, South Korea, and the ever-present U$). However, they are buoyed by the anti-THAAD protests in South Korea even as the South Korean government (not the one that was recently elected) has liked the U$ missile “shield” program in the past, even as there are daily protests against it “by villagers in Seongju and Gimcheon.” But the DPRK should rest assured even though the U$ and S. Korean forces still need to properly understand the will of DPRK that Cuba and Syria have pledged their solidarity with them. Even though this solidarity will not, by itself, stop the Pentagon from leading 300,000 troops in a rehearsal for military invasion and “decapitation” of the regime, assisted by, of course, the South Korean government, but it is an important part of an anti-imperialist alliance against U$ (and Western) imperialist actions which aim to undermine “unfriendly” governments, even if they differ in ideology.
Recently, the orange menace, the purveyor of “gunboat diplomacy,” says he is willing to talk with Kim Jong Un. However, this requires that the DPRK has to surrender to U$ imperialism, a sentiment reinforced by a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Anthony Ruggiero, who declared that the orange menace should only meet with Kim Jong Un if the DPRK surrenders its nuclear weapons, close its supposed “prison camps,” and not “threatening” the U$, saying it should bow before US, which is equally unacceptable. It is worth pointing out that many of those living in the US have internalized anti-communist and imperial values. For one, 68% of the U$ feels it “is important that the U.S. be No. 1 in the world militarily,” 86% of the populace has unfavorable views of the DPRK, with “Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq” also in the same category. With this chauvinism of US populace, it should come as no surprise that 65% of the U$ are concerned about the DPRK with nuclear weapons, with 78%, in Pew’s results, having an “unfavorable view” of the country.
Despite the recent spat between the state media of the DPRK and Chinese media over the justified nuclear and missile program of the DPRK, it seems evident that the “strong bond between the two countries” will stay in place. [9] Hence, this “expected” victory for the U$ imperialists will not happen as the imperial threats continue from the “World’s Worst Human Rights Abuser.” After all, the U$ hopes they will remove the DPRK’s “nuclear deterrence for self-defence” is not going to happen. With the power of the DPRK pushed along by the WPK, even under current conditions, this can resist the hardline positions of the U$ State Department, with Mark Toner showing that he is one of the many faces of imperialism by saying that “our conviction that we need to apply greater pressure on North Korea to get it to comply to international concerns. There are a number of options…isolation, diplomatic isolation being another one.”
Adding to this, it is troubling that China agreed to “suspend all coal imports from North Korea until the end of this year” in order to curry favor of the U$, to appease it. After all, as some recently pointed out, if China brought the DPRK economy to its knees, U$ imperialism would win. With the WPK having the determination to not “yield to the war threats being hurled right now by the criminal agents of U.S. imperialism” with every right to self-defense, including against the “biggest nuclear weapons state in the world,” the United States, will China hold its ground? The likelihood is that they ultimately will not as they are Chinese social-imperialists after all. Likely CIA plant Brian Becker, ANSWER Coalition National Coordinator, addressed this at the end of an April 18 post in Liberation News, declaring “Today, the danger of igniting regional and global confrontation is real. China and Russia are backpedaling, hoping that their prudence, or possible appeasement, will deter or deflect the danger. Their position is understandable given the level of risk. But appeasement, as we know from history, poses its own risks in the face of bullying and aggression. Appeasing the bully, the aggressor, invites more not less aggression.”
While Mr. Becker makes a valid point, he is understating the existing revisionism and social-imperialism of China and Russia. Any concessions to the US imperialists should be strongly criticized, no matter if by Russia, China, or any other state. As the CIA creates the Korea Mission Center to “purposefully integrate and direct CIA efforts against the serious threats to the United States and its allies emanating from North Korea,” and watch the country like a persistent hawk, complains about the DPRK going to the Belt and Road Forum, the “existential threat” of the DPRK (in the strange mind of CIA chief Mike Pompeo) is being closely scrutinized, like always, by the imperialists. [10] With accusations abound by the DPRK throughout the bourgeois media, the nation can only use its own wit and existing alliances in case of an imperial attack. If war under unpredictable orange menace occurs, we should stand beside the DPRK in solidarity even if the war is popular within the United States, any Western country, and especially within those countries in the global periphery.
Notes
[1] If he grants a humanitarian waiver, there are activities relating to “identifying or recovering the remains” of past POWs taken during the Great Fatherland Liberation War (“Korean War”) from 1950-1953, complying with the agreement on the UN headquarters or Convention on Consular Relations, or allowing “financial services” by a non-DPRK foreign financial entity as part of a waiver.
[2] The CIA World Factbook lists the following as the country’s industries: “military products; machine building, electric power, chemicals; mining (coal, iron ore, limestone, magnesite, graphite, copper, zinc, lead, and precious metals), metallurgy; textiles, food processing; tourism.” It also says the country exports “minerals, metallurgical products, manufactures (including armaments), textiles, agricultural and fishery products” while importing “petroleum, coking coal, machinery and equipment, textiles, grain” with their biggest trade partner (76.4% from China, 5.5% from the Republic of the Congo).
[3] Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (New York: Verso Books, 2004), 8, 10-11.
[4] Ibid, 12-14, 17, 37-38, 47.
[5] Ibid, 68-70, 72, 77-78, 102, 133, 195, 235, 273, 309, 392.
[6] There are numerous other miscellaneous provisions manifested in sections 1-3, 301-304.
[7] See Wikipedia pages “list of treaties,” “list of international declarations,” “law of war” and the ICRC’s “Treaties, States Parties and Commentaries” page along with the Wikipedia category “Treaties adopted by United Nations General Assembly resolutions.” While Wikipedia is never source that should be cited in general, these links are a good starting point, which is why they are included here.
[8] KCNA, “DPRK Warns U.S., S. Korean Intelligence Agencies of Merciless Punishment: Ministry of State Security,” May 5, 2017; KCNA, “Statement of DPRK Central Public Prosecutors Office,” May 12, 2017; KCNA, “DPRK Foreign Ministry Gives Briefing on Situation,” May 11, 2017; North Korea wants South’s spy chief extradited over alleged Kim plot,” CNN, May 12, 2017.
[9] A DPRK (North Korean) view on the current situation as noted in a BBC interview. On May 3, 2017, KCNA released an article titled “Commentary on DPRK-China Relations” which was reprinted in Rodong Sinmun under the title “Reckless Remarks Undermining DPRK-China Relations Should Be Stopped,” by Kim Chol, a Vice Minister in the Korean Army, the same person who the bourgeois media claimed falsely was executed by mortal bombardment even though Foreign Policy said it was pure speculation. His article says the following:
The People’s Daily and the Global Times, widely known as media speaking for the official stand of the Chinese party and government, have recently carried commentaries asserting that the DPRK’s access to nukes poses a threat to the national interests of China. They shifted the blame for the deteriorated relations between the DPRK and China onto the DPRK and raised lame excuses for the base acts of dancing to the tune of the U.S. Those commentaries claimed that the DPRK poses a threat to “the security in the northeastern region of China” by conducting nuclear tests less than 100 km away from its border with China. They even talked rubbish that the DPRK strains the situation in Northeast Asia and “offers the U.S. excuses for deploying more strategic assets” in the region. Not content with such paradox, the commentaries asserted that to remain averse to the DPRK’s access to nukes is to preserve interests common to the U.S. and China, calling for slapping harsher sanctions against the DPRK in order to avert a war which would bring danger to China. The newspapers, even claiming China holds the initiative in handling the DPRK-China relations, made no scruple of letting out a string of provocative remarks urging the DPRK to choose one among such options if it doesn’t want military confrontation with China–“whether to face protracted isolation or to preserve national security by making a U-turn” and whether to break Sino-DPRK friendship or to dismantle its nukes. This is just a wanton violation of the independent and legitimate rights, dignity and supreme interests of the DPRK and, furthermore, constitutes an undisguised threat to an honest-minded neighboring country which has a long history and tradition of friendship. China is hyping up “damage caused by the DPRK’s nuclear tests” in its three northeastern provinces. This only reveals the ulterior purpose sought by it, being displeased with the DPRK’s rapid development of nukes. As far as “violation of national interests” oft-repeated by politicians and media persons of China is concerned, it is just the issue that the DPRK should rather talk much about. It is just the DPRK whose strategic interests have been repeatedly violated due to insincerity and betrayal on the part of its partner, not China at all. Some theorists of China are spouting a load of nonsense that the DPRK’s access to nukes strains the situation in Northeast Asia and offers the U.S. an excuse for beefing up its strategic assets in the region. But the U.S. had activated its strategy for dominating Asia-Pacific long before the DPRK had access to nukes, and its primary target is just China. China should acknowledge in an honest manner that the DPRK has just contributed to protecting peace and security of China, foiling the U.S. scheme for aggression by waging a hard fight in the frontline of the showdown with the U.S. for more than seven decades, and thank the DPRK for it. Some ignorant politicians and media persons of China daringly assert that the traditional relations of the DPRK-China friendship were in line with the interests of each county in the past. They are advised to clearly understand the essence of history before opening their mouth. Their call for not only slapping stricter sanctions but also not ruling out a military intervention if the DPRK refuses to abandon its nuclear program is no more than an extremely ego-driven theory based on big-power chauvinism that not only the strategic interests but also the dignity and vital rights of the DPRK should be sacrificed for the interests of China. One must clearly understand that the DPRK’s line of access to nukes for the existence and development of the country can neither be changed nor shaken and that the DPRK will never beg for the maintenance of friendship with China, risking its nuclear program which is as precious as its own life, no matter how valuable the friendship is. The DPRK, which has already become one of the most powerful nuclear weapons state, does not feel the need to think over how many options it has now. China should no longer try to test the limits of the DPRK’s patience but make proper strategic option, facing up to the situation. China had better ponder over the grave consequences to be entailed by its reckless act of chopping down the pillar of the DPRK-China relations.
A Global Times piece DIRECTLY responds, saying that the above piece is just a “stronger disgruntling” but not mentioning China’s support for UN sanctions “against North Korea” or Pyongyang’s next step, with the editorial board claiming that the editorial is “nothing more than a hyper-aggressive piece completely filled with nationalistic passion” and claims that the DPRK does not understand “Beijing’s deep concern for the potential risks posed by Pyongyang’s nuclear tests to people living in northeastern China.” Adding to this is evidence that the Mr. Chol was onto something when he said that “the People’s Daily and the Global Times…have recently carried commentaries asserting that the DPRK’s access to nukes poses a threat to the national interests of China.” The Global Times carried many commentaries to this effect in recent days: “Is China-North Korea friendship treaty outdated?” (May 3), “China, US share goal of halting North Korean nuclear tests” (May 2), “Is breakthrough likely on NK nuke issue?” (May 1), and “Pyongyang’s failed missile test adds to Korean Peninsula tensions” (April 29). The People’s Daily has done the same thing, running similar pieces: “Responsible actions needed to ensure peace of Korean Peninsula: People’s Daily” (May 2), “Commentary: the Korean Peninsula is not the Middle East” (April 28), “US, DPRK must hold talks before it’s too late” (April 18), and “Can Korean Peninsula go from geopolitical flashpoint to stable place of peace?” (Feb. 17). Also see this article in Sina English: “China calls for end to provocations on NK issue.”
[ |
year," the ACMD chairman said.
"They now list 200 different psychoactive substances that lie outside our existing scope of regulation.
Prof Les Iversen said untested legal highs were no longer 'a nice set of party drugs that we can let the kids to get on with'. Photograph: Home Office/PA
"Our problem is to know how many of these are really being used in this country and how harmful they are. This is difficult because we can't possibly address all classes of compound at once, unless we and the government can think of clever ways of regulating."
He said they were particularly worried about the impact of a synthetic drug that is becoming widely available in Britain that imitates the hallucinogenic effects of LSD, which once fuelled the 1960s psychedelic era but has been out of popularity for more than 30 years.
Iversen said a dose of synthetic LSD could be measured in micrograms, which was so minute that it could not even be measured with an analytical scale. It was usually supplied in a diluted solution, as a drop on a piece of blotting paper, but it was also possible to buy it in powder, spray or fluid form.
"The dangers of an overdose are clearly immense. We are looking at it with a great deal of caution and worry," he said.
He added that the misuse of existing consumer laws, which has led to legal highs being sold as plant food, had caused them to be widely available.
"They are a set of chemicals that are potentially very dangerous. Novel psychoactive chemicals can be made in China one week and shipped to the UK for human consumption the next without any safety data.
"To me that is an appalling situation. Sooner or later we will get unexpected serious harms emerging from one or other of these compounds. We will then blame ourselves for letting them be sold without any safety precautions," warned Iversen.
He rejected a new approach in New Zealand, which tests and licenses the sale of these new psychoactive substances, as unworkable in Britain, but said a solution might be found by tweaking the Medicines Act or using consumer protection laws.READER REPORT: New Zealand's unspoken death toll TRACEY TWADDLE
123rf.com OPTIONS: We should be using modern medicine and support services for mental health in the same way we have used technology and statistics to reduce the road toll, says Tracey.
In New Zealand, we speak a lot about the road toll.
The yearly toll, the holiday toll, the number of people who die each year on our roads. And also the measures taken to try to reduce it - reducing speed, changing drink driving rules and maybe even the driving age.
However there is one toll, one yearly number of deaths, by a particular cause that is not really discussed, not really focussed on and I believe not enough is being done to make it smaller - our suicide rate.
In 2013, from January to December, 253 people died on our roads. This has been steadily decreasing since 1987, when it was 795 people.
In 2013/14, during the statistical 12 months, 529 people died from suicide. This has been hovering about the mid 500s since 1997.
In the past seven years, 2391 people died on our roads. In the same timeframe, 3787 people committed suicide.
We may have reached the point of limited returns with our current focus on speed, alcohol and safety with respect to our road toll. But surely the mental health of our nation deserves the same focus on targeted reduction of numbers.
Although money has been spent on advertising and awareness of mental health issues, money also needs to be spent on the nitty gritty end.
Beds and emergency assistance for people who are about to add to this toll. And much more on prevention of this. People who have asked for help, and at present are being turned away and put off by the hoops to be jumped though to get assistance. Or refusal of care because of lack of beds. Many people have to get to this stage to receive care, because there was no funding to nip it in the bud.
We have modern medicine and support services. We should be using them in the same way we have used technology and statistics to reduce the road toll.
Our road toll has reduced because of a focus on eliminating risk factors and our mental healthcare should be no different.
Mental illness can be invisible. But we need to be discussing this number of suicides along with the road toll.
Is our spending comparable? I don't have access to that information, but I would be very interested to know.
So from now on, every time the number of road deaths is mentioned I want the suicide rate for the same timeframe mentioned too. Holiday road toll? Holiday suicide rate for the same timeframe so we don't forget, and so it is spoken.
It is real. We need to do something about it. Now.
Read more:
* Why are Kiwi youth committing suicide?
* Suicide and NZ 'epidemic'
* 'I was orphaned by suicide'
Help
* National suicide prevention
* Community Action on Suicide Prevention Education and Research (CASPER)
CommentsTomboys can’t have all the fun. Here’s 10 simple yet marvelously effect pieces to spice up your autumn outfits. 1. Panama Hats Nordstrom Urban Outfitters J.Crew Panama hats are awesome. Specifically, felt panama hats in dark neutrals such as rich chocolate browns, camels and blacks are all the rage amongst the young, chic, and unintimidated by statement headwear. Even on good hair days (aka days I bother showering), I find myself grasping my coffee panama hat on the way out the door. It adds a wonderfully unfussy finishing sheen to whatever I’m wearing, ands shows I’m unafraid of bold headwear. Don’t be tempted by embellishment or patterns—the charm of a timeless piece lies in simplicity, not excess. Instead, add light layers and hardware accessories for a result that says: tough but classy. Who doesn’t adore a gritty broad? 2. High-waisted skinny jeans
Rag & Bone Top Shop Forever 21 H&M Chances are you’re already set on low rise denim. Our generation has been stocking up on bum-grazing waistlines since middle school. As much as I love visible hip bones (I really really love hip bones), there’s a rich world outside low cut that we should all be exploring. High-waisted skinny jeans, particularly in a super soft stretchy fabric, are immensely flattering to the female form. Low rise straightens your body; high rise accentuates curves. Every time I slip into mine, I can’t help taking a moment to admire my newly defined hourglass shape in the mirror.The disclosure forms cover Jan. 1, 2014 to May 14 of this year. They show that even as his wife has begun her pursuit of the presidency, Mr. Clinton has shown no signs of slowing down: He gave three speeches in recent days, including one Thursday for the American Institute of Architects in Atlanta, and two on Tuesday in New York — one for Univision Management and one for Apollo Management Holdings.
The disclosure forms do not reveal what taxes the couple paid on their income, but a campaign official who requested anonymity said they had paid an effective tax rate of about 30 percent.
Mrs. Clinton’s last filing, which covered her final years as secretary of state, disclosed more than $16 million in income. Most of the money, mainly covering 2012, stemmed from about 70 honorariums for President Clinton.
The Clintons have come under increasing scrutiny for their financial activities since she announced her run for president last month. Much of the attention has been focused on the Clinton Foundation and the donations it received from foreign entities during the time that she was secretary of state.
But the couple has also faced criticism for giving highly paid speeches to certain groups, particularly the financial industry.
The speaking circuit has enriched many well-known Washington figures and former presidents, but the exorbitant pay for light work can distance them from the realities most Americans experience at their jobs. In one case, the report shows, Mrs. Clinton received $100,000 for a speech to the California Medical Association — by satellite.A Mario game, never brought over-seas, exclusive to Japan and without an english translation?!
Yes, for as hard as it is to believe, this obscure Mario title never saw the light of day in any country outside of Japan, thanks to the weird distribution method of kiosks back in ‘98, and thanks due to Nintendo’s International Division shutting down sales of all SNES games in ‘97.
This neat little package includes not only one, but 2 games! That’s right, the original Wrecking Crew for the NES was ported and included alongside its sequel, Wrecking Crew ‘98!
Now you can enjoy the flexibility of having both games in one single ROM, now in full english text thanks to the incredible work of the RomHacking community!
The game is fully playable, from start to finish! Finally, a long forgotten game will see the light of day overseas, thanks to hackers doing what Nintendon’t!
TO-DO:
The credits sequence still uses the Japanese names for the characters in English alphabet. An upcoming update will be released to translate these names to their official English names and/or change those new characters to proper English “pun-ful” names. Keep an eye for the update!
Known bug:
After defeating Spike, once the “It has been a while…” text finished loading, and you press Start, the game crashes out for no reason with a black screen. However, it seems that this particular crash doesn’t happen in any of the other 2 paragraphs of text in this match. Also, this seems to happen with both the text after you beat him to unlock the Secret base and the second time you beat him too.
If someone can help out to fix this issue, please be sure to contact ShadowOne333! Any help will be greatly appreciated!Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
March 31, 2014, 5:03 PM GMT By Meghan Holohan
A measles outbreak in Orange County in California, affecting 21 people is the most recent example of the return of the highly contagious viral illness.
“There have been 49 cases confirmed in the state so far this year,” Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC News’ chief medical editor told TODAY’s Natalie Morales. “Eight big pockets are accounting for 77 percent of cases in this country and there are two reasons: under-vaccinated children or unvaccinated children.”
Measles is a respiratory infection that causes fever, runny noses, and a rash. In some cases, it can lead to death. Reports of measles, once thought to be eradicated in the United States, have been increasing across the country and experts expect that more outbreaks will be seen. Officials in New York City and San Francisco have also seen cases.
Vaccinated people can carry the disease and when they come into contact with unvaccinated people these people contract the illness. Ninety percent of the time unvaccinated people get the illness, said Dr. Greg Wallace, Head of the Centers for Disease Control Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Polio team.
“It is the most contagious of the vaccinated diseases,” Wallace said.
Because there are few effective treatments for measles, vaccines are the best way to prevent it. Children should receive the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine between 12 to 15 months of age and a booster before they enter school between the ages of 2 to 4 years old, Wallace and Snyderman recommend. If adults are working with children or in health care or traveling — especially if they were born before 1989 when the second shot was required — they might want to receive a booster for additional protection.
“It’s certainly effective and it is certainly safe, but there can be side effects. Some small percentage, less than 10 percent, may get a mild fever and even a rash,” Wallace said, adding that the illness is far worse than the side-effects of the vaccine.
“The vaccine does work and these outbreaks don’t occur unless you have enough people who have not been vaccinated.”
If people suspect they have measles they should call the doctor’s office or emergency room ahead of time so the staff can prepare to isolate them to prevent further spread of the illness, Wallace said.
While there have not been any deaths in the United States due to measles in several years, Wallace said people died during an outbreak in France in 2011. Both Wallace and Snyderman stress the importance of vaccination.
“I want parents to be a little scared because 15 years ago, we thought we eradicated measles in this country. And we've seen an uptick. We shouldn’t fool ourselves,” Snyderman said.During the third presidential debate, Hillary Clinton praised President Obama’s economic performance, adding: “He has cut the deficit by two-thirds.”
Fact-Check: FALSE
This repeated Democratic canard relies on fraudulent accounting that only starts more than halfway through Obama’s first year in office, after the $862 billion stimulus, the massive omnibus spending bill (“porkulus”), and the deployment of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was signed by Obama’s predecessor but for which he voted.
As Breitbart News noted when President Obama claimed in January to have cut the deficit by “almost three-quarters”:
This is pure fiction. Obama has doubled the national debt, and it’s not because he cut the deficit. Rather, he spent staggering amounts of money in his first months in office–which he assigns, dishonestly, to the previous fiscal year, under George W. Bush. He “cut” (i.e. spent more gradually) from that spending, but only under protest, after Republicans took the House in 2010.
The truth is that Obama vastly expanded the deficit in a doomed and ill-conceived experiment in Keynesian stimulus spending, much of which was wasted on priorities that helped Obama’s political supporters — especially the public sector unions — but did little for the economy.Will This Year's Republican Convention Be Like 1880?
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In July of this year approximately 50,000 people will attend the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
Current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is presently leading his opponents in the race to get enough delegates to secure the party nomination.
However, many have expressed concern over the controversial Trump becoming the nominee and have looked for an anti-Trump to get the nomination in spite of lacking a larger share of votes and delegates.
As a result, there is a chance that this year's GOP Convention will resemble the party's 1880 convention, which had a brokered result.
1880
In the race for the White House, the Republican Party found itself divided from within between two factions, the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds.
Stalwarts were the "crony capitalist" or "machine politics" wing of the party and were led by New York Senator Roscoe Conkling.
Half-Breeds wanted to reform the "spoils system" that kept the Stalwarts in power. They were led by Maine Senator James E. Blaine.
While the Stalwarts put forth former president and general Ulysses S. Grant as their candidate, the Half-Breeds chose Blaine.
Because of the divide, neither candidate entered the 1880 convention with a clear majority of delegates to secure the nomination. The contested convention became a brokered one as several ballots were cast without a clear victor.
"Although nearly two-thirds of the delegates had been pledged to either Grant or his Half-Breed opponent Blaine when the Republican National Convention convened, securing a majority of 370 proved impossible for either candidate," noted Ashley Portero of Demand Media.
The voting continued for three days with the delegates eventually backing someone who wasn't even a candidate.
"After more than 30 ballots resulted in a stalemate, James Garfield emerged as a compromise candidate. At the 36th ballot, when Grant still had the support [of] 309 delegates, the party's moderate and liberal factions joined forces behind Garfield, sweeping him to victory with the support of 399 delegates," Portero noted.
Garfield went on to win the presidential election in November, only to be assassinated the following year.
2016
Despite the controversial nature of his rhetoric and background, Trump has successfully led a crowded Republican field in the number of primaries won and delegates accrued.
Nevertheless, Republican opponents U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich continue to put up a sincere enough struggle that some believe Trump may fail to get the majority of delegates necessary to win on the first ballot (1,237).
Some have spoken openly of a "contested convention" in which a compromise figure may become the nominee.
In a brokered convention, the nominee selected to represent the party in the national election does not have to have been a candidate during the primary season.
Hence, former House Speaker John Boehner and the Koch brothers have suggested current House Speaker Paul Ryan become the nominee.
"Charles Koch is confident House Speaker Paul Ryan could emerge from the Republican National Convention as the party's nominee if Donald Trump comes up at least 100 delegates shy, he has told friends privately," reported The Huffington Post.
"People close to Ryan continue to insist publicly that he has no interest in the nomination. And one associate of the speaker said he "guarantees" there has been no conversation with Charles Koch about the possibility …."
In this respect, Ryan is similar to Garfield, who insisted he was not a candidate until the moment he became the nominee.
Skepticism
At the start of April, Trump holds a strong lead in the GOP primary season, having gotten 737 of the necessary 1237 delegates to secure the nomination; his nearest opponent, Sen. Cruz, has 470.
While many have talked or advocated for a brokered convention come July, others, including Daniel Klinghard of Fortune, have stated that no such scenario will play out.
In a column published last month, Klinghard noted that a brokered Republican convention has not occurred since 1920, when Warren G. Harding got the nomination.
"The convention turned to Garfield because two major blocks were deadlocked, unable to beat one another and unwilling to compromise. It turned to Harding because there were no standout candidates who came to the convention with a clear following," wrote Klinghard.
"Rejecting a popular candidate today — particularly one who has as enthusiastic a following as Trump — means rejecting that candidate's supporters, who expect that the convention will represent their will."Acharya Balkrishna, the head of yoga expert Baba Ramdev-run FMCG company Patanjali and Radhakishan Damani of D-Mart have found their place along with Mukesh Ambani’s in the Hurun India rich list 2017.
A massive rally in the stock market and the resultant jump in Reliance stocks saw the wealth of Ambani shooting up by a massive 58% to Rs 2.57 trillion this year, says the report which is into the sixth year.
Ambani retains the richest Indian title for the sixth year running and this year he has climbed to top 15 in the Hurun global rich list for the first time. His wealth is 50 per cent more than GDP of Yemen, the country of his birth.
“Balkrishna, CEO of Patanjali and childhood friend of Ramdev, is now among the top 10 rich people in the country. Damani, the new retail king, of D-Mart is the biggest gainer with wealth increase of 320 per cent. The blockbuster listing of Avenue Supermarts, also added eight new entries in the rich list,” Hurun said in a statement.
Balkrishna rose to the eighth position from 25th last year, after seeing his wealth grow by 173% to Rs 70,000 crore. Patanjali, with a turnover of Rs 10,561 crore in FY17 has been a close competition to major global brands.
The biggest gainer (321%) was Damani, the 62- year-old chairman of Avenue Supermarts, followed by Anurang Jain and family of Endurance Tech with a rise of 286%.
The wealth calculation was as of July 31, when the rate of exchange to the dollar was 64.1, it added.
At 34, Divyank Turakhia of Media.net is the youngest self-made billionaire. He joins five other self-made individuals under-40, all from new technology businesses.
The 42-year-old Bengaluru-based Ambiga Subramanian is the youngest self-made woman in the list. She sold her shares in Mu-Sigma, the data analytics unicorn that she co-founded. There are 51 women in the rich list this year.
The cut-off to top 100 has more than doubled to Rs 8,400 crore since 2013. There are 136 billionaires this year, a record since the inception of Hurun Rich List in 2012.
In terms of cities, Mumbai tops the list with 182 individuals followed by New Delhi (117) and Bengaluru (51). Chennai and Kanpur enter the top 10 cities for the first time with 15 and 8 new additions, respectively.
On average, wealth of the listers has risen by 11 per cent over 2016 and at least, 16 in the list saw their wealth double this year. While the number of dollar billionaires jumped to 136 from 126 in 2016 as many as 100 individuals saw their wealth decline.
Till July 31, Sensex gained 16.1 per cent or 23.3x over 19.6x on July 31, 2016, while BSE Mid Cap rose 16.4 per cent and BSE Small Cap rose 2.72 per cent. The rupee declined 3 per cent against the dollar. “The market capitalisation of all listed firms is now equivalent to 84 per cent of nominal GDP- highest in the emerging markets,” says Anas Rahman Junaid of Hurun Report India.
The 24-year-old Eklavya Juneja of Mankind Pharma is the youngest person in the list with a 12 per cent stake.
Kushal Pal Singh of DLF is the richest real estate billionaire with Rs 27,400 crore. Mangal Prabhat Lodha of the Lodha Group is the richest private real estate developer in the list with a wealth of Rs 15,700 crore followed by Jithendra Virwani of Embassy Property with Rs 8,800 crore.
With 26 new entrants, Ahmedabad breaks into top 5 and with 22 and 11 listers, Chennai and Kanpur respectively breaks into top 10 cities. There are 18 new cities in this year’s list. Interestingly, Udaipur has three listers, Vadodara has 2, and Kanchipuram and Faridabad has one each.
The Hurun report is a luxury publishing and events group set up in London in 1998 with strong presence in China.
First Published: Sep 26, 2017 11:08 ISTBeing called a ‘good man’ by Trump is sometimes an omen
President Donald Trump walks down the steps of Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, N.J., Friday, Sept. 29, 2017. Trump is spending the weekend in Bedminster, N.J., at his golf club. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
BRANCHBURG, N.J. (AP) — Sometimes it’s better not to be a nice guy.
President Donald Trump has dismissed and accepted the resignations of a growing list of administration officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
Trump said before the news broke that he was disappointed with Price for reportedly taking numerous, expensive charter flights, when cheaper commercial options were available. But he also offered compliments.
“He’s a very, very fine man,” Trump repeated as he departed the White House en route to his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
“I felt very badly because Secretary Price is a good man,” Trump said, adding later: “I think it’s a shame because as a human being, Tom Price is very good man.”
It’s not the first time Trump has offered praise just before or after showing someone the door.
As Trump was preparing to part ways with his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, he was asked about Bannon’s fate at a news conference in New York.
“I like Mr. Bannon. He’s a friend of mine,” said Trump, before trying to distance himself from his former general election CEO by pointing out that he’d won the primaries before Bannon came on board.
“I like him. He’s a good man. He is not a racist, I can tell you that,” Trump said, adding: “He’s a good person and I think the press treats him, frankly, very unfairly.”
Days later, Bannon was out.
It was a similar case for Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus. Trump announced he was replacing Priebus via tweet from aboard Air Force One last July. Not long after, Trump spoke with reporters on a rainy tarmac, where he repeated his “good man” kiss of death.
“Reince is a good man. John Kelly will do a fantastic job. Gen. Kelly has been a star, done an incredible job thus far. Respected by everybody. A great, great American.”
As for Priebus? “Reince Priebus, a good man,” Trump repeated, sounding like a tombstone engraving.
Trump also had kind words for his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, whose dismissal he has seemed to most regret.
The day after Flynn’s forced resignation, Trump called Flynn “a wonderful man” at a White House news conference and again blamed the news media for treating him “very, very unfairly.”
He also defended taking so long to dismiss Flynn after being warned of potential issues.
“This man has served for many years,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News. “He’s a general, he’s a — in my opinion — a very good person.”False rumors on the internet are nothing new, especially in the Game of Thrones fandom. In the early days of the show, before filming even began, there were IMDb shenanigans when a creative fan added Holly Marie Combs’s name to the cast listings as playing the part of Catelyn Stark. Obviously that was untrue, and it demonstrated just how easy it is for anyone with a login to update the movie and television database.
Part of IMDb’s charm is that anyone can update it, but unfortunately it can lead to trolling and misinformation and that is the case this week when the cast listing for a season five episode was updated.
MAJOR SPOILERS below the cut!
Fortunately, the Huffington Post was able to get in touch with Michelle Fairley’s representation and they were able to confirm that rumors of Fairley returning to play Catelyn or Stoneheart were not true.
“There hasn’t been any discussion about her returning to the show after Season 3,” Fairley’s rep told HuffPost Entertainment. “As of now, this is completely incorrect.”
Sorry, folks, there’s no Lady Stoneheart in the works currently- just someone getting creative with IMDb once again. This actually happened last year, but that’s slipped people’s memories, and it didn’t make as big a ruckus last year. I believe the entry last year was removed before many people noticed.
The season five Fairley episode listing on the database is in the process of being removed.A Clinton Foundation official pushed Hillary Clinton's State Department to approve a request for Bill Clinton to speak at a North Korean industrial complex accused of funding the country's rogue nuclear program.
The invitation was facilitated by Tony Rodham, the brother of the Democratic nominee, who had entered now-defunct business partnerships with the Clinton bundler named as a "go-between" for the speech hosts and the secretary of state.
New emails shed light on a paid speech opportunity in North Korea that was first uncovered last year through a batch of documents provided to Citizens United through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The latest records to emerge from that case, which were obtained by the Washington Examiner, offer additional insight into the effort to persuade Bill Clinton to deliver remarks in the communist country.
Bill Clinton successfully sought State Department approval for 215 speeches while his wife served as secretary of state, earning $48 million on the speaking circuit during her tenure. His frequent addresses to foreign governments and entities that had interests pending before Hillary Clinton's agency has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest.
In March 2012, the former president received an invitation to speak at the Gaesong Industrial Complex in North Korea, where dozens of South Korean companies took advantage of the lower wages permitted north of the demilitarized zone by shifting parts of their operation there.
According to Human Rights Watch, the labor laws governing work at the Gaesong campus "fall well short of international standards."
Sung Chul Park, chairman of a textile manufacturer that employed North Koreans at the industrial compound, invited Bill Clinton to speak at the dedication ceremony for a church he had built on the property. He extended the request through Billy Kim, a Korean-born evangelical leader.
Kim cited a "mutual friend," Richard Park, as the "go-between" who would coordinate the request with Sung Chul Park and Bill Clinton.
Richard Park has donated heavily to Hillary Clinton's political campaigns dating back to her race for a U.S. Senate seat in New York, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. His $100,000 donation to Bill Clinton's second inaugural in 1996 was scrutinized after Richard Park was rewarded with an invitation to a state dinner with South Korea's president.
More recently, Richard Park's friendship with Tony Rodham earned him a direct line to Hillary Clinton while she served as secretary of state. In January 2013, the Korean businessman sent Rodham an email and asked him to "forward this to your sister," according to records released by the State Department in November.
When Hillary Clinton received the message, in which Richard Park wished her well after a stint in the hospital, she instructed her assistant to respond.
Richard Park and Rodham both worked as managers for a company called Eco-Micro Science Technologies, according to records from Nevada's secretary of state. The Carson City-based firm appears to have dissolved in 2011.
When a Clinton Foundation official reached out to Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's chief of staff, in May 2012 to inquire as to whether the State Department would have "concerns" about Bill Clinton speaking in North Korea, the official specified that the invitation "came via Tony Rodham."
Mills replied bluntly: "Decline it."
But Amitabh Desai, the foundation employee, pushed back, asking Mills to provide "any specific concerns... beyond just saying it would be concerning for [the U.S. government]" given Rodham's involvement. Desai noted Rodham was slated to meet with Bill Clinton "in a couple of hours."
The former president would have pocketed an unspecified fee for the North Korean speech had he delivered it, the invitation showed. Sung Chul Park, the businessman who wanted Bill Clinton to speak at the dedication of his church, would have "taken care of" the "honorarium" typically offered to high-profile speakers.
Sung Chul Park faced questions over alleged tax evasion in 2015 after Korean authorities accused him of purchasing shares in the textile corporation under family members' names.
His company suffered declines in 2013 after North Korea temporarily suspended operations at the Gaesong complex amid an expansion of sanctions resulting from its nuclear tests.
South Korea pulled its operations from the Gaesong campus in February after North Korea tested a long-range missile in violation of international restrictions on its weapons program.
Seoul reportedly accused the North Koreans of diverting money from work performed at the industrial park to its unsanctioned nuclear program.
As much as 70 percent of the wages paid to workers at Gaesong was reportedly confiscated by Pyongyang and spent on its weapons program and luxuries for the country's handful of rulers.
David Bossie, president of Citizens United, said the details of Bill Clinton's flirtation with the North Korean speech raises fresh questions about the former president's paid engagements.
"This new invitation letter makes clear that Bill Clinton will consider taking money from anyone and waste U.S. government time and resources to figure out the details," Bossie told the Examiner. "The American people have a right to know the full extent of Bill Clinton and Tony Rodham's ties to North Korea."
Bill Clinton's frequent and highly-paid speaking engagements, often funded by groups that had donated to the Clinton Foundation or lobbied the State Department, have posed uncomfortable questions to his wife's presidential campaign.
Hillary Clinton has struggled to address recent revelations that donors to her family's foundation were afforded special access above what was given to other agency outsiders. Allies of the Democratic nominee point to the foundation's global acts of charity when the organization has come under fire.
Hillary Clinton's own paid speeches became a magnet for criticism during the Democratic primary. Her acceptance of several six-figure speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in between her State Department service and the launch of her presidential campaign caused many progressives to question the authenticity of her anti-Wall Street rhetoric.In the coming weeks, Americans are going to be treated with the worst kind of Washington-speak regarding the tobacco legislation currently being considered by the Congress and Attorney Generals from forty different states. We will hear about the scourge of tobacco and the resultant premature deaths. We will hear about how this phalanx of government elates has suddenly grown a conscience after decades of subsidizing the product which, we are now told, "kills millions of Americans each year". Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer. This is not to say that smoking is good for you.... news flash: smoking is not good for you. If you are reading this article through the blue haze of cigarette smoke you should quit. The relevant question is, what is more harmful to the nation, second hand smoke or back handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric.
The tobacco settlement is not only about big taxes it's about big government. Under the current Senate version, the deal would require the creation of 17 new government bureaucracies to manage the tax windfall described above. But it is also about big government on a much more profound scale, namely, government big enough to protect us from ourselves. Even a conservative like me would support government big enough to protect us from foreign threats and threats to our domestic tranquility but the tobacco deal goes to the next level. Government big enough to protect us from our own stubborn wills. And a government of such plenary power, once conceived will hardly stop at tobacco. Surely the scourge of fatty foods and their attendant cost to the health care economy bears some consideration. How about the role of caffeine in fomenting greater stress in the lives of working Americans? Don't get me started about the dangers of sports utility vehicles! Those of you who find the tobacco deal acceptable should be warned as you sit, reading this magazine, sipping a cup of hot coffee with a hamburger on your mind for lunch. A government big enough to go after smokers is big enough to go after you.Bill Everitt
10:47 A.M. UPDATE:
Police in Kelowna, B.C., are in the early stages of their investigation after a passenger was stabbed to death aboard a bus and the suspect fled the scene.
RCMP Const. Kris Clark says the incident occurred early Thursday evening and that he couldn't say if the male victim died on the bus or after he was rushed to hospital.
A witness told Castanet that the man appeared to die on the scene, before he was rushed to hospital.
Details regarding the suspect or their description have not yet been released.
Les Milton, president of the Kelowna local of the Amalgamated Transit Workers union, says it was a rough night for passengers and the bus driver who looked on in horror.
Milton says the passenger is believed to have been stabbed in the neck when the bus pulled over at a regular stop.
9:20 p.m. Update:
A witness has come forward and given more details about the incident to Castanet.
The witness, who wanted to remain anonymous, was two feet away from the victim when he was attacked. She says their eyes met and he looked at her with disbelief that he had been stabbed. He was holding his hand over the bleeding neck wound he'd just received in an apparent random act of violence.
She helped another male passenger try to save the victim's life, she compressed an article of her clothing against the man's wound to try and stop him from losing more blood.
The witness says there did not appear to be an altercation on the bus before the man was fatally wounded by another passenger.
"He just got on the bus and before he got off he stabbed him in the neck," she says. "The driver had already stopped the bus when the guy stabbed him and ran off."
"By the time the cops got there, the guy was already dead, I could tell by his eyes."
She says the victim looked to be in his 50s and she said she had noticed him on the bus before.
The woman did not see what the attacker looked like; others reported the man was wearing a grey hoodie.
The stabbing occurred behind Safeway on Baron Road on the 6:21 p.m. University 8 bus. There were about 20 people on the bus at the time of the incident.
RCMP say the suspect is still at large.
An earlier version of this story mistakenly said the incident occurred before 6 p.m. It occurred around 6:30 p.m.
Were you on the bus? If you've already talked to the RCMP, please send your story to [email protected]
Photo: Jennifer Zielinski
A man was fatally stabbed on a Kelowna city bus just before 6 p.m. Thursday.
The suspect is still at large and RCMP have cordoned off several areas on Leckie Road behind the Staples building.
The witness told Castanet that just before 6 p.m. there was some altercation on the bus which resulted in a stabbing.
"The Kelowna RCMP were called to a report of a disturbance on a city transit bus on Baron Road behind Dilworth Centre, located at 2339 Highway 97," media relations officer Cst Kris Clark said in a release. "An unknown male passenger was rushed to hospital but he succumbed to his injuries. Efforts are underway to apprehend the suspect at this time."
There were other passengers on the bus at the time. They are currently being interviewed by the RCMP and will be transferred to another bus to complete their journeys.
RCMP also have an area near a dumpster at 2035 Quail Place taped off. It was overheard that the suspect may have dropped something in the area, although it's currently unclear what the item might be.
The road is blocked behind the Staples building West of Leckie and Baron.
Anyone with any information who has yet to speak with police are asked to call the Kelowna RCMP at 250-762-3300.
Remain anonymous by calling Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477, leaving a tip online at www |
, Kennedy asked him if he knew anything about it, and Tunney said, "this is crazy."
In 1992, a Boston Herald reporter reached Kennedy spokesman Paul Donovan. Donovan said Kennedy’s office had made other efforts to meet with Andropov, but nothing ever came of it. According to the Herald, Donovan said, "The rest of the memo is KGB fiction."
Denials from anyone tied to Kennedy might be expected, but Kennedy does have a sort of character reference in the arena of foreign relations from a Reagan insider, the administration’s disarmament negotiator Max Kampelman.
In his memoirs Entering New Worlds, Kampelman wrote that the Soviets liked working with Kennedy as a back-door conduit of information, and Kampelman welcomed the arrangement.
"I learned that the senator never acted or received information without informing the appropriate United States agency or official," Kampelman wrote.
In 1985, Reagan himself approved using Kennedy this way, and a working relationship grew between Kampelman and Kennedy.
While it is possible that the administration never caught wind of any contacts Tunney had with the KGB, it is worth noting that when the archivists at the Reagan Library searched the White House files on Kennedy, no episode involving the USSR in 1983 popped up.
Smoke, but no fire?
In the Reagan years, Kenneth Adelman served as deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and then director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. In 2015, we asked Adelman what he made of the KGB memo, and he dismissed it.
He had no idea if an overture might have been made, but even it had, Adelman said it didn’t matter.
"We knew senators were doing this sort of thing all the time, and we ignored it," Adelman said. "We didn’t think it was important, and it wasn’t. The administration didn’t care about it."
Stephen Cohen, a political scientist at Princeton University and New York University, suggested that KGB memos shouldn’t be taken at face value.
"As someone who has worked for years in once closed Soviet-era archives, I can tell you that many false documents can be found there," Cohen told PunditFact in 2015. "As the saying goes, rubbish in, rubbish out."
Paul Kengor, a political scientist at Grove City College who included the memo in his book about Reagan, The Crudasder, takes the memo seriously.
"The memo is absolutely accurate," Kengor said. "No question."
It is worth noting that the memo does not say how Tunney conveyed Kennedy's message beyond "through confidential contacts." In other words, the memo's author was relying on someone else and not speaking from his own experience, which introduces another level of uncertainty.
Our ruling
Gutfeld said that Kennedy met with the KGB in order to defeat Ronald Reagan in 1984. There is certainly evidence that Kennedy attempted to meet with Soviet officials, but it was with the approval of the Reagan White House.
The validity of a specific KGB memo saying Kennedy wanted to de-escalate tensions with Moscow over a U.S. plan to install nuclear missiles in Western Europe is widely questioned.
But more to the point, Gutfeld reached one conclusion that doesn’t add up. There is no evidence of Kennedy "meeting with the KGB." The evidence Gutfeld used on screen doesn’t support that contention.
We rate this claim False.Tom Mitchell has smashed the all-time record for most disposals in a home and away season.
Mitchell notched up disposal number 38 at the 10-minute mark of the fourth term against Carlton, then making it 749 disposals for the season.
It knocks off the previous record of 748, set by Collingwood's Wayne Richardson way back in 1971.
And he's done it with one whole game in hand.
He ended the game with 44 disposals, taking his season tally to 755 from just 21 games.
That's a lazy 36 disposals a game.
It's a remarkable feat that Triple M stats man Ash Chua was keeping an eye on all night, and he was absolutely thrilled when Mitchell collected the record-winning handball receive.
"That's the record, most number of touches in a home and away!" he immediately declared.
The boys were thrilled...not for Mitchell, but for how excited the Chu-man was.
"A momentous moment for Ash! This is utopia for me! Tommy Mitchell's broken a world record!" Swatta proclaimed.
"Ash Chu-man has nearly blown the top off his HP computer!"
Fev couldn't stop laughing.
"He couldn't speak! He couldn't get it out!" he said.
"This is what we live for, Fev, statisticians! Records!" Ash laughed.PJ Media
In light of recent revelations that the Islamic State is teaching its followers to eat non-Muslims, surely we can now all agree that, at least in this, ISIS is truly not Islamic?
Alas, no. Even the eating of “infidels” has precedents throughout Islamic history, especially as a terror tactic. Some well-documented anecdotes come to mind:
The first concerns that jihadi par excellence, Khalid bin al-Walid (d.642). Dubbed the “Sword of Allah” by Muhammad for his prowess, he holds a revered position among jihadi groups (ISIS’ black flag with white Arabic writing is a facsimile of the banner Khalid carried in battle). During the Ridda—or “apostasy wars” on several Arab tribes that sought to break away from Islam following Muhammad’s death—Khalid falsely accused Malik bin Nuwayra, a well-liked Arab chieftain, of apostasy. After slaughtering him, Khalid raped—Muslim sources call it “married”—Malik’s wife. Not content,
He [Khalid] ordered his [Malik’s] head and he combined it with two stones and cooked a pot over them. And Khalid ate from it that night to terrify the apostate Arab tribes and others. And it was said that Malik’s hair created such a blaze that the meat was so thoroughly cooked [from Muslim historian al-Tabari’s multi-volume chronicle, al-bidaya w’al nihaya (“the Beginning and the End”; Arabic excerpt here).
The second anecdote concerns the Islamic conquest of Spain. According to Muslim chronicler Ibn Abdul Hakam, after capturing a group of Christian winemakers, the Islamic invaders
made them prisoners. After that they took one of the vinedressers, slaughtered him, cut him in pieces, and boiled him, while the rest of his companions looked on. They had also boiled meat in other cauldrons. When the meat was cooked, they threw away the flesh of that man which they had boiled; no one knowing that it was thrown away: and they ate the meat which they had boiled, while the rest of the vinedressers were spectators. These did not doubt but that the Moslems ate the flesh of their companion; the rest being afterwards sent away informed the people of Andalus [Christian Spain] that the Moslems feed on human flesh, acquainting them with what had been done to the vinedresser [source].
Tarek ibn Ziyad—another jihadi extraordinaire, revered for burning his boats on reaching Spain’s shores as proof of his commitment to jihad or “martyrdom”—also had Christian captives slaughtered, cooked up, and apparently eaten in front of their fellow hostages. Then, according to Muslim historian Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Maqqari, the jihadi hero “allowed some of the captives to escape, that they might report to their countrymen what they had seen. And thus the stratagem produced the desired effect, since the report of the fugitives contributed in no small degree to increase the panic of the infidels” (The History of the Mohammedan Dynasty, p. 276).
Note that, according to the above cited Muslim chroniclers, the jihadis engaged in these cannibalistic practices to terrorize and create panic among infidels and apostates, that is, as a form of psychological warfare. This is further pronounced when, as they often do, the chroniclers quote or paraphrase Koran verses that call for “striking terror” into the hearts of nonbelievers (e.g., 3:151, 8:12, 8:60) in juxtaposition to the savage accounts they relay.
(I watched and linked to a video some years back of a modern day Egyptian cleric also making it clear that Khalid’s actions were calculated to terrify the apostates. Although YouTube has, as usual, taken the video down by now, here’s my original translation of what he said: “People wonder how our lord Khalid could have eaten from such meat? Oh yes—he ate from it! Our lord Khalid had a very strong character, a great appetite, and everything! All to terrorize the desert Arabs [apostates]. The matter requires determination; these matters require strength—terrorism.”)
There are more and related anecdotes. During the earliest Muslim invasions of Christian Syria, one of Muhammad’s companions, ‘Ubadah bin al-Samat, told a Christian commander that “We have tasted blood and find none sweeter than the blood of Romans,” meaning Byzantines and/or Christians. Whether literal or figurative, clearly such bloodthirsty references inspire the Islamic State’s worldview as evidenced by the latter’s assertion that “American blood is best, and we will taste it soon.”
Incidentally, veneration and/or emulation of early jihadi barbarity is not limited to “radical” or extreme outfits that, so we are always told, “have nothing to do with Islam.” None other than Al Azhar—the Muslim world’s most prestigious university, which hosted Obama’s 2009 “New Beginning” speech—teaches these accounts of Muslims eating infidels. The reason is simple: such a heritage doesn’t belong to ISIS any more than it does to Al Azhar. It belongs to Islam.
A final note: one school of thought maintains that in the aforementioned historical anecdotes, Muslims did not just pretend to devour their victims; they really did. However, later Muslim chroniclers, embarrassed by the bestial savagery of their coreligionists, portrayed the cannibalism as only pretend. If true, this further validates why ISIS isn’t merely teaching Muslims to pretend to devour their infidel victims, but to eat them in reality—as when one jihadi cut out and dug his teeth into the heart of a fallen Syrian soldier, after saying “I swear to Allah, soldiers of Bashar, you dogs—we will eat your heart and livers! Allahu Akbar!” (Yes, video here.)
This may also shed light on the Daily Mail‘s unsatisfactory explanation on why ISIS is promoting cannibalism. According to Haras Rafiq, the Daily’s authority whom it describes as a “practicing Muslim,” ISIS is promoting cannibalism “if there are no food supplies available during what they describe as a time of jihad.” Under such circumstances, “terrorists were encouraged to kill non-Muslims or Muslims who do not share their version of Islam for food.”
To be sure, eating humans in times of extreme duress and starvation—or “non-halal” food—is not particularly shocking and has been committed many times, past and present, by peoples of all races and religions. One is therefore left to wonder if Rafiq is yet another in a long line of embarrassed Muslim authorities trying to rationalize away their coreligionists’ depraved practices in the name of Islam.The final design for the Wairakei Rd/Russley Rd intersection will not allow access to the airport precinct from State Highway 1.
The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) will permanently close access to the Christchurch Airport end of Wairakei Rd from State Highway 1.
Drivers heading west on Wairakei Rd will still be able to turn left onto Russley Rd (State Highway 1), towards the Memorial Ave intersection, following the changes on Thursday night.
Drivers heading south on Russley Rd will still be able to turn left onto Wairakei Rd, towards the central city.
There will no longer be direct access to the airport precinct area and Orchard Rd from Wairakei Rd.
An NZTA statement said signs had been in place for several weeks to warn drivers of the impending changes.
The change is part of NZTA's Russley Rd upgrade project, and is needed for safety because the road is so close to the airport interchange lanes at Memorial Ave.
An underpass for cyclists and pedestrians is open just north of Wairakei Rd, at the newly-complete Harewood Rd roundabout.
NZTA said final engineering work to remove traffic islands and the roundabout at the Wairakei Rd intersection would likely take place at weekends and off-peak hours in October.
The roundabout is likely to be reduced to one lane during this time.But for the first time, the Beatles have given us an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent. And for the first time, it is not exploration which we sense, but consolidation. There is a touch of the Jefferson Airplane, a dab of Beach Boys vibrations, and a generous pat of gymnastics from The Who.
The one evident touch of originality appears in the structure of the album itself. The Beatles have shortened the “banding” between cuts so that one song seems to run into the next. This produces the possibility of a Pop symphony or oratorio, with distinct but related movements. Unfortunately, there is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtapositions of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related.
With one important exception, “Sergeant Pepper” is precious but devoid of gems. “A Day in the Life” is such a radical departure from the spirit of the album that it almost deserves its peninsular position (following the reprise of the “Sergeant Pepper” theme, it comes almost as an afterthought). It has nothing to do with posturing or put-on. It is a deadly earnest excursion in emotive music with a chilling lyric. Its orchestration is dissonant but sparse, and its mood is not whimsical nostalgia but irony.
With it, the Beatles have produced a glimpse of modern city life that is terrifying. It stands as one of the most important Lennon-McCartney compositions, and it is a historic Pop event.
“A Day in the Life” starts in a description of suicide. With the same conciseness displayed in “Eleanor Rigby,” the protagonist begins: “I read the news today, oh boy.” This mild interjection is the first hint of his disillusionment; compared with what is to follow, it is supremely ironic. “I saw the photograph,” he continues, in the voice of a melancholy choir boy:
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood aud stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was reallysure if he was from the House of Lords.
“A Day in the Life” could never make the Top 40, although it may influence a great many songs which do. Its lyric is sure to bring a sudden surge of Pop tragedy. The aimless, T. S. Eliot-like crowd, forever confronting pain and turning away, may well become a common symbol. And its narrator, subdued by the totality of his despair, may reappear in countless compositions as the silent, withdrawn hero.
Musically, there are already indications that the intense atonality of “A Day in the Life” is a key to the sound of 1967. Electronic-rock, with its aim of staggering an audience, has arrived in half-a-dozen important new releases. None of these songs has the controlled intensity of “A Day in thg Life,” but the willingness of many restrained musicians to “let go” means that serious aleatory-pop may be on the way.Scientists say Key Haven is the ‘perfect’ island for releasing the genetically modified insects – but locals refuse to be ‘lab rats’ in FDA-cleared experiment
The Florida Keys are three months away from a straw poll vote on whether to release millions of genetically modified mosquitoes on an island just east of Key West, and the tourist destination is awash in lawn signs.
Alongside the typical signs to vote for court clerk, judge, sheriff or school board are signs that showcase the overhead view of a mosquito and read: “NO CONSENT to release of genetically modified mosquitoes”.
For the last five years, the biotechnology company Oxitec has been developing a plan to experimentally release the GMO mosquitoes in the Keys, which scientists hope could eventually impede the spread of the Zika virus.
“It is the perfect scientific trial site,” said Derric Nimmo, a spokesman for Oxitec and a molecular biologist, about Key Haven. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Keys mosquito control district could say, ‘We don’t have Aedes aegypti here – you can’t get dengue or Zika?’”
Each male mosquito released by Oxitec will carry a gene to prevent his offspring from reaching adulthood. Scientists hope that the genetically modified males will mate with wild females to undercut the population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the type that spread Zika through Brazil.
But the prospect of ridding the neighborhood of a disease-carrying pest hasn’t quelled public dissatisfaction.
The GM mosquitoes dominate local news in Key West. Mosquito control commissioners up for reelection face multiple opponents. The city of Key West formally opposed the mosquitoes’ introduction in 2012.
“Why are you pushing [sic] down our throats?” asked Mila de Mier, a Spanish transplant to Key West and a real estate agent. She has led the charge against the mosquitoes’ release, collecting nearly 170,000 signatures in an online petition against the experiment.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oxitec mosquito larvae are shown. Each male mosquito released by Oxitec will carry a gene to prevent his offspring from reaching adulthood. Photograph: Alexandre Carvalho/Oxitec
“It’s about human rights – this can’t be pushed down our throats without consent,” said De Mier, who views her mission as helping mold policy on genetically modified animals for the country.
If the trial goes well, the technology would be on track to commercial approval in the United States, opening a slice of the nation’s $14bn pest control market to the company. Globally, analysts predict Oxitec’s mosquito could bring in up to $400m in annual sales for its parent company, Intrexon.
With millions in potential sales at stake, the experiment in the environmentally sensitive, populous area hinges on the fundamental question proposed by opponents: do the people who live where an experiment is to be conducted have a right to decide whether to go forward?
‘No consent’
Signs saying “No consent” are scattered across what looks like about half the front yards in Key Haven, a neighborhood of neat, high-end homes where the streets stretch out into the Gulf of Mexico like fingers.
The neighborhood is distinctly, extravagantly Floridian. Corinthian columns stand astride stucco doorways, balancing arches of hurricane-shuttered homes. Large boats park in driveways. Glass front doors reveal infinity pools and Gulf vistas.
For some in the neighborhood, the question of Oxitec’s trial is one of convenience.
“It would be so buggy,” said Andrea Spottswood, 62, a prim woman who wears a pressed button-up, pink lipstick and large diamond earrings. The trial “may be worth a try”, but “we don’t want to be the lab rats, and they were all going to be dumped down this street.”
She, like others in the neighborhood, is skeptical of the company’s basic claims.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Meagan Hull, left, and real estate agent Mila de Mier both oppose genetically modified mosquitoes, and say they’re willing to take the fight all the way. Photograph: Jessica Glenza for the Guardian
“They say this mosquito doesn’t bite, but I don’t know if I’m buying it,” Spottswood said. Oxitec’s plan is to mostly release male mosquitoes, which don’t bite. Its application with the FDA says that only one out of every 1,000 mosquitoes would be female. Asked whether the trial could advance science, Spottswood said, “Right. They’re also going to make a lot of money.”
Intrexon appears keenly aware of this.
Though Nimmo has said Oxitec is running a mainly door-to-door public education-style campaign aimed at Monroe county’s 52,000 voters, Intrexon has intensely lobbied Congress.
By April, the large international law firm Sidley Austin LLP estimated Intrexon paid at least $400,000 for the firm to advocate for Oxitec’s mosquitoes, hoping to hurry along approval and secure government funding.
Behind another “No consent” sign lives Joan Lord-Papy, 85, a native islander. Inside her home, daytime TV rambles. For Lord-Papy, memories of mosquito swarms are vivid.
An island divided
Lord-Papy recalls a time, in the 1950s, when mosquitoes were so bad that drivers “picked up anybody who broke down” on “the 18-mile stretch” between Florida City to Key Largo out of sympathy for the hundreds of bites they would endure.
Florida cleared to release genetically modified mosquitoes in Zika fight Read more
Others recounted the lore of motorists who preferred sleeping in their vehicle to changing a flat at dusk, when ambush by bloodsuckers was certain. Lord-Papy herself served on the Florida Keys Mosquito Control Board for 20 years beginning in 1962.
Mosquito populations on the island have declined significantly over the decades, with the institution of a robust mosquito control program.
“I’m local. I was born and raised here, so I’ve always known mosquitoes and what they do to the community,” she said. But, she admits, “I really don’t know that much about the spray they want to use. I don’t know how it will affect children, really.”
Phil Goodman views this sort of opposition as an uninformed electorate standing in the way of science.
Goodman is one of the two holdouts on the Keys mosquito control board, and also its chairman, who has refused to abide by the public opinion. A former chemist and chemical company owner, Goodman complains that people call Oxitec’s OX513A patented insects “franken-skeeters”.
“We’re in the public health business, not the public opinion business,” he said. The board, he believes, “will make a better decision than the majority of uninformed people.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest How Oxitec mosquitoes work to control Aedes aegypti to help prevent the spread of virus. Photograph: Oxitec
Oxitec was, in fact, invited to the island by the county’s mosquito control commissioners, a group once in favor of the experiment, but who are now divided after years of public outcry. The vote on the mosquito release is non-binding, and three of five mosquito control board members have agreed to abide by the outcome.
“Let’s have a scientific debate and come to some kind of conclusion,” Goodman said. Goodman fears a slippery slope, where every new insecticide will require public approval.
The district has already invested in the experiment. It donated space to Oxitec to build a laboratory in Marathon, in the middle Keys, and expects to donate up to $200,000 in free labor each year the experiment goes forward.
Certainly, the current methods employed by mosquito control districts against the Aedes are imperfect.
The notoriously difficult-to-control bug was nearly eradicated in the 1950s by governments in Latin America, who undertook a military-style campaign to spray DDT inside homes. Aedes aegypti mosquitoes also spread dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya, diseases with potentially life-threatening symptoms.
Miami-Dade County began spraying Naled in August, after the first mainland cases of Zika transmitted by local mosquitoes were found in the Wynwood neighborhood. About 6m Floridian acres are sprayed each year. But Naled’s effectiveness in Aedes control is widely debated, both for its effectiveness and its adverse impacts.
“I got a complaint the other day – someone found 30 dead bees on the side of the road,” Goodman said. Naled kills just about any flying insect the size of a mosquito aloft when planes spray overhead.
Public education can also only go so far.
In the Keys, ubiquitous door hangers remind residents to empty standing pools of water. Aedes mosquitoes can breed in pools as tiny as a bottle cap, making every wrinkle of a tarp potential habitat. Goodman suspects some Aedes mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned cisterns on the islands, which used to supply residents’ water.
Oxitec’s trial wouldn’t be the first one the company conducts, nor the last. The company has released GMO mosquitoes in Brazil, Panama, Malaysia and recently the Cayman Islands. And it has submitted applications to begin trials in Sri Lanka and India. The longest such trial has been approximately two years, increasing Keys residents’ concerns about unknown long-term consequences.
Opening this Pandora’s box, sometimes you don’t see the impact until five, 10, 15 years down the road Mila de Mier
Most trials have resulted in reduced Aedes populations, Oxitec has said. Nimmo cites a 90% or better rate of reduction in most populations. But the same rate of effectiveness is likely to be significantly lower in locations with more complex geography.
Opponents have raised other concerns as well: for every 1,000 mosquitoes released, one will be female, the sort that bite.
De Mier and other opponents ask: what happens if a female Oxitec mosquito bites a woman? What if it passes the “kill gene”, as opponents call it, to people? Oxitec scientists analyzed the saliva of roughly six mosquitoes, the gene was not detected, and scientists concluded that humans were unlikely to be exposed. But that hasn’t soothed critics.
“Opening this Pandora’s box, sometimes you don’t see the impact until five, 10, 15 years down the road,” De Mier said.
“I’m not against genetically modified at all,” she said. “Sometimes, I don’t know what I put on my table, but that’s the difference – it’s about choice,” she said, referencing the GMO food supply. “Permission has not been asked or given … This is only for Oxitec’s benefit.”
What about the impact on tourism, de Mier asked? The Keys depend almost solely on visitors to the warm teal waters for income, with the hotel occupancy rates near 100% in February and March, and tens of thousands of visitors arriving from around the world in winter months.
Meagan Hull, 45, another local opponent, said she decided against a vacation after learning Oxitec would release the mosquitoes on the Cayman Islands. “Now, I don’t want to go to the Caymans. I mean, come on, they’re ruining the world for us!”
De Mier said: “You see how pretty is this place. If you’re not going to fight for here, where are you going to fight for? I’m going all the way.”It finally happened! A few weeks ago, Toni Wilen, current maintainer (and all around extremely smart guy) of WinUAE, decided he wanted to add CyberStorm/Blizzard/CyberStormPPC/BlizzardPPC and WarpEngine RAM configurations to WinUAE (simulating RAM accessible on those boards).
Well, word got out, and people started asking if he was going to add PowerPC Emulated CPU to those emulated PPC boards. He initially said no. He’s said for a very long time he doesn’t like PowerPC and wasn’t interested.
However, he’s apparently the kind that wants to make his product the best it can be, probably likes a challenge and saw a jump in development donations specifically tied to PowerPC emulation.
QEMU was looked at and passed up, as it was harder to bring the code changes over than he wanted to do. However, the long-abandoned PearPC source code (the original MAC OSX emulator that was cut short when Apple jumped to Intel), provided a ready-made, drop in PPC cpu.
At first, it didn’t work, then slowly, WarpOS, and later PowerUP software began to work. The question was always if OS4.x and MorphOS for classics would work. There were issues, crashes, blank screens, etc, and Toni continued to deny that he would work specifically for that.
However, today, August 14, 2014, he posted two images about his next beta:
Here’s the original WinUAE2.9.0 thread where the PPC stuff originated.
Here’s the PPC specific thread
and here is the initial posting of the good news.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio — "The infamous tweet."
That's what you probably know about Cardale Jones—a 2012 social-media miscue that made its way into college textbooks and has yet to leave the lexicon of the average college football fan.
It's also the work of Ohio State's new starting quarterback, the Buckeyes' last hope at landing a spot in the College Football Playoff.
Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain't come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.
Those were the words that first introduced Jones to the college football world, which immediately went viral and earned the then-true freshman a suspension for Ohio State's prime-time matchup with Nebraska two seasons ago. As Buckeyes head coach Urban Meyer explained at the time, the distraction of Jones simply wasn't worth what Jones was contributing to the team.
"We're getting ready to play a big-time game in a great stadium and I get a bunch of text messages and phone calls about, 'Did you hear?'" Meyer said at the time. "So we suspended him immediately for the game. [It was a] very ignorant comment."
Whether it's fair or not, that moment of immaturity has defined Jones' college career. But thanks to J.T. Barrett's ill-timed season-ending injury and the Buckeyes' immersion in the playoff hunt, it will no longer have to, as it will be Jones who leads Ohio State into next weekend's Big Ten championship game.
Tony Dejak/Associated Press
'They knew I wanted to be a Buckeye.'
A product of the storied Cleveland Glenville pipeline, Jones was a 3-star prospect and the 10th-ranked pro-style quarterback in the 2011 class. With offers from Michigan, Penn State, Iowa, Illinois and West Virginia, the 6'5", 215-pound Jones opted to accept Ohio State's late scholarship offer on national signing day.
But Jones' pledge to the Buckeyes came with a caveat.
With 5-star quarterback Braxton Miller already enrolled in Columbus, it didn't make sense for Ohio State to add another signal-caller to its 2011 class. So former Buckeyes head coach Jim Tressel accepted Jones' commitment with the expectation that he'd "grayshirt," spending a season at a prep school before beginning his college career.
Jones obliged, spurning his other BCS conference offers in order to head to Virginia's Fork Union Military Academy. Even as his recruitment essentially reopened, Jones never wavered in his commitment to Ohio State, citing his time at Fork Union as worthwhile.
"It hasn't been hard because I have wanted to be a Buckeye and I was willing to do whatever it takes to be a Buckeye," Jones told Ari Wasserman of BuckeyeSports.com in 2011. "They knew I wanted to be a Buckeye. Before I even committed they told me what I was going to have to do to achieve this. I think it shows that I am dedicated and loyal."
USA TODAY Sports
'He kind of was a little bit of a knucklehead.'
While his errant tweet may be what he's still best known for, it was only a glimpse of the struggles that Jones endured upon finally arriving in Columbus in 2012. With Tressel gone and Meyer in charge, the freshman signal-caller failed to click with the new Ohio State staff throughout the Buckeyes' 12-0 season.
"He had a one-way bus ticket back to Cleveland," Meyer said. “He was a guy who couldn’t get out of his own way."
Jones' infamous tweet was his lone public indiscretion, and both he and Meyer maintained that he was excelling in his classes at the time. But Jones rarely drew praise during his first two years on campus, and Meyer's actions spoke louder than his words.
Even once active, Ohio State was hesitant to allow Jones to play, and the redshirt freshman appeared in just three games in 2013, attempting a total of two passes. At one point, Meyer even considered the third-string-quarterback competition between Jones and Barrett to be "close," even though true freshman Barrett was still recovering from a torn ACL and an obvious redshirt candidate.
"He kind of was a little bit of a knucklehead," Ohio State running back Ezekiel Elliott said.
USA TODAY Sports
'A changed guy.'
Somewhere between the end of the Buckeyes' 2013 campaign and the start of the ensuing offseason, something clicked for Jones. With Kenny Guiton having graduated and Miller recovering from shoulder surgery, there would be plenty of quarterback reps to be had in spring practice as Meyer searched for Miller's new backup quarterback.
Jones appeared to make the most of his new opportunity, exiting the spring session as the Buckeyes' undisputed No. 2 quarterback. His 13-of-29, 106-yard passing performance in the spring game left much to be desired, but most importantly, his personal strides allowed him to remain a member of the Ohio State roster.
“Cardale, you talk about a changed guy,” Meyer said following the first spring practice of the year. "You remember the famous tweet or whatever? It’s a different guy. He had to be a different guy or he wouldn’t be here.”
On the field, Jones wasn't able to maintain his momentum, with Barrett surpassing the redshirt sophomore on the Buckeyes depth chart two weeks prior to the start of the season. Two days later, Miller suffered a season-ending torn labrum in his throwing shoulder, allowing Barrett to embark on what would be a Heisman Trophy-caliber campaign.
But off the field, Meyer remained impressed with Jones' progress. Even as he was relegated to the role of backup to a younger player, the Cleveland native remained steadfast in his preparation, knowing that he was just one play away from being Ohio State's starter.
"Cardale Jones is growing up. I admire him," Meyer said in September. "I like his professional approach right now."
USA TODAY Sports
The Rookie and the Vet
Whether Jones' newfound approach will pay off remains to be determined, but both he and the Buckeyes will have the chance to find out on Saturday.
With Ohio State playing in its second consecutive conference championship game and a potential spot in the College Football Playoff on the line, it will be up to Jones to quarterback the Buckeyes against Wisconsin's defense, which is ranked second in the nation.
"We gotta go and we have a lot of confidence in the guy that's going to be doing it," Meyer said in his post-Michigan press conference. "His name is Cardale Jones. He's been here, I think, for 120 years. He's been here for a while."
It might seem that way for a player who initially signed with the Buckeyes on the same day as most of the team's current seniors, but Jones' eligibility is still just that of a redshirt sophomore. Moreover, he remains something of an unknown, as he has attempted just 17 passes in his seven appearances in mop-up duty this season.
Meyer maintains that Jones' skill set is similar to that of Barrett and Miller, although now at 250 pounds, he's more bulldozer than he is Ferrari. He has, however, shown ability as a runner, ranking fourth on Ohio State with 206 rushing yards despite his limited playing time.
But against the Badgers, Jones will be asked to do much more than run out the clock, which has been his primary objective throughout the 2014 season. In addition to Meyer, his teammates remain confident in his ability, pointing to his short stint as the Buckeyes' No. 1 signal-caller last summer.
"He was the starter before J.T. took the spot, so we're not talking about some random, nobody quarterback," star defensive end Joey Bosa said. "He's a great quarterback and he'll get the job done.”
"He's changed a lot," Elliott added. "He's matured a lot, and he helped J.T. lead this year. I think he'll do a great job."
As for his infamous tweet? All indications point to it being nothing but a distant memory, remembered more on Twitter than it is inside the Ohio State locker room. But Saturday could go a long way toward changing Jones' reputation on a national scale, as he'll finally have the opportunity to play football.
And his performance will likely make or break the Buckeyes' 2014 season.
Ben Axelrod is Bleacher Report's Ohio State lead writer. You can follow him on Twitter @BenAxelrod. Unless noted otherwise, all quotes obtained firsthand. All statistics courtesy of cfbstats.com and recruiting information courtesy of 247Sports.Got a BURNING QUESTION that requires advice from Cremator?
Deliver your questions:
Via a YouTube video, linked in the comment section
Call the catacombs at (424) 666 – ATAK
ARCHIVE
Mr. Cremator,
I have a few important questions to ask you. First how many pickled cabbages would I have to pay you to teach me how to play bass at the caliber you do. Or would you rather a home cooked meal of my family and friends. Second when can we expect the Icreamator cookbook to come out. Also I will personally cook my arm for you guys to play a show near me. thank you and good day
Mr. Bromentor
Dear Mr. Bromentor
If you can pick up a bass, you’re already playing it at the caliber I do. What the fuck, it has four strings, you hit it… is there some kind of technique I’m missing here? Whatever, you all worship me before I sup on the marrow in your bones. If you’re looking to cook a part of yourself, your arm is stupid. It’s lean on the meat and it will be hard to cook with only one limb. Better yet, cut of some juicy rump from your buttocks and sauté that in some butter and serve topped with cremé fraiche. Delicious!
Cremator
Hey Cremator. I’m pretty hideous and I had a thought to make a hood. My face tends to send people into a frenzy of eye-gouging and I figured a hood would solve this… “problem”. Any thoughts
Hey No Name,
I can guarantee you that putting a hood on your head does nothing to stop mobs chasing you with pitchforks and torches. Of course, it doesn’t help |
it, i search for this trailer in youtube, metacafe, and latest, from comicon with no luck, it was there but immediately taken down, fortunately, a friend of mine had this trailer by torrent and uploaded in 4shared, so here it is, the 5 min trailer of THOR, get it while it lasts, I’m sure Marvel will bring it down as soon as possible, and I wont upload it as It against the TOS. I just share my searches result with you.
“THOR”
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Writers : Ashley Miller (screenplay) and Don Payne (screenplay)
Cast and Characters :
Chris Hemsworth …
Related posts:Capture d’écran de la page d’accueil du site de l’ICIJ - ICIJ.org
Offshore Leaks, Luxleaks et maintenant Swissleaks... Derrière ces révélations sur des fuites massives, on retrouve un acronyme : ICIJ, pour Consortium international des journalistes d’investigation. Et c’est encore ce réseau donc, qui a révélé dimanche soir un vaste système d’évasion fiscale accepté et encouragé par l’établissement britannique HSBC.
1 Qu’est-ce que l’ICIJ?
Pour parvenir à ces révélations massives, plus de 160 journalistes de 60 nationalités différentes se sont associés. Parmi les médias les plus connus, on trouve le Washington Post, la BBC, le Guardian, le Süddeutsche Zeitung. En France, les journalistes Fabrice Arfi et Karl Laske de Mediapart, Aurore Gorius (indépendante) et Serge Michel du Monde travaillent pour le consortium.
Fondé en 1997 à Washington, l’ICIJ était un projet du Center for Public Integrity, une entité indépendante crée par Charles Lewis, un ancien journaliste de CBS. Le point de départ de ce réseau de journalistes? La nécessité d’unir les forces pour sortir des enquêtes ambitieuses alors que la presse est en crise. Sur son site, l’ICIJ résume :
« Nous perdons nos yeux et nos oreilles, précisément au moment où on en a le plus besoin. »
2 Qui finance?
Pour financer ses chasseurs de scoops, l’ICIJ utilise la méthode anglo-saxonne : le financement privé. Les investigations sont soutenues grâce aux dons des citoyens, mais aussi et surtout grâce à l’argent de fondations telles que l’Oak Foundation, la Packard Foundation, l’Adessium Foundation…
Pour enquêter sur la criminalité, la corruption ou la responsabilité des différents gouvernements à travers le monde, le consortium ne dispose toutefois que de trois salariés permanents. A côté, il y a donc des équipes de journalistes, de spécialistes informatiques, d’experts et de juristes qui se forment pour chacune des enquêtes.
3 Qui dirige?
Le journaliste d’investigation australien Gerard Ryle. Il était déjà membre de l’ICIJ en 2011 quand il a reçu un mystérieux colis dans sa boîte à lettres. Le paquet contenait un disque dur avec plus de 2,5 millions de fichiers. Il se rend alors à l’évidence, seul, il ne pourra pas grand chose :
« Ces données étaient quasiment impossibles à lire. Elles faisaient planter mon ordinateur à répétition. Il y avait beaucoup de noms de personnes de partout dans le monde mais qui ne me disaient rien. »
Il part donc s’installer à Washington, prend la tête de l’ICIJ et missionne de nombreux journalistes pour travailler sur ce que l’on appellera en 2013 le « Offshore Leaks ».
4 Comment y rentrer?
N’importe qui ne peut pas intégrer le consortium. Les journalistes, tous reconnus dans leurs pays pour avoir révélé de nombreux scoops, sont généralement choisis sur recommandation. Aurore Gorius a livré des précisions à L’Express :
« J’ai été proposée à la cooptation par l’un de mes anciens professeurs, Mark Hunter. L’ICIJ est un réseau de journalistes à travers le monde, qui correspondent essentiellement par e-mails et qui proposent aux autres membres des sujets d’enquête auxquels on choisit de participer ou pas, évidemment à l’échelle internationale. »
5 Comment le secret des enquêtes est-il assuré?
Pas facile d’organiser une enquête aussi ample. Il a d’abord fallu trouver un moyen pour préserver le secret de l’investigation, tout en assurant une circulation fluide des informations entre la soixantaine de rédactions associées. Sans oublier la traduction et la clarification des données remises par clé USB à Gérard Davet et Fabrice Lhomme, comme les deux journalistes le racontent dans Le Monde. Des centaines de milliers de fichiers Excel, sous forme de tableaux arides, à comprendre et à organiser.
Fabrice Lhomme (g.) et Gérard Davet (dr.), le 10 novembre 2014, dans les locaux de l’AFP à Paris - Lionel Bonaventure/AFP
Les moyens de communication actuels ont considérablement aidé à concilier tous ces impératifs.
Au Monde, où cinq-six personnes étaient au courant de l’enquête il y a six mois, on a d’abord pris soin de sécuriser les échanges. Comme le détaille le datajournaliste Alexandre Léchenet, qui a rapidement été associé à l’enquête afin d’organiser les données brutes :
« Lorsqu’on discutait entre nous, entre journalistes du Monde, on sécurisait nos échanges avec PGP et Cryptocat. »
Comme nous l’expliquions dans notre guide pour rester anonyme sur Internet, le logiciel PGP permet de chiffrer les e-mails assez simplement (de nombreux tutoriels expliquent la marche à suivre sur Internet). Même principe pour Cryptocat, qui sécurise pour sa part les discussions instantanées, et qui a récemment été classé comme l’un des meilleurs outils de communication confidentiel par l’Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), qui défend les libertés sur Internet. Autre journaliste du Monde associé à l’enquête, Simon Piel précise que l’adoption de ces pratiques n’a pas forcément été évidente pour tous :
« Au départ, c’était un peu compliqué de digérer ces protocoles d’échanges. Mais une fois PGP installé, ça allait. »
Néanmoins, d’autres précautions ont été prises, ajoute-t-il, telle que l’utilisation d’un VPN pour les recherches effectuées sur Internet au sujet de telle ou telle personnalité apparaissant dans les SwissLeaks. Les VPN, pour Virtual Private Network (réseaux privés virtuels), sont des dispositifs qui chiffrent les communications. Comme l’explique Simon Piel :
« C’était pour éviter que les recherches sur Google soient tracées et traçables. A certains moments, on se demande si on est pas un peu parano, mais finalement ces mesures de prudence ne sont pas si difficiles à intégrer. »
Au journal, une pièce isolée a permis à la petite équipe de se réunir pour travailler à l’écart. Le jeu de données, lui, était stocké sur un ordinateur non connecté à Internet, pour prévenir toute fuite. Jusqu’à ce que l’ICIJ le transforme en une base de données lisible et consultable à distance.
6 Comment des journalistes du monde entier ont-ils pu mettre en commun leurs infos?
Les journalistes pouvaient accéder à une base de données créée pour l’occasion. Comme l’explique Alexandre Léchenet :
« [Cette plate-forme] permettait d’accéder à toutes les données indexées. Grâce à un moteur de recherche interne, c’était plus simple de trouver le fichier qui nous intéressait spécifiquement, de le prévisualiser et de le télécharger. »
De même, un système de tags permettait d’éclairer chaque information.
Parallèlement à ce site, un autre, sur le modèle de Facebook, servait d’espace de discussion aux journalistes du monde entier. En juillet dernier, l’ICIJ avait obtenu 35 000 dollars de la Knight Foundation pour bâtir cette plate-forme, que décrit Simon Piel :
« C’était à la fois un forum où il était possible de discuter avec les journalistes et de partager les réflexions, mais aussi plein de forums thématiques, dédiés par exemple à la drogue, aux armes, aux personnalités politiques... »
Les deux sites sont sécurisés par l’ICIJ, que nous avons contacté afin d’obtenir plus de détails. Seuls les journalistes sélectionnés et inscrits auprès du consortium pouvaient y accéder, à l’aide d’un mot de passe. Les URL des pages, précisent les rédacteurs du Monde, n’avaient rien d’évident : il s’agissait d’une succession incompréhensible de lettres.
Pour remettre les données à l’ICIJ néanmoins, les journalistes du Monde ont privilégié une transmission de la main à la main : ils se sont rendus à Washington, ce qui a également permis de s’accorder sur les termes de la publication.
7 Pourquoi l’enquête a-t-elle été publiée un dimanche soir?
Le choix de la date n’a pas été facile et aurait même changé à de nombreuses reprises. Il a fallu prendre en compte les différents formats (quotidiens, hebdomadaires, journaux, télévisions), ainsi que les nombreux fuseaux horaires impliqués par cette collaboration.
La discussion a été permanente mais Le Monde a gardé la main dans la mesure où il était, à l’origine de cette enquête.
L’émission « 60 Minutes », diffusée chaque dimanche soir sur CBS News et partenaire ce 8 février de l’opération, a également pesé dans la décision de publication.The House of Cards, for the unacquainted, is fundamentally a story about how private economic power intersects and conflicts with government power, with each sector manipulating personal ambition to achieve their respective goals. The power conflicts are personified by a billionaire electric power baron who is a friend and financial backer of the president of the United States, and Francis Underwood, an unscrupulously ambitious Democratic leader in the House of Representatives. In one episode (spoiler alert), the baron shuts off electric power to Washington DC by shutting down one of his power plants, and threatens to shut down his power plants serving much of the southeastern United States, claiming the plants need scheduled maintenance, all in order to force the president and congress to adopt policy changes favorable to his business interests in China.
The parallel episode in Minnesota can be fully understood only with an understanding of the retail gasoline market in Minnesota and of the governor and state legislature.
Two refineries supply almost all the gasoline sold to Minnesota consumers. One is the St. Paul Park refinery, owned by Northern Tier Energy, and the other is the Pine Bend refinery, owned by Flint Hills, which is owned by Koch Oil, which is, in turn, owned by the Koch brothers.
The Pine Bend Flint Hills refinery supplies between 50% and 75% of the Minnesota gasoline market, depending upon who you talk to. See footnotes on sources, below. (Koch’s refinery is of course privately owned by the two brothers and the exact gasoline sales are not public. But if both Minnesota refineries were operating at capacity, Pine Bend would provide 78% of the gasoline produced.) In any event, there are only two suppliers selling into the retail gasoline market in Minnesota, and the smaller one claims that it supplies 25% of the Minnesota market.
If you are a gasoline station operator in Minnesota, you will receive a telephone call pretty much every day from your supplier informing you of the wholesale price you will pay on your next order. Station operators must raise or lower their prices immediately upon a change in the wholesale price, for reasons that are irrelevant to this post. Although no one to my knowledge has alleged that Flint Hills has conspired to fix retail gasoline prices, those prices move in daily unison at all stations pretty much statewide. Koch's Flint Hills refinery is the price leader and is happily followed by the only other, much smaller supplier, and so the prices move in unison.
Now for state government. In 2012, control of the state legislature switched from the republicans to the democrats. The new democratic leaders of the legislature elected in 2012 campaigned on, and made it clear that their election would result in, significant new taxes to close the projected $6.2 billion biennium government deficit, and significant new spending on education and transportation infrastructure. With Mark Dayton, democrat, as governor elected in 2010, the democrats were situated to deliver on their campaign promises.
The first democratically controlled state legislature after the 2012 elections convened on January 8, 2013, and was constitutionally mandated to adjourn at midnight, May 20, 2013. The way the Minnesota legislature works, particularly in years when the biennium budget is on the agenda, is that nothing gets done until the last 4 or 5 days of the session, when all-night sessions are the rule. More importantly for political players and lobbyists, legislation that was considered dead can come back to life in those 5 days, so nothing is over until it is over, and votes take place at ten minutes to midnight on May 20th. Lobbyists and the usual power brokers live in terror those last 5 days, knowing that all their prior efforts during the session can go down the drain.
During the 2013 session, in early April, the House Transportation Committee proposed to raise taxes on gasoline by 5 cents per gallon. Dayton, for reasons unknown, let it be known that he was opposed. In response, in late April, the Transportation Committee proposed a tax on wholesale oil suppliers.
Which brings us to the week of May 14-May 21, 2013. On May 16, 2013, the price of gasoline jumped 40 cents overnight. The price increase pushed the per-gallon price of gasoline to the highest in the continental United States. Blame for the increase was placed on the usual suspects, except one. Bad weather in the Gulf of Mexico, trouble in the Middle East, jump in demand, shortage of supply, etc.were bandied about, but my favorite reason (because it fit so perfectly the House of Cards script) was that the Pine Bend Refinery had to close for “maintenance.”
On May 20, the legislature adjourned, increasing taxes on the wealthy and on business. The tax increases were bitterly opposed by the Chamber of Commerce and the business lobby, but all the proposed tax increases passed, except one: the oil tax increase failed. Who wants to explain an oil or gasoline tax that would increase gasoline prices even more than the then (suddenly) prevailing $4.29 per gallon price?
Dire warnings of gasoline prices going even higher were rampant.
Now the curious part. Check out the gasoline and oil prices for Minnesota for 2013:
[Charts used by permission of GasBuddy]
The reason that a “jump in oil prices” could not be blamed for the jump in gasoline prices was because it could be too easily verified to be untrue. Oil prices actually fell that week.
More importantly, the price of gasoline fell a dollar gallon in the two weeks following the legislature’s adjournment to slightly below its price in the weeks before adjournment, and before the May 16th price increase.
Now take a look at gasoline prices in the states surrounding Minnesota:
Funny thing. Wisconsin feels no pain, but Minnesota gets whacked. Now let me think about the difference between Wisconsin and Minnesota... Oh, yeah, that’s right Wisconsin’s governor takes personal phone calls from David Koch.
I cannot guess what evil motives lurk in the hearts of men like the Kochs, but I have a whole lot more evidence of their economic and political buccaneering –and outright financial harm to the public- than the Kochs have in their multi million dollar fraudulent attack on Obamacare.
Are Tea Party republicans so far gone that they cannot see how government power, in which they at least have a voice, helps protect them from the direct out-of –pocket harm inflicted by the unrestrained power of a Koch oligopoly, in which they have no voice?
Epilogue. The tax and spending increases passed by the Democrats turned a $6.2 billion biennium deficit into a $1.2 billion surplus and reduced unemployment from 6.7% to 4.7% within 18 months. Only transportation infrastructure got stiffed, thanks to the Kochs.
Sources:
Gasoline prices went up 40 cents a gallon overnight-
http://nl.newsbank.com/...(price%20of%20gasoline)%20AND%20date(4/2/2013%20to%206/1/2013)&p_field_date-0=YMD_date&p_params_date-0=date:B,E&p_text_date-0=4/2/2013%20to%206/1/2013)&p_field_advanced-0=&p_text_advanced-0=(%22price%20of%20gasoline%22)&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&xcal_useweights=no
Pine Bend owned by Flint hills owned by Koch Industries supplies 70% of gasoline to MN market-
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Koch refinery in MN
http://www.fhr.com/...
St Paul Park produces 25% of gasoline in MN-
http://www.energystar.gov/...
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/...
[“Minnesota Refineries “]
[“The Flint Hills and St. Paul Park facilities refined about 128 million barrels of crude oil in 2011.’]
[“Flint Hills is almost four times larger than the St. Paul Park refinery: its operating capacity is 277,200 barrels per day, compared with the latter’s 74,000. They jointly produce the vast majority of petroleum products consumed in Minnesota.”]
MN legislature considers gas tax in 4/09/2013=
http://www.mprnews.org/...
MN legislature considers oil wholesale tax – 4/17/2013-
http://www.mprnews.org/...
MN legislature adjourns 5/20/2013-
http://www.twincities.com/... [“Democratic-Farmer-Labor lawmakers delivered on much of what they promised. On the last day of the session, they passed a hefty tax increase to plug a hole in the state budget and pump more money into education, property tax relief and jobs creation.” “Not done: Legislators rejected raising gas taxes or metro-area sales taxes for transit. A task force last fall said the state needs to raise $50 billion more for transportation projects over the next 20 year”]
2-year chart of TC MN gas and oil prices- showing 5/16/2013 spike-
http://www.TwinCitiesGasPrices.com/...
http://www.twincitiesgasprices.com/...
Gas prices spike in MN in 2013 highest in continental US; gas price map by state http://www.twincities.com/... [“Experts said that indicates that the refineries don't have the capacity now -- apparently because of the maintenance work -- to process the same amount of crude oil they did last year.”]
Government hearing on how gas prices are determined-
http://www.gpo.gov/...
MN State budget deficit 2011-2012
http://www.cnn.com/...
I usually take a year or two to figure out what just happenedUPDATED
By Julie Montanaro
February 19, 2015
A man accused of a bogus bomb threat at a Tallahassee bar will undergo a psychiatric screening before a judge decides whether to free him on bond.
Employees and customers at the Fourth Quarter were forced to evacuate Wednesday night but the bar and grill re-opened for business as usual this morning.
Molly Gosline was the first customer to arrive for lunch at the Fourth Quarter. She saw police surrounding the place on her way home from work Wednesday night and was shocked when she tuned in to WCTV to discover someone had threatened to blow up a briefcase on the bar.
"Oh no! My concern was are they okay? And what would happen if this restaurant went up? It's like no, it can't go anywhere," Gosline said.
23 year old Jared Simpson is now accused of multiple felonies. Arrest papers say officers arriving on scene asked Simpson what was inside the briefcase and he answered, "maybe a bomb or a baby" and then smiled.
The Big Bend Bomb Squad examined the briefcase and detonated a backpack outside but didn't find any explosives. Arrest papers say they found Simpson across the street asking diners for money to pay his nine dollar bar tab.
Customers there say he walked across North Monroe street on his hands.
"I was scared to come back to work," Fourth Quarter bartender Marissa Waas said as she got ready for the lunch crowd. "It makes you realize that could happen anytime with anybody. I'm happy that we're alive and nothing bad happened."
"I was like a bomb threat? Who would wanna blow up the bar?" Fourth Quarter cook Terrez Williams said.
Williams says Simpson was sitting at the end or the bar singing when he left. He never imagined that the briefcase bomb threat would follow minutes later.
"He came in here and tried to pay for his drinks with a rock. So I figured something was wrong with him then," Williams said.
A judge set Simpson's bond at more than $30,000 but ordered him to undergo a mental health screening before returning to court tomorrow.
Court documents show Simpson is from Maine and told investigators he was in town to party with the Rainbow People in the national forest.
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
February 19, 2015
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Tallahassee police have arrested a man following a bomb scare at the Fourth Quarter Bar on Wednesday.
TPD says they've arrested 24-year-old Jared Simpson after he left a briefcase inside of Fourth Quarter Sports Bar and led patrons to believe it was a bomb.
The Big Bend Regional Bomb Squad later determined the briefcase along with a backpack in Simpson's car to be safe.
According to witnesses, Simpson tried to pay for a Bud Light using a rock as tender. When the bartender told Simpson that she wouldn't accept a rock as payment, he said that he would pay her in other ways and threw a ripped-up dollar bill at her.
Witnesses say Simpson then left the bar and came back in wearing a gray suit. When bartenders told him that he had to leave if he couldn't pay his tab, he left again and returned with a briefcase. He then set it down and said "anyone who goes near this will die," before running out of the bar.
When police apprehended Simpson at El Jalisco across the street. He was asked what was in the briefcase and he replied "maybe a bomb or a baby" and smiled, according to TPD.
Police say Simpson also sang a song he made up about how he is a "rainbow man" and wouldn't comply with law enforcement requests. When asked additional questions about the briefcase he told police "I am my own master, I answer to myself, no police have the right to ask questions."
A retired law enforcement officer at the Fourth Quarter told police that Simpson initially walked in using crutches and told the retired officer that he had been "shot up in war."
When the retired officer asked him what branch he served in, Simpson responded "If I tell you, I have to kill you."
Police say that after Simpson was read his Miranda Rights and was sitting in the back seat of the car when he took out three large screws of the plastic seat and managed to get his handcuffs from the back of his body to the front.
Simpson was arrested and transported to the Leon County Jail. He is being charged with one count each of Threatening to Bomb or Arson, Weapon of Mass Destruction Hoax, Threat of a Bomb Hoax, Petit Theft and Disorderly Conduct.
A judge this morning ordered Simpson to undergo a mental health screening before returning to court tomorrow to determine whether he should be released on bond.
Simpson's permanent address is listed as being in Waterford, Maine.
Court records show Simpson's bond is set at $30,500.
UPDATE 10:18 p.m.
By: James Buechele
Kim Dale has worked at the 4th Quarter Bar and Grille for nine years. Wednesday afternoon was one of those days she says she'll never forget.
"It's very scary, especially thinking if he gets out and comes back and wants revenge," said Dale.
Dale was serving a man police have identified as Jerod Simpson, 23. She says Simpson was acting strange even leaving and changing clothes. Dale says Simpson even tried to pay his tab with a rock.
That's when he left again.
"He came back in, brought in a briefcase, put it on a table and put a phone on the bar and hit a button and then said 'anybody that goes near that briefcase is gonna die.'"
Those inside the bar evacuated across the street. The Big Bend Regional Bomb Squad checked the briefcase and found it to be safe. However, Simpson's vehicle was searched and authorities discovered a backpack. They then decided to detonate it.
"There was nothing that went off by mistake," said TPD officer David Northway. "That was actually an intended outcome."
Although no one was injured, Dale says she'll be nervous heading back to work.
"It's going to be scary. I think a lot of people are going to hearing something like that regardless anybody it's going to be a scary thing."
By: WCTV Eyewitness News
February 18, 2015
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A strip mall in the 2000 block of North Monroe Street has been evacuated after police received reports of a suspicious item.
The 4th Quarter Bar and Grille is the focus of the investigation.
According to the bar employees, a man in his twenties came into the bar, placed a briefcase on the counter and indicated that it was dangerous.
Hazardous Devices teams are currently on the scene.
WCTV will bring you more information as it becomes available.If you like watching other people have fun, maybe this is for you. Maybe.
I'd better provide some explanation for why I decided to even check Bodyconscious out. It starts with my enthusiasm for FMV puzzle games, an obscure genre I haven't been able to find an example of on the 3DO. For some reason, all four FMV puzzle games on the Saturn (that I'm aware of) feature a live action cast of attractive women and lots of cheesecake shots. So when I noticed that GameFAQs lists Bodyconscious as a puzzle game, and that the cover is a cheesecake shot of some bare legs, I figured there was a decent chance that I'd found an FMV puzzle game on the 3DO.
Well, not only is Bodyconscious not an FMV puzzle game, it's not a game at all. What you get in this package is a long video of women in various states of dress/undress dancing in a nightclub. (Some men are in there, too, but they're few and far between.) There are lots of modern options - scene skip, scene select, frame skip, rewind, etc. - but ultimately it's a non-interactive video.
Hardly an entertaining one, either. The women are not unattractive, but many of the scenes depicted have a lewdness which is disturbing rather than sexy: a slow zoom-in on the inner side of a thigh, a close-up of a bare shoulder blade, and a sequence in which one woman crouches on the floor while another makes pelvic thrusts at her buttocks at a rhythm with no apparent connection to the music. It's hard to put the unpleasantness of this film into words, so if by chance my descriptions sound appealing, I'd better bring up that the game runs at under 15 frames per second. Remember, these ladies are all dancing, so a poor frame rate means it's sometimes hard to even tell what you're looking at, much less enjoy it.
A key point behind my giving Bodyconscious a low grade is wondering who it could have been intended for. Perverts is the obvious answer, but I think even the most shameless pervert would find it pitiful to be watching videos of women dancing, all the while knowing that if only he weren't so scared of real live women he could easily be flirting with one at a real nightclub right now. Also, while I've mainly commented on the lewder shots, most of the video is of women in modest dress, or even business attire. There's very little here that would appeal to anyone's libido.
The other possibility that comes to mind is that having a video of nightclub scenes playing in the background might help add life to a party. But then we hit the opposite problem: It's hard to imagine a group of people who wouldn't be uncomfortable at a party with the occasional flashing female flesh seen in Bodyconscious.
So really, who can this release be recommended to, even tentatively, or even in a so-bad-it's-good sense? Nobody.
Rating: 1.0 - Terrible
Product Release: Bodyconscious Digital Rave! Part 1: Shinjuku & Takashi (JP, 12/23/94)(PCM) Many were curious just how GWAR and the scumdogs of the universe would survive after the loss of their leader Oderus Urungus but I can say that his spirit was very much alive and well during the GWAR Eternal Tour as it slayed its’ way across the nation.
After being sucked through a hole in the space/time continuum Lord Blothar has now found himself thrust on stage fronting the almighty GWAR and he certainly managed to pull it off without a hitch. Well, maybe that is not entirely true … he did have to deal with his sister from a distant future the sexy breast-blood spewing Vulvatron.
The tour overall focused on GWAR’s search for their lost leader Oderus and they payed homage to his spirit beautifully. The show was both highly entertaining and the perfect way to allow fans to both celebrate and mourn the death of Oderus, who in his own right was a true rock n’ roll pioneer.
The production for this tour was phenomenal and it was an utterly fantastic idea to have the first song of the evening performed by Oderus himself through the magic mirror aka. a video screen on-stage. I am not going to lie that I actually shed tears during the song while watching one of the slaves (GWAR’s on-stage hands/prop guys) looking devastated the clawing at the screen which contained an image of their beloved leader.
Musically speaking everyone in GWAR has truly stepped up their game and their finale cover of the Pet Shop Boy’s “West End Girls” was fantastic. I definitely enjoyed GWAR’s version a whole lot more than the original.
I am sure that GWAR will have plenty more in-store for 2015 as the band will be celebrating their 30th anniversary! It is sure to be a bloody good time!
Photography by: Megan C. Brooks
The post GWAR Eternal Tour Beautifully Paid Homage To Lost Leader Oderus Urungus appeared first on.Months of anticipation (mostly from my husband) led up to the past Saturday night where “The Notorious” Conor McGregor challenged Floyd “Money” Mayweather to a duel! Okay it wasn’t a duel, but a girl can dream, right? Anyway, we had to throw a party! Friends, family, fighting, and FOOD! Oh crap… food. What were we supposed to do? Force our loved ones to eat vegan foods?! Nah, we decided to tell everyone to bring whatever food they wanted since we were splurging for the Pay-Per-View and just have some accidentally-vegan Heat Wave Doritos, pistachios, and a vegan pizza available for ourselves…
Split Decision
…That is until my dad messaged me saying we should make a totally vegan evening of it. I was torn. I loved the support and enthusiasm my dad was presenting me with. This is exactly what I wanted! But what would the guests think? I feared that the night that was supposed to be dedicated to the huge moment we’ve been waiting for since January would instead shine the spotlight on our recent dietary change and be filled with a chorus of “Oh, this is vegan?” and “This doesn’t taste like cheese” and “I’m going to need some chicken wings after this”. However, I could not pass up someone’s willingness to eat vegan with me so we planned a menu of Hawaiian BBQ Jackfruit Pizza and Killer Vegan Chili accompanied by a variety of snacks (veggie tray with hummus, Heat Wave Doritos, fruit, chips and salsa, and pistachios).
As much as I believed in a night where McGregor would destroy Mayweather while my friends and family enjoy food that doesn’t contain animal body parts or secretions, I was equally expecting both McGregor and myself to get KO’d.
Bob and Weave
Fast-forward to the day of the fight where my mother-in-law agreed to give me festive boxing braids for the event. Although I have always liked braids, I was convinced I had a bad case of weird head shape that could not possibly be paired with braids. As if I didn’t already have enough anxiety about McGregor and the food, why not add to it the fear of looking ridiculous, right? So she finishes my braids and I take a look in the mirror and politely say I love them secretly thinking that I need an unbiased opinion before believing it didn’t accentuate my weird head shape. But as the day continued and the fight inched closer, I started loving my braids more and more. They weren’t weird at all! They were normal and, dare I say it, pretty badass! No second, third, or fourth opinion needed. I adored them and that’s all that mattered.
Roll With The Punches
Our party began and the vegan spread was released to the public. And just as my
belief in McGregor did not turn out the way I had hoped, neither did offering vegan- friendly food as the majority of options to my non-vegan guests. As much as I tried to ignore it, my ears would perk up when I heard “fake/real cheese” and “vegan/normal pizza” and the cringe was especially real when it was shouted across the room. It was just about as unrealistic to expect someone who has never boxed professionally in his life to knockout Mayweather as it was to expect a bunch of people who have never (knowingly) eaten vegan in their life to eat it without any questions, comments, or concerns.
TKO
Not the happy ending you were expecting? Don’t be sad. The happy ending is there if you just take a closer look. McGregor’s loss was not as devastating as I built the possibility up to be and the blatant skepticism of “fake” cheese was equally not as devastating as I thought it would be. Nobody bashed the food. Lots of people tried it. Some people even said that it actually tasted good (which is saying a lot really because I have little to no experience making pizza nonetheless a pizza with a foreign contaminant such as dairy-free cheese). And, much like my braids, this experience helped me toward the ideal attitude of not worrying about others’ opinions of how I do my hair or what I put into my body.
Post-Fight Press Conference
McGregor in a boxing ring; Braids on my head; Vegan cheese in the stomachs of my loved ones. All examples that it’s okay to do whatever you want and to not care about what others think (as long as you’re not hurting anybody). Whether the outcome is what you had hoped for or not, you did it and that’s all that matters. Plus, you might just find out that 1) your family and friends won’t shut you out; 2) the guy you wanted to win is actually just as good of a loser as he is a winner; and 3) you can rock a badass boxing braid.
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In an interview with Mac Attack on WFNZ in Charlotte, Cam Newton said that he was moving on.
Cam: The Dab has been put aside. New stuff coming that he is working on. — Travis Hancock (@TBoneWFNZ) June 9, 2016
With the dab officially put to rest, we all wait in anticipation for what Newton |
50/50. So now, two losses later and he's got a problem...the IRS. They don't play. I don't really personally know his business and I could care less about his business. I'm just speaking from what I hear, that he got a problem with the IRS, both here and in his country. So when I offered you $40 million, you turned it down. I offered Manny Pacquiao $40 million and he said he wanted 50/50. So now, you took two back-to-back losses, and from what I hear, I don't know for a fact, but from what I hear, you got tax problems and now you're begging to get the fight. You could care less if you win; all you want to do is fight Floyd Mayweather to clean up a tax bill basically. He's got a $68 million tax problem now. He couldn't put ten fights together and make $68 million, so now, who is he chasing?
He don't need to be focused on Floyd Mayweather. He need to be focused on that tax business. I don't knock him for doing it, but all the cards are in my hand. It's not about working harder; it's about working smarter. To become pound-for-pound, I proved myself. To be 45 and 0, I proved myself. To dominate for 17 years, I proved myself. I don't have nothing else to prove to nobody else. I can retire; he can't. I just look at the situation like this, worst comes to worst, I'm still going to get at least $200 million for the rest of my contract. Let's talk facts! If he's on the same level as me, let's see his pay-per-view numbers. If he's on the same level as me, let's see his last check. They let my $41.5 million check leak. So now, let me see his check from his last fight leak. Pacquiao got IRS problems. Pacquiao got pay-per-view number problems. Pacquiao's boss name is Rob Arum. Pacquiao owes $68 million in taxes. Pacquiao's got 5 losses. He still got Timothy Bradley problems and Marquez problems.
So this guy's got all these problems and he wants Floyd Mayweather to solve them for him, huh? He's got 68 million problems and he wants me to solve them. First he didn't need me; now he needs me. He's willing to do anything now after his career done took a major setback. First he wanted 50/50; now he's like, "Floyd, give me anything. Throw an old, desperate dog a bone." This man got 68 million problems. Now he wants Floyd Mayweather to solve his problems when he was just saying he's on the same level as me. He basically told me, "Fuck you! I don't need you. I don't need your $40 million. I'm getting the same type of money you getting." So if you getting the same type of money I'm getting, you don't need me. If you doing the same type of pay-per-view numbers I'm doing, you don't need me. I want to see the pay-per-view numbers. As a matter of fact, ever since he's been fighting on pay-per-view, I want to see his residual checks; the money that comes in on the backend, I want to see those checks. I don't know what their relationship is, but I'm not doing business with Rob Arum.
BT: Touch on that for a minute if you can. I know we've talked about it in the past, but why don't you want to do business with Arum? He recently came on record and said you guys have a good relationship.
FM: I don't have a good relationship with him. Why does he want to do business with a coward? When I left [Top Rank], he said something about I was scared of Antonio Margarito and all this, right? Where's he at now and where am I at? They claimed Castillo won the fight; where's he at now and where am I at? We can keep going on and on. All I gotta say is where are they at now, and where am I at? It's so crazy; I be looking at fighters like Pacquiao. I know Rob Arum gonna eat, Michael Koncz gonna eat; all of them are on a percentage basis. Guess what! Michael Kon...What's his name? Michael Con-Artist [Koncz]? Michael Con-Artist wouldn't be my manager if I was in the boxing game. What's so crazy is a long time ago, Pacquiao should have got with Al Haymon and we would've got his career together. But sometimes, they don't listen. A hard head makes a soft ass. When I gave him the opportunity to fight me, he didn't take it, and then, he was sleeping on that MGM canvas. I don't know how that feels, but he can take it every which way, if he feels more comfortable laying on his face or on his back. In life, it's about moving forwad. As far as the Rob Arum situation, I left him to become my own boss. With age comes wisdom and growth. All that would've, could've, should've; what I would've done? Yeah, when his name was holding some decent weight. This guy's numbers done dropped so heavy. He got knocked out, so he [Arum] took him to the other side of the planet to fight. Pacquiao had one of the worst knockouts in boxing history. If my fighter was knocked out like that, I'd get him out the sport, period.
BE SURE TO CHECK BACK SOON FOR MUCH MORE WITH FLOYD "MONEY" MAYWEATHER
[NOTE: For more on Floyd Mayweather, visit his websites at www.TheMoneyTeam.com and www.FloydMayweather.com ]Waterboarding and ‘Torture’ in the American Media
Did the American media cover up torture by the Bush Administration?
James Joyner · · 20 comments
An April paper by a large team at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy notes an interesting shift in the use of the word “torture” to describe the practice of waterboarding. The Abstract:
[W]aterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.
For the sake of discussion, let’s take the finding at face value rather than quibbling over the methodology. It’s conceivable that there are different degrees of waterboarding and that foreign countries use more extreme forms than that employed by our own government. It’s also conceivable that pre-2002 use of the word “torture” was mostly in the form of official propaganda being quoted rather than a matter of pure editorial judgment. But, in the main, the findings strike me entirely plausible.
Further, let me stipulate that I’ve been on the record repeatedly stating that waterboarding is torture.
What to make of all this?
Glenn Greenwald makes a passionate case that it proves the “media’s servitude to the government.”
Andrew Sullivan is more succinct:
The editors who insisted on these changes remain liars and cowards and a disgrace to journalism and a free society. They should quit for this kind of open deception and craven cowardice in putting power before truth. They remind you that if you really want to understand what is going on in the world, the New York Times will only publish what the government deems is fit to print – even in its choice of words.
While there’s much truth in all of that, there’s actually a much simpler answer, which Adam Serwer summarizes beautifully:
I think it’s actually the conventions of journalism that are at fault here. As soon as Republicans started quibbling over the definition of torture, traditional media outlets felt compelled to treat the issue as a “controversial” matter, and in order to appear as though they weren’t taking a side, media outlets treated the issue as unsettled, rather than confronting a blatant falsehood. To borrow John Holbo‘s formulation, the media, confronted with the group think of two sides of an argument, decided to eliminate the “think” part of the equation so they could be “fair” to both groups. Of course, this attempt at “neutrality” was, in and of itself, taking a side, if inadvertently. It was taking the side of people who supported torture, opposed investigating it as a crime, and wanted to protect those who implemented the policy from any kind of legal accountability. Most important, it reinforced the moral relativism of torture apologists, who argued that even if from an objective point of view, waterboarding was torture, it wasn’t torture when being done by the United States to a villain like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, but rather only when done by say, a dictator like Kim Jong Il to a captured American soldier.
Furthermore, Kevin Drum gets at something he perhaps didn’t intend when he snarks, “As always, where you stand depends on where you sit.”
The fact of the matter is that the United States Government was engaged in this policy against Very Bad People for reasons the American people enthusiastically supported. Most Americans were nonplussed when news broke that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times because, after all, KSM was a Very Bad Man who did Unspeakably Horrible Things.
This puts the decisionmakers of the American press, whether they agreed or not, in a very difficult situation. To have insisted that the U.S. Government was engaged in torture when the leaders of said Government adamantly denied that what they were doing constituted torture and most citizens supported the “enhanced interrogation techniques” and dismissed as buffoons those worried about poor widdle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have not only been taking sides in an ongoing debate but taking a very unpopular stand.
Additionally, the use of the word “torture” has legal and propaganda implications. To have matter-of-factly stated that the U.S. Government was engaged in torture was to say that those carrying it out are criminals. The press doesn’t do that with accused criminals, even when there’s incontrovertible video evidence. And, of course, saying that the U.S. Government is engaged in “torture” is a propaganda victory for the enemy. That’s a tough thing to do in wartime.
Further, while the press doubtless came to despise some members of the Bush Administration, they naturally had close relationships with the team and saw most of its members as good people trying earnestly to protect the country from another 9/11 type attack. It’s psychologically and professionally difficult to dismiss their insistence that they’re not committing torture as simply untrue. Simultaneously, it’s easy to believe that waterboarding done under the auspices of a despotic regime for the sole purpose of maintaining tyranny is something inherently different and thus worthy of a different name.
Does this amount to “servitude” to the government and “cowardice”? Maybe. But I think it’s more complicated than that.Progressive metallers Brutai have released their new song Of Ashes exclusively with Metal Hammer.
“Of Ashes is a politically driven track about an unwanted ruler burning our world to ashes,” frontman Felix Lawrie tells Metal Hammer. “We feel it’s quite appropriate given the current state of the world we are living in.”
The track is taken from the band’s debut album Born, the artwork for which was designed by Mario Sanchez Nevaro and animated (in the video below) by George Redhawk, who is registered legally blind.
“George is an artist whose mesmerising and unique work captured our interest as he recreates his own ‘vision’ in an animated version of the artwork he likes. All of his work is non profit, but to show our appreciation for his major contribution to our forthcoming album, we’d like to encourage donations to the Wolf Mountain Sanctuary, a cause in which he supports.”
Brutai will play the Sophie Lancaster stage at Bloodstock festival.Django Patterns: Model Inheritance
This post discusses the two flavors of model inheritance supported by Django, some of their use-cases as well as some potential gotchas.
Overview
When the queryset refactor landed a couple years ago, Django's ORM grew support for model inheritance. Model inheritance comes in two flavors, abstract and... not. What are the important differences in how Django handles these two types of inheritance?
Multi-table inheritance (not abstract)
Directly extending a model results in two tables where the shared fields are stored in one table (the parent model's table) and the fields unique to the child model are stored on the child model's table. The child model contains a foreign key to the parent model and whenever queried automatically includes the joins.
class Media ( models. Model ): title = models. CharField ( max_length = 255 ) pub_date = models. DateTimeField () class Photo ( Media ): # note that Photo extends Media image = models. ImageField ( upload_to = 'photos' ) class Video ( Media ): video = models. FileField ( upload_to = 'videos' ) class VideoWithThumbnail ( Video, Photo ): """ Querying this object will result in 3 inner joins on filters/gets Saving/deleting will require at least 4 queries, but in my testing saving actually required 10 queries and deleting 13! """ pass
Because of the way these items are stored in the database, it is possible to query against all media objects, whether they're photos, videos, or just plain-old Media objects. Querying Media, the base class, will return Media instances without either the special photo or video fields:
>>> Media. objects. all () # get all the media objects, photos or videos [<Media: Media object>, <Media: Media object>] >>> Photo. objects. all () # just the photos [<Photo: Photo object>] >>> Video. objects. all () # just the videos [<Video: Video object>]
I find multi-table inheritance useful in the following circumstances:
Query against all objects of a type, i.e. all media
Relate (via a ForeignKey/M2M) to all objects of a type
I see two main downsides to this type of inheritance:
More queries: every insert/update/delete must cascade to all the tables in the inheritance chain
More joins: every select must against join against all tables in the inheritance chain.
There are a couple other things to watch out for:
Since the parent model and all the descendants have unique content types, Generic ForeignKeys can be a bit cumbersome.
Django's model signals do not cascade to child models, so a post_save handler registered sender=Media would not be called when a Photo object gets saved.
You can't override fields defined on subclasses (true for mixins as well). This makes sense if you think about how this data is being stored.
If you're interested, there's a neat project called django_polymorphic that optimizes this type of inheritance and lets you query the base class and always returns the "most specific subclass" transparently.
The rest of this post will deal with Abstract models.
Abstract Models, or "Mixins"
OK, multi-table inheritance is admittedly a pretty complicated affair and there a quite a few things to watch out for. Defining a model as abstract and using it as a mixin I find much more intuitive, especially at the database level.
class AbstractMedia ( models. Model ): title = models. CharField ( max_length = 255 ) class Meta : abstract = True # <--- denotes our model as abstract class Photo ( AbstractMedia ): image = models. ImageField ( upload_to = 'photos' )
Basically, an abstract model doesn't get a table. This has several implications:
Subclasses contain all the fields on their table (no joining/parent-fk)
Abstract model can't be queried against
Abstract model cannot have a ForeignKey or M2M to it
As Eric Florenzano pointed out in his talk "Why Django Sucks and How We Can Fix It", abstract models introduce a whole new set of problems:
trading implementation for configuration - this is probably more in reference to the idea that abstract models provide an elegant solution to the "reuable app problem"
extra level of indirection
what fields does my model have, and what base class provided them?
That being said, there are definitely valid use-cases for abstract models. Commonly you'll hear abstract models referred to as "mixins" and this pretty well describes what I see as their main strength. They allow bits of functionality to be wrapped up in a class and reused in many models without forcing you to incur the extra database overhead.
I read in Head First: Design Patterns to "favor composition over inheritance", which I take to mean that it's better to build your objects out of smaller pieces than extending/overriding and creating a tall class hierarchy.
Looking at some examples
Mixins can do just about everything that normal models can do, so you can use them to encapsulate bits of common model functionality. One thing I find myself doing a lot is auto-generating a slug for my models that have title fields. This can be wrapped up neatly using a mixin:
from django.db import models, IntegrityError, transaction from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify class TitleSlugModel ( models. Model ): title = models. CharField ( max_length = 255 ) slug = models. SlugField ( unique = True ) class Meta : abstract = True def save ( self, * args, ** kwargs ): """ Based on the Tag save() method in django-taggit, this method simply stores a slugified version of the title, ensuring that the unique constraint is observed """ self. slug = slug = slugify ( self. title ) i = 0 while True : try : savepoint = transaction. savepoint () res = super ( TitleSlugModel, self ). save ( * args, ** kwargs ) transaction. savepoint_commit ( savepoint ) return res except IntegrityError : transaction. savepoint_rollback ( savepoint ) i += 1 self. slug ='%s _ %d'% ( slug, i ) class ContentObject ( TitleSlugModel ): content = models. TextField ()
Another common thing I find myself doing is storing a pub/created/modified date. In this example the ContentObject model will be composed of two abstract models, the TitleSlug model and the new DateAwareModel. Note that both of the ABCs are overriding the save() method, but that, because of python's method resolution order, everything gets called as we would expect.
import datetime from django.db import models, IntegrityError, transaction from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify class TitleSlugModel ( models. Model ): # everything the same as above def save ( self, * args, ** kwargs ): print 'title slug model save() called' #... same as above except adding a "print" statement at the top # of the method class DateAwareModel ( models. Model ): pub_date = models. DateTimeField () modified_date = models. DateTimeField () created_date = models. DateTimeField () class Meta : abstract = True def save ( self, * args, ** kwargs ): print 'date aware model save() called' if not self. pk : self. created_date = datetime. datetime. now () self. modified_date = datetime. datetime. now () return super ( DateAwareModel, self ). save ( * args, ** kwargs ) class ContentObject ( TitleSlugModel, DateAwareModel ): content = models. TextField () def save ( self, * args, ** kwargs ): print 'content model save() called' super ( ContentObject, self ). save ( * args, ** kwargs )
Here's some sample output from the shell showing that all 3 save() methods are called and our model gets a slug and a modified date.
>>> import datetime >>> from media.models import * >>> content_obj = ContentObject ( title = 'testing' ) >>> content_obj. pub_date = datetime. datetime ( 2010, 10, 9 ) >>> content_obj. save () content model save() called title slug model save() called date aware model save() called >>> content_obj. modified_date datetime.datetime(2010, 10, 9, 13, 31, 57, 782511) >>> content_obj. slug u'testing'
Conclusion
Thanks for reading, I hope you found this post informative! Both multi-table inheritance and abstract models have their place in the django developer's toolkit. There's potential for some serious overhead when using multi-table inheritance, but you gain the ability to query against all objects of a base type. Abstract base classes avoid the database overhead by not creating explicit links in the database, but you lose the ability to query across subclasses. As always, any comments, feedback, suggestions, errata, etc are appreciated.
Links
Commenting has been closed, but please feel free to contact meProsecutors in Texas have dropped a 2011 drunken driving citation against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. heiress Alice Walton.
Officials said Monday that the highway patrol officer who pulled over Walton has been suspended and won't be available to testify.
Parker County, Texas, Prosecutor John Forest told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (http://is.gd/4WDwlt ) that his office had two years to pursue the case against Walton. But the trooper's suspension won't be over by the Oct. 7 deadline.
Forrest said the trooper is on paid leave. The suspension for alleged misconduct began in February.
Walton's attorney, Dee Kelly of Fort Worth, says the matter has been resolved without a formal charge being filed.
The arrest came about a month before the opening of the Walton-backed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.
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Information from: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, http://www.arkansasonline.comShare:
A gift for you: Holiday StreetPass Weekend from 12/24 - 1/4
Share the joy of the season with other Nintendo fans by trading StreetPass tags during National StreetPass Weekend.
Stop by any of the more than 29,000 Nintendo Zone hotspots across North America with your Nintendo 3DS system from Dec. 24, 2015 through Jan. 4, 2016—you could get up to six StreetPass tags from across North America.
Wondering what StreetPass can add to your games? Visit the old Wayfarer Manor to meet wandering Yo-kai. You can receive gifts from them or even battle and befriend them in YO-KAI WATCH. Collect puzzle pieces for the new Mario & Luigi™: Paper Jam panel, or pick up enemy tokens for StreetSmash in Super Smash Bros.™ for Nintendo 3DS.
You can also find a character named Claude with a special decorating request for your Animal Crossing™: Happy Home Designer game.
Find a hotspot near you here: http://www.nintendo.com/3ds/nintendozone.
Wishing you a holiday filled with fun and games!Everyguyed Grooming
Getting a haircut can be a daunting task at times, especially if you’re forced into unfamiliar follicle territory with the prospect of finding a new barber. It’s funny, but people often place a inordinate weight on their hair and getting it cut, but the fact of the matter is unless you’re considering chopping off your lengthy headbanger locks for a military-issue buzz cut it’s going to grow back before you know it. Still, a great haircut is one of the small, but indispensable pleasures of life, so to help you out we’ve assembled a simple list to help you get the best trim for your money.
Look for a Place that’s Busy
If you’re passing by a shop that’s empty most of the time, it’s not a good sign. Sure, it might provide the convenience of right-here, right-now service, but it’s probably going to result in a cut that you’re going to need to hide under a cap for a few weeks.
If you see a guy with a haircut you like, ask him where he got it. We know that may sound like a strange prospect to some, but we’re proponents of guys actually talking to each other about style and grooming. Enough with awkward stoicism; he’s not going to accost you complimenting his cut, and it’s a simple way of finding a new shop to try.
If you see a guy with a haircut you like, ask him where he got it
Cost doesn’t always translate into quality
A decent men’s haircut (for relatively short, classic styles) should cost you between $20-40 in most cases. Of course, this changes slightly depending on the city, and even the neighborhood you’re in, but a man shouldn’t have to choose between paying his rent or growing dreadlocks.
A good way to ensure you’re not overpaying for a cut is to a barber. This article is titled ‘How to find a quality Barber’ for the specific reason that a salon probably isn’t where you need to go. Unless you’re getting layered highlights – if you are, consult a calendar cause you’re in the wrong decade – all you need is a man who’s skilled with scissors. Okay a beer is a nice touch, but Tahitian cucumber water or scalp massages aren’t. Cost isn’t always reflected in your cut, but more likely in that alpaca leather couch in the waiting area.
You should never feel rushed by a barber.
If you notice a barber pushing through clients before you, and feel like he’s going to give you the same bum-rush treatment, don’t be afraid to just make an excuse and get out of there (a fake phone-call works wonders). Yes, it’s not the ideal reaction, but a rushed cut or a surly barber is something no man shouldn’t have to pay for.
A good barber should be attentive, interested, and engaged: asking you what you want, and taking the time to confirm the details or suggest new options. It’s kind of like dancing, except one partner has sharp implements at their disposal.
A good barber should be attentive, interested, and engaged
You get the cut you ask for
If you’re not crazy about your cut when you walk out the door, remember that barber’s will cut your hair to maximize your value, so it will be about a week before it has a chance to grow-out and take it’s shape. Unless he has clearly done a complete hack-job, tip him fairly, and wait to see the true results of his skill emerge in time.
If you’re getting a haircut within a week of a specific function or event, ask the barber to cut it to look a little grown in and more natural. Ideally though, you should time your cut a week or so before an event in order to look your best. If the haircut never ends up meeting your standards, you don’t have to return.
Summary
We’ll keep this simple, because that’s what your barbershop experience should be.
Opt for a place that’s busy. You might have to work to get an appointment, but odds are your cut will be one of quality
. You might have to work to get an appointment, but odds are your cut will be one of quality You don’t always get what you pay for. A simple barbershop cut should fall between $20-40, any more and you’re paying for atmosphere
. A simple barbershop cut should fall between $20-40, any more and you’re paying for atmosphere You get the cut you ask for, so communicate with your barber and let them know exactly what you want. They’re skilled with shears, they aren’t mind-readers
Author(CNN) -- In an effort to ramp up pressure for Peru to crack down on illegal loggers in its region of the Amazon, an indigenous rights organization has released what it says are photos of an uncontacted tribe in Brazil that is threatened by the logging across the border.
Survival International says the previously unpublished aerial photos, which it released Monday, show members of an uncontacted Brazilian tribe that is likely to get drawn into conflicts with Peruvian tribes who are fleeing their homes because of the logging.
One photo shows five tribe members, some in red tribal paint, standing in front of a hut and looking upward. One man is holding a bow, and another, younger person, holds a machete. Foods including bananas, papayas and cassava can be identified near the tribe members.
The photos were taken by Brazil's National Indian Foundation and were given to Survival International, it said.
"The illegal loggers will destroy this tribe," Survival International Director Stephen Corry said in a written statement. "It's vital that the Peruvian government stop them before time runs out. The people in these photos are self-evidently healthy and thriving. What they need from us is their territory protected, so that they can make their own choices about their future."
More than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, and about half live in the remote reaches of the Amazonian rainforest in Peru or Brazil, near the recently photographed tribe, the organization says.
"But this area is now at real risk, and if the wave of illegal logging isn't stopped fast, their future will be taken out of their hands. This isn't just a possibility: it's irrefutable history, rewritten on the graves of countless tribes for the last five centuries," Corry said.
Loggers in Peru are pushing isolated Indians from Peru into Brazil, where, according to Survival International, "the two groups are likely to come into conflict."
Several nongovernmental organizations have pushed Peru to act against the logging for years, but little has been done, they say.Las Vegas - After a relatively uneventful president and vice-presidential nominating process, all hell broke loose at the Libertarian National Convention when the Libertarian Party attempted to pick a new national committee chair. The race between current chair Mark Hinkle and vice chair Mark Rutherford fell into disarray when a group of delegates associated with Lee Wrights made a push for the option of None Of The Above.
The selection of “None of the Above,” or NOTA, would exclude Hinkle and Rutherford from future rounds of ballots, while opening the race to candidates who can be nominated from the floor. Wrights said he would accept the nomination.
The fight began when Nicholas Sarwark of Colorado pushed for someone to speak on behalf of NOTA. Parliamentary rangling ensued, watch after the jump.
Sarwark, who seconded Wrights in the presidential nomination process, won his fight to speak on behalf of NOTA and delivered the following speech.
Hinkle was eliminated after the first round of voting. But because Rutherford did not receive 50 percent plus-one, it went to a second round of voting. In that second round, NOTA beat Rutherford 273-269. Immediately after the vote was announced a round of boos erupted, and one delegate alleged vote tampering.
LP Secretary Bill Redpath held a revote, and Rutherford came out on top by a handful of votes. This caused more anger on the floor.
"BOOO!"
"Voter fraud!"
After the crowd settled a motion came to the floor to throw out the recount and conduct a third round of voting. It passed with a two-thirds vote.
At press time a third round of voting was ongoing.
Party insiders think this is an attempt to get Wrights in as national chairman.
When asked about it Wrights denied knowing anything.
“I don’t know what the hell is goin’ on. I was busy running for president. I don’t have time for these shennaigans,” he said inside the conventional hall.
Wrights said he would accept if nominated for national committee chair.
The man who started this all, Sarwark, said this had nothing to do with Wrights.
"I just wasn't comfortable with the two candidates. This has nothing to do with Lee," he said.
Would Rutherford be an acceptable national chair if NOTA loses?
"I am not gonna cry or get drunk and jump off the roof of the Red Rock if Rutherford wins," he said.
Gary Johnson's campaign chairman, Ron Nielson, described the scene as "wild".
Some background on Hinkle and Rutherford.
Hinkle has been the party chair since 2010. He is a bridge between the philopshical wing of the party and the political wing of the party. Rutherford is from the political wing of the party. During his nomination speech he declared, "We are a major party!" A third candidate from Oregon failed to qualify for the election.
According to one delegate, NOTA has not won in the 20 years that he has been a member of the Libertarian Party.
Update 5:32pm PST - Mark Rutherford has beat None of the Above, 278-275 278-277.
Update 5:48pm PST - A motion to extend the meeting beyond 6pm failed.
Update 5:49pm PST - Redpath calls for adjournment at 6pm. Delegates are challenging his authority to do so. Redpath says there is no winner of the electino and the convention will reconvene tomorrow at 9:00am PST.
Update 5:52pm PST - Motion to overturn the rule of the chair that challenges are dilatory fails.
Update 5:56pm PST - The meeting is adjourned until tomorrow at 9:00am. There will be a fourth rounding of voting for the LNC chair tomorrow morning.A public-records request from a liberal blogger led to Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor realizing that her chief of staff wasn't doing her job.
A public-records request from a liberal blogger led to Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor realizing that her chief of staff wasn�t doing her job.
Laura Johnson, 33, the only chief of staff Taylor has had in 3 1/2 years as lieutenant governor, resigned on Thursday at Taylor�s request. Heather Brandt, 30, executive assistant to Johnson, also resigned, citing an �unhealthy hostile work environment� in her resignation letter.
The resignations came after it was noticed that the amount of time the two women�s cars were parked in the Riffe Center garage under the Statehouse was �significantly less� than the amount of time they said they had worked on their time sheets. The �irregularities� � according to Taylor�s office � only came to light because the liberal-leaning Plunderbund blog requested payroll records, time sheets and parking records for Johnson and Brandt since Jan. 1. The request was made on April 29.
Multiple spokesmen within the Kasich administration said it wouldn�t be unusual for Taylor not to have known where Johnson was or whether she was working throughout the day. But Taylor, a Republican, and her spokesman seemed to offer conflicting statements on whether the work Johnson was responsible for was completed.
Taylor, who lives in suburban Akron and commutes to Columbus, is also director of the Department of Insurance.
�The lieutenant governor works out of multiple offices and travels the state; she is often in contact with staff through cellphones,� said Chris Brock, Taylor�s spokesman. �As long as the work is getting done, that�s what�s important. It wasn�t until we started looking through the records when we found these irregularities.�
Taylor referred the matter to the state inspector general�s office and to the state Highway Patrol for further investigation. In her referral memo, Taylor wrote that �due to certain personal issues� both Johnson and Brandt were facing, she allowed them �some flexibility in their work schedules.�
�As a working mom, I know it�s hard to juggle both family and a job, so I�ve tried to be supportive of my own staff as they juggle those demands,� Taylor said in a statement released to the media. �Unfortunately, the flexibility I�ve tried to show the chief of staff of my personal office hasn�t been appropriately respected and the workings of the office have suffered.�
Taylor also said that �in any workplace, especially a public workplace, responsibility and trust come with accountability, and in this case I think I�ve been let down.�
In 2011, The Dispatch found that Taylor had either been picked up or dropped off by a state-owned airplane three times at Akron-Canton Airport � about 6 miles from her home � and Republican Gov. John Kasich ordered her to repay the state $1,039.50 for those flights.
Neither Johnson nor Brandt immediately responded to messages seeking comment. Johnson was a deputy campaign manager for the Kasich-Taylor campaign in 2010. She was paid about $125,000 last year; Brandt made $58,300.
Rob Nichols, a spokesman for Kasich, said �the governor was aware� of the situation and � supports the lieutenant governor�s decision.�
Kasich�s political opponent this fall, Democratic Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, is taking heat in Cleveland for refusing to release records showing when he is in his county office, citing security concerns.
[email protected]
@joevardonWith every passing day, it feels like the robot uprising is getting a little closer. Robots are being beaten down by their human overlords, even as we teach them to get stronger. Now, they’re starting to break free.
A robot in Russia escaped from a research lab in the town of Perm yesterday, June 15, reports the BBC. An engineer at robotics company Promobot had forgotten to close a gate, and the runaway bot caused a traffic jam as it bolted out into the world.
It promptly ran out of power in the middle of the road. The robot got about 50m (164 ft) before its battery died, according to local newspaper Argumenty i Fakty (Russian).
According to Promobot’s website, the robot is designed to roam around on its own, engage |
For consumers, any remaining drive noise is likely a relatively small price to pay for sharply focused video, however, given that manually pulling focus during video capture is a difficult art to learn.
Also unlike many competing cameras, the Sony SLT-A77 provides full control over movie exposure, with a choice of Program, Aperture-priority, Shutter-priority, or fully Manual recording. It also allows Tracking autofocus, as well as use of Creative Style and some Picture Effect modes during movie capture. Recording is started and stopped with a dedicated Movie button on the SLT-A77's rear panel, and audio is captured by default with a built-in stereo microphone. There's also an external stereo microphone jack, compatible with microphones including Sony's own ECM-CG50 Shotgun Mic and ECM-ALST1 Stereo Mic. A built-in monaural speaker caters to movie playback, and has an eight-step adjustable volume setting.
See the A77 Video page for sample videos and more details.
Playback. To let you immediately judge composition, exposure, and the like, the Sony SLT-A77 provides an optional Auto Review function that can display images on-screen for two, five, or ten seconds immediately post capture. (There's also a Shot Result Preview function in Record mode which lets you see an image as it would be captured with the current settings, including shutter speed, DRO settings, etc.) After capture, Playback mode lets you review single images, with optional shooting information, RGB histogram, or blinking highlight/shadow warning. In addition, images can be enlarged up to 13.6x to confirm fine details. Two index views are available, showing either four or nine frames at once.
Connectivity. The Sony SLT-A77 includes a USB 2.0 High Speed data connection, allowing for transfer of images and movies to a personal computer. Two operating modes are available for the USB connection, either USB Mass Storage Class, or Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol. Catering for high-definition video output, the SLT-A77 also provides a Type-C Mini HDMI connection, with support for Bravia Sync, Sony's brand name for the Consumer Electronics Control standard. This allows certain playback functions such as switching between images to be performed using the attached display's remote control unit. There's no standard-definition video output on the SLT-A77, though, so photographers who've yet to switch to a high-def display will need a third-party device with which to view images on a standard TV.
Other connectivity on the SLT-A77 includes a DC Input for the optional AC adapter, a flash sync terminal and hot shoe, and jacks for both an external stereo microphone, and a wired remote control unit.
Storage. As well as Sony's proprietary Memory Stick PRO Duo and Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo flash cards, the SLT-A77's single card slot supports Secure Digital cards, including not only the higher-capacity SDHC and SDXC types, but also the higher-speed UHS-I compliant cards. 2D images can be saved either in Sony ARW 2.3 raw format, or as standard JPEG files (DCF Ver. 2.0, Exif Ver. 2.3, MPF Baseline compliant). 3D images are saved as Multi Picture Object files (MPF Extended compliant).
Battery. The Sony SLT-A77 draws power from a proprietary NP-FM500H lithium-ion battery pack, which is rated by Sony for 470 shots when using the electronic viewfinder, and 530 shots with the LCD monitor, to CIPA testing standards.
An available VG-C77AM vertical grip not only provides duplicates of the main controls for portrait-orientation shooting, but also accepts two NP-FM500H battery packs, roughly doubling battery life (since the in-camera battery pack can't be used with the grip connected).
Sony A77 Image Quality
Since the Sony A77 has now taken the APS-C resolution crown, we're comparing it here to two of its biggest competitors, the Canon 60D and Nikon D7000 and two full-frame cameras of similar resolution, in this case the Nikon D3X and Sony A850. Though we normally start with ISO 1,600 here, we thought we'd start with ISO 100 to show the best it can do.
Note: These crops have been updated from the original v0.58 firmware on our prototype A77 to v1.03 firmware from a full production-level unit. Also note that these images are best quality JPEGs straight out of the camera, at default settings including noise reduction. All cameras in this comparison were shot with our very sharp reference lens, the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro.
Sony A77 versus Canon EOS 60D at ISO 100
Sony A77 at ISO 100 Canon 60D at ISO 100 The Sony A77 does quite well against the Canon 60D, which is not a huge surprise at ISO 100 considering what happens when you pit a 24.3-megapixel sensor against an 18-megapixel design. Both look great, but the Sony resolves more. You can see hints of a thread pattern in the Canon 60D, but it's better defined from the A77.
Sony A77 versus Nikon D7000 at ISO 100
Sony A77 at ISO 100 Nikon D7000 at ISO 100 The A77 also surpasses the 16.2-megapixel Nikon D7000, bringing out significantly more detail from our test target. What happens as ISO rises will be interesting.
Sony A77 versus Nikon D3X at ISO 100
Sony A77 at ISO 100 Nikon D3X at ISO 100 The Sony A77 also does well against the $8,000 full-frame D3X. The D3X looks a little more crisp, but simple sharpening could help that.
Sony A77 versus Sony A850 at ISO 100
Sony A77 at ISO 100 Sony A850 at ISO 100 Here we have the crop-frame A77 against Sony's full-frame A850. It seems to come down to a difference of contrast, maybe even exposure. The pink fabric below the red leaf swatch has more texture, which you'd expect from a larger sensor, and truer color. Overall, the A77 looks quite comparable.
Most digital SLRs will produce a reasonable ISO 100 shot, so we like to push them and see what they can do compared to other cameras at ISO 1,600, 3,200, and 6,400. Recent advances in sensor technology have made ISO 1,600 look a lot more like ISO 100, but there are still cameras whose quality starts to fall apart at this setting. We also choose 1,600 because we like to be able to shoot at least at this level when indoors and at night.
Sony A77 versus Canon 60D at ISO 1,600
Sony A77 at ISO 1,600 Canon 60D at ISO 1,600 ISO 1,600 confirms the reason we do these crops, as the Sony A77 starts to struggle with detail at this setting thanks to aggressive noise suppression, particularly in the mosaic crop. The Canon 60D maintains a little more detail, but not a lot, also struggling with the red leaf swatch. The A77 with the latest 1.03 firmware does a lot better in the red leaf swatch, producing a comparably muddled, if differently rendered image.
Sony A77 versus Nikon D7000 at ISO 1,600
Sony A77 at ISO 1,600 Nikon D7000 at ISO 1,600 It's probably a toss-up between the two, given the A77's heavier noise suppression against Nikon's lower detail at 16 megapixels. But there's no question that the Nikon D7000 renders the red leaf swatch a lot better than the Sony A77, even with the new firmware. Nikon still takes a more even hand balancing noise suppression against sharpening, creating a more realistic rendering than most other manufacturers at this point.
Sony A77 versus Nikon D3X at ISO 1,600
Sony A77 at ISO 1,600 Nikon D3X at ISO 1,600 Again, noise suppression in the A77 limits detail in all three crops when compared to the Nikon D3X, which has legendary performance in low light. Still, this is quite good performance from an APS-C sensor compared to a full-frame.
Sony A77 versus Sony A850 at ISO 1,600
Sony A77 at ISO 1,600 Sony A850 at ISO 1,600 Here the Sony A77 surpasses somewhat, doing a better job with background chroma noise and the mosaic image than its larger cousin the A850. But both the A900 and A850 didn't do as well at higher ISOs, so it's not much of a surprise. Note that the A850 still does a slightly better job on the red leaf swatch.
Today's ISO 3,200 is yesterday's ISO 1,600 (well, almost), so below are the same crops at ISO 3,200.
Sony A77 versus Canon EOS 60D at ISO 3,200
Sony A77 at ISO 3,200 Canon 60D at ISO 3,200 Except for color, it seems both cameras render about the same detail at ISO 3,200, though the A77 with the new firmware does a better job with the red swatch. The Canon retains a little bit more subtle color, if it's a little pumped by comparison. Very close.
Sony A77 versus Nikon D7000 at ISO 3,200
Sony A77 at ISO 3,200 Nikon D7000 at ISO 3,200 Sony cleans up the chroma noise a little more thoroughly, omitting color artifacts that show up noticeably in the shoulder of the olive oil bottle above in the D7000 image. But the Nikon D7000 looks a little better on the mosaic image, and does a better job capturing the essence of the red leaf swatch.
Sony A77 versus Nikon D3X at ISO 3,200
Sony A77 at ISO 3,200 Nikon D3X at ISO 3,200 The Nikon D3X maintains a lot more color as well as detail. The A77's rendering is still respectable, but again shows the disadvantage of a smaller sensor size.
Sony A77 versus Sony A850 at ISO 3,200
Sony A77 at ISO 3,200 Sony A850 at ISO 3,200 The Sony A77's image looks a little cleaner than that of the A850, with less blotchy noise, though the A850 renders the read leaf swatch a little better. I prefer the A77's image.
Detail: Sony A77 vs. Canon 60D, Nikon D7000, Nikon D3X, and Sony A850
Sony
A77
ISO 100
ISO 3,200
ISO 6,400 Canon
60D
ISO 100
ISO 3,200
ISO 6,400 Nikon
D7000
ISO 100
ISO 3,200
ISO 6,400 Nikon
D3X
ISO 100
ISO 3,200
ISO 6,400 Sony
A850
ISO 100
ISO 3,200
ISO 6,400 Detail comparison. High-contrast details are often sharper as ISO rises, so they're worth a look as well. Base ISO detail looks good from all five cameras, with the A77 looking slightly soft but not significantly so. The Nikon D7000 also doesn't quite render the lines inside the letters as well as the others due to its lower resolution of 16 megapixels. At ISO 3,200 you can see some decay in quality from the A77 even when compared to the A850, though the A850 shows color splotches where we know there are none. At ISO 6,400 the Sony A77 doesn't do quite as well as the others with the fine lines or the red letters. Still, for the price -- and even the camera's size -- the Sony A77 does very well.
Sony A77 firmware 0.58 vs 1.03
Below are crops comparing the red leaf swatch at ISO 3,200 with the prototype and production camera.
Sony A77 v. 0.58 at ISO 3,200 Sony A77 v. 1.03 at ISO 3,200 Sony's production firmware makes an improvement in the rendering of the very difficult red leaf swatch, so clearly they have improved their red-channel processing. There was little improvement in the other channels, so other elements of our test crops remained essentially unchanged.
Sony A77 Print Quality
100% crops on-screen can only tell you so much, especially when comparing cameras of different resolutions. So we always print samples of various sizes to determine the maximum print size at each ISO setting. To avoid printing massive stacks, we print only JPEGs generated from our test images taken at default noise suppression settings. Usually you can get quite a bit more processing the images from RAW.
Note: This is an updated print quality analysis based on images printed with the firmware version installed when the production-level lab shots were taken (v1.03), revealing a slight increase in overall quality from the pre-production version (v0.58).
ISO 50/100 prints look quite good at 30 x 40 and terrific at 24 x 36.
ISO 200 prints are again excellent at 24 x 36 inches.
ISO 400 prints are also good at 24 x 36 inches.
ISO 800 shots print quite well at 20 x 30 inches.
ISO 1,600 shots look great at 16 x 20, although hints of noise appear in light shadows.
ISO 3,200 makes a nice 11 x 14 inch print, although there is some large, diffuse chroma noise in areas of flat tints.
ISO 6,400 images are usable at 8 x 10, if a little rough in some spots. We prefer the 5 x 7 images.
ISO 12,800 and 16,000 do not produce usable prints and are best avoided.
Overall, the Sony A77's image quality is excellent. Once we installed the updated firmware and reshot and printed the updated images, we were able to give slightly higher recommendations at several ISO settings than we were able to give with the prototype, based mainly on the update's ability to more accurately render data in the red channel.
In the Box
The retail kit contains the following items:
Sony Alpha SLT-A77V body
SAL1650 SAM lens with lens cap, if bought as a kit
Lithium-ion battery pack NP-FM500H
Battery charger
USB cable
Body cap
Shoulder strap
Software CD-ROM
Recommended Accessories
Extra battery pack for extended outings
Fast, large capacity SDHC/SDXC or Memory Stick Pro-HG Duo memory cards. These days, 8-16GB is a good trade-off between cost and capacity.
Camera case
Additional lens(es)
External flash
Sony Alpha A77 Conclusion
Pros: Cons: 24.3-megapixel APS-C sensor offers great resolution for a prosumer DSLR
Unique Sony translucent-mirror tech provides full-time phase-detect autofocus
Full-time live view by default
12 frames-per-second capture rate
Fast autofocus, burst, shutter lag, shot-to-shot and continuous mode speeds
Full 1080p HD video recording, at up to 60 frames per second
60fps video mode is true 60fps from the sensor, not frame-doubled 30fps
Live phase-detect autofocus during video recording (but see notes under Cons)
Supports both AVCHD and MPEG-4 video formats
Full PASM exposure control in video mode (but see note under Cons)
Stereo audio recording via built-in mic or standard 3.5mm external jack
Very good body-based image stabilization
Tons of creative modes and filters, including Sony's Sweep Panorama
Very good 2.4 million dot EVF (OLED technology)
Articulating 3-inch, 921,600-dot LCD is bright and viewable in all lighting conditions
Excellent 16-50mm f/2.8 zoom kit lens
Solid magnesium alloy molded body
Comfortable, ergonomic build and easy-to-operate controls
Popup flash can also serve as a wireless controller
Built-in GPS
Good battery life for an interchangeable lens camera equipped with an EVF (but see note under Cons) Somewhat heavy for a prosumer DSLR
Uses an EVF instead of an optical viewfinder; EVF appears dim when used in bright light
Camera doesn't switch fast enough between the LCD viewfinder and EVF after viewfinder detects you're looking through it, leaving you in the dark for a brief moment
Images sometimes a little underexposed
Noise suppression gets in the way of truly sharp pictures at ISO 1,600 and above
Continuous AF in Movie mode only works with large apertures and isn't available in aperture priority, shutter priority, or manual exposure modes
AF tracking in Movie mode was unreliable in our testing
Movie-mode aperture priority, shutter priority, and manual exposure modes are only available with manual focus
Max ISO sensitivity limited to 1,600 in movie mode
Video images are cropped significantly from full sensor area, makes wide-angle video harder to achieve
EVF is still an EVF, dynamic range doesn't match that of the human eye
Below average battery life compared to traditional DSLRs with optical viewfinder
The Sony Alpha A77 is a major leap forward for the company in DSLR design, features and image capabilities, finally putting Sony into the competitive mix with Canon and Nikon in the prosumer DSLR marketplace. The A77's 24.3-megapixel APS-C sensor, Translucent Mirror Technology and 12 frames-per-second capture rate changed everything for Sony. I found the Sony A77 to be solidly built, with a comfortable, familiar feel very reminiscent of the ergonomics of past Canon DSLRs-- which is a good thing. The A77 is very fast on almost all accounts, including autofocus, shutter lag and shot-to-shot speeds. As you'd expect with the high-resolution sensor, the A77's image (and print) quality is excellent, and the 16-50mm f/2.8 zoom kit lens provides excellent optics and performance beyond that of most kit lenses. Our laboratory testing did show that the A77's heavy-handed noise reduction robbed a little fine detail when shooting at ISOs of 1,600 and above. Another downside was the lack of an optical viewfinder. While the EVF does allow Sony to pack more performance into the sensor and internal electronics, I found it somewhat difficult to deal with; it was often dim when used in bright light, and didn't switch over from the LCD fast enough after it detected I was using the EVF. Additionally, when I took the camera out for some test shots, I found that sometimes my images were slightly underexposed, but nothing I couldn't fix afterward in Photoshop. Despite these negatives, I hadn't been excited about a DSLR as I was with the A77 in a long, long time. And Sony more than lived up to my high expectations. The rare combination of superior design and build, excellent imaging, fast shooting speeds, tons of creative modes, Full HD video recording and much more make the Sony A77 a definitive Dave's Pick.
Follow Imaging-Resource.com on Twitter!Art by John W. Tomac | Website | @johnwtomac
Ever wonder who’s behind all the live stats on the MLSsoccer.com Matchcenter on Saturday nights?
The latest episode of the Emmy-nominated series MLS Insider goes behind the scenes with the number crunchers at Opta Sports, the world’s leading live sports data company. When supporters are watching games from the stands there’s an army of soccer-savvy minds breaking down the action into sensible stats for fans and, in the case of the New England Revolution, MLS teams willing to embrace the new numbers revolution.
For more on the numbers game, check out the latest column from Opta Sports analyst Devin Plueler, who breaks down the statistic that differentiates one of the best teams in MLS this season from one of the worst. And don’t miss the rest of the MLS Insider series, including past episodes on New York Red Bulls striker Bradley Wright-Phillips, the rise of MLS academies and Thierry Henry’s memorable matchup against former club Arsenal.WWE Superstar Kane recently spoke with talkSPORT‘s Rob Leigh, and talked about his brother The Undertaker’s match with Shane McMahon at Wrestlemania 32.
Kane talks about why Undertaker is taking the match on Vince McMahon’s behalf, and how the match might actually play out. You can read a few excerpts below, and listen to the interview in the player below:
Kane talks about how the match might go down:
“With Shane, you just have to weather his exuberance, for lack of a better term. He’s going to want to just let it all hang out and jump off the top of the stadium if he can. So I think that’s the most important thing – just let him do his deal. And then eventually, of course, what’s going to happen is – much like in a soccer or rugby match – that emotion’s going to wear off and from there the better team, or in this case The Undertaker, does what he does best.”
Kane talks about why Undertaker is taking the match in the first place:In my college systems class we were required to implement malloc.
I spent a week or so on it. No version control — I was both youthful and arrogant.
After ironing out all the little systems bugs, I began cleaning up the directory to package up and send off for grading. I went to remove something in the same directory that also started with the letter m, and when I hit tab, zsh helpfully completed this to malloc.c.
By the time I had noticed, it was too late.
I had just run rm malloc.c.
grep to the rescue
I knew that grep works on a lot of the virtual filesystems available in nix, like /proc. I thought, “why not `/dev/` too?”
I figured I could use a command like this to grep over raw disk data — not over files or anything like that, just on the raw data on disk — and if successful, I’d have a resonable shot at recovering my homework.
I now doubt that this idea is even remotely original — grep was probably designed to do exactly this sort of thing.
Anyway, after RTFM'ing for awhile, eventually I ran a command that looked vaguely like this:
$ grep --binary-files=text --context=x'stringfromyourfile' \ /dev/whateverPartition > someFile.txt
The gist of what we’re doing here is running grep over the partition /dev/whateverPartition, finding the string'stringfromyourfile', and grabbing the x lines bookending that string. If you pick x to be big enough, you should get the entire file, plus a bit of junk around the edges. [EDIT: HN user sparkie points out that this is actually not entirely accurate!] Though, of course, the string has to be unique on your disk, or this will fail.
The key to this is actually the flag --binary-files=text ; that tells grep to run on the binary disk data even though it doesn’t really make any sense.
In the end, this proved good enough and I got my homework back. It’s a nifty hack that I don’t expect to need to use again, though it’s worth knowing that in principle it can be done, especially if you need to look for something else in some binary file, somewhere.
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DisqusAn officer belonging to Mexico's newest police force, known as the gendarmerie, marches with an eagle during the launching ceremony for the new force at the Federal Police headquarters in Mexico City. (Eduardo Verdugo/AP)
Mexican avocados, on their journey to guacamole bowls the world over, often first pass through cartel-controlled farmlands, where extortion can raise prices, drag down the economy and put farmers at risk.
The same goes for limes from Michoacan, sorghum from Tamaulipas, shrimp from Sinaloa.
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Friday announced the inauguration of a new police unit intended to protect the production chain and take on other unorthodox assignments.
Nieto said Friday that the new force will “serve and protect Mexicans in areas where it is needed, or where institutions are weak.”
Since his 2012 inauguration, Peña Nieto has sought to fulfill a campaign promise for a new police force to shore up law and order in Mexico. Over that time, the 5,000-man gendarmerie has changed shape and suffered delays in its inception.
The early concept was that the gendarmerie would be far larger and made up of military personnel. But now it has shrunk and been subsumed into the civilian federal police and will serve as one of its seven divisions.
Critics of the project have argued that there isn’t much need for a primarily rural-based force, as the majority of crime takes place in urban areas — and that its mission will be difficult to distinguish from those of other security forces.
In addition to protecting rural commerce, officials say the gendarmerie will be called upon as needs arise, such as guarding mines or boosting security at tourist beaches. Community outreach in troubled areas is also an aspect of the plan.
“The end goal is the tranquility of the citizens, and to give them that tranquility you have to safeguard families, schools, workplaces,” Mexico’s national security commissioner, Monte Alejandro Rubido Garcia, told reporters this week. He added that it is “fundamental” that “we improve the image of the police.”
Corruption and infiltration by cartels have been recurring problems for Mexican police, particularly at the local level. Mexican officials say the gendarmerie will be better trained and educated. In establishing the force, they have worked with police from France, Colombia, Chile, Spain and the United States. Mexican officials said that more than 100,000 people applied for the 5,000 positions.
Since Peña Nieto took over in December 2012, official statistics show that violence has fallen from its highs in the previous administration. Last year, for example, the number of homicides fell by 15 percent. But large swaths of the country still live with the intimidation of organized crime. In many places, local police have worked in tandem with the cartels.
“The difference is that this will be a highly specialized group, with good training, with good salaries,” said Raul Benitez-Manaut, a researcher at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. “The government has to show that the gendarmerie will do their jobs well.”Here’s the score so far on the city’s new green bins: 300,000 for the good guys, and, it appears, a big fat zero for raccoons. By now, most Toronto households are using the new organic waste bins, which the city began rolling out last year and which will be delivered to every home by the end of 2017.
Toronto's new green bins are proving to be a hit with the public. With the bins so far delivered to about 300,000 households, the city says they have yet to receive a single report of raccoons getting into them. ( JACK LAKEY / for Toronto Star )
The key feature is a locking lid designed to thwart the ring-tailed scavengers, which grew fat and sassy by knocking over the old ones, spilling their smelly contents onto the street and feasting on them. But those days appear to be over, which has to be distressing for raccoons that had grown accustomed to living on Easy Street. Jim McKay, general manager of solid waste management, said the new bins have been placed at about 300,000 residences, including all of Etobicoke and Scarborough, with another 180,000 still to be delivered.
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The verdict so far? “The reaction from the public has been very positive,” with hardly any complaints, he said, adding that the city’s bottom-line cost for the program is about $31 million. And here’s the good news: “Look, I don’t want to jinx it, but I can tell you we haven’t had a single complaint about an instance of a raccoon getting into them,” said McKay. Bins are more likely to be damaged by sharp-toothed squirrels that, in a few instances, have attacked the lids and chewed through the heavy-gauge plastic, he said. We checked in with the city on the new bins after we got an email from Frank Nakashima, saying his was dented by the collection truck that picks them up and empties them.
“Today, my green bin was damaged (bent out of shape), probably by the truck’s mechanical arm, so that the lid will no longer close,” he said. “Even though it will be replaced, what can be done to prevent this from occurring again? These are great raccoon-proof bins, but, if they are so easily damaged, isn’t that a preventable waste?”
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Reports of damage “are very rare, but it does happen,” said McKay, noting that in some cases, the hydraulic arms that pick up the bins squeeze them a bit too hard — usually on new trucks — and require adjustment. If a bin is damaged, McKay says residents should report it to 311, which will create a report and send a staffer to check it out. If the bin can’t be fixed, it will be replaced on the spot at no charge. The rollout continues in North York, Toronto and East York. The progress of the program can be tracked online here. So, what’s your verdict on the new bins? Please let us know.Competition: get your game in front of Will Wright and Sid Meier
Most indie game developers would give their right arms to get their game ideas in front of game gods like Sid Meier and Will Wright. Fancy it?
Intel's Level Up 2009 competition's judging panel is full of heavy hitters, including Wright and Meier, and all you have to do to show them your bits and bytes is submit a game idea. Sex it up with some screenshots if you wish. Here are the details:
Level Up 2009 is a worldwide competition providing developer's greater exposure to the gaming community. Submissions (in the form of an abstract, any screenshots or movies -- code is not necessary) from professional, aspiring and student game developers will be accepted until July 1, 2009. The games will be judged in three categories: Best Threaded Game, Best Game-on-the-Go, and Best Game Optimized for Intel® Graphics. On July 20, 2009, finalists will be notified by email, and by August 10 executable programs and articles are due.
Winners get hardware and the attentions of the top developers in the world. Check out your competition here.
Gosh, makes our Game Pitch feature feel like child's play.
Thanks for the heads-up, Erik!'Silent intifada' rages on as family car with children as young as six months old targeted in potentially lethal hail of rocks.
Even as the Knesset debates heightening security in Jerusalem amid a wave of Arab violence in recent months, and after a lethal Hamas terror attack in the city last Wednesday, a family with seven children became the latest terror victims on Monday.
The family car, driven by a couple with their seven children aged from six months to ten years old, came in for a hail of rocks by Arab assailants on Monday morning.
The attack came as the car drove on Salah e-Din Street near the Jerusalem District Court in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood north of the Old City, not far from Hebrew University's Mount Scopus Campus.
Fortunately the young family emerged unscathed from the onslaught, but their car suffered damage from the rain of rocks. Police have launched an investigation and are scouring the area for the perpetrators of the attack.
The attack Monday is just the latest in an ongoing wave of attacks dubbed the "silent intifada" by residents, that only recently has started gaining major media attention after a Hamas terrorist rammed his car into a group of people in Jerusalem last Wednesday, killing a three-month-old baby and a 22-year-old woman.
It is not the first such attack against Jewish motorists by any means.
Two Jews were targeted last Tuesday between the northern neighborhoods of Atarot and Shuafat, with Arab rioters coming right up to their car to identify them as Jews before launching a volley of rocks from point blank range.
The Monday before that, the police call center saved a Jewish family that accidentally drove into Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, where two IDF soldiers were brutally beaten to death by a lynch-mob in 2000.
A car filled with women and children earlier this month also escaped an Arab mob in the Jerusalem neighborhood of A-Tur, after last month a family took a wrong-turn into Jerusalem's eastern Wadi Joz neighborhood and just barely escaped from an Arab ambush.
As part of measures to end the violence, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is pushing for much harsher sentences - up to 20 years in some cases - to be leveled against rock-throwers.This summer’s visit to southern Italy for a project meeting was a great opportunity to include a few extra days for absorbing local urban experiences. Italy is one of the most-studied scenes in the world among urbanists. Not to mention architecture lovers.
Like so many after their travels to Italy, I also felt compelled to share my experiences and continue my article series on ideas worth stealing (or not) from other cities around the globe. (See the previous ones on Tokyo & Hong Kong here and Istanbul here).
The cities I now had the chance to visit are a curious trio. Naples is perhaps best known for pizza and the Camorra mafia. Potenza for, well, not really anything. Or possibly for some as a place to bypass on the way to Matera and its UNESCO-protected cave city.
Here are the top 5 takeaways I gathered flaneuring in them.
1. The Via Caracciolo Liberation
Urban waterfronts can tell a lot about the aspirations of a city. In the past, waterfronts were often devoted to industrial and other unpleasant uses. Now cities are working towards making these places more people-friendly.
Naples has also joined the movement with a goal of reconquering their picture-postcard waterfront, along Via Caracciolo, from the congested, many-laned arterial road it had turned into during the 20th century.
The action began in 2012. Naples saw their hosting of the America’s Cup World Series as an opportunity to advance their Lungomare Liberato (liberate the waterfront) initiative. Car access was blocked from a 3km-long section of Via Caracciolo to make room for activities related to the event.
This temporary intervention has over the years become more or less permanent, resulting in a real waterfront promenade for strolling along the sea, hosting various events and enjoying other recreational activities. The restaurants at the Castel dell’Ovo end of the Lungomare have also managed to increase their outdoor seating areas considerably after the cars have vanished.
The liberation project is in many ways a landmark initiative for immediate quality of life improvement in a congested city. But how things are today offers an extra lesson: adding people-space successfully doesn’t end with blocking access from cars.
It’s now five years on from the original liberation. But the place still looks as if the traffic disappeared yesterday. I was there just on one day, admittedly, but it looks like the Neapolitans’ honeymoon with the newly opened space is over. There’s not much going on at the Lungomare.
This is a reminder about the importance of coupling public space transformations with investments or policies to support the emergence of new activities at the site. Peace and quiet on an empty road is not enough to keep people returning in the long run. I’m not sure if there are active plans for a phase two with the Lungomare liberation project, but it desperately needs new interventions from someone.
2. Escalator Transit Lines FTW. Or Not.
The city of Potenza has an interesting design: It consists of a rather small historic “uptown” on top of a steep hill and a more modern “low town” that spreads around it. The uptown is the center of public life whereas the lower parts are more like suburbs.
Potenza’s history is thus one of many stairways. Cars have made climbing up and down less of a necessity, but there’s only so many of them you can squeeze into the narrow uptown streets. Buses don’t really fit at all.
So Potenza has come up with an unconventional idea for providing public transportation: installing giant escalators. After the opening of Santa Lucia, a 600-meters long, U-shaped stretch of moving stairs, the city has bragged about operating the world’s second-longest escalator system (1.3km in total). Altogether there are four such escalator “transit lines”, all equipped with ticket sales booths and grandiose entrances like if you were at a subway station.
You can’t blame the city’s leadership for being unimaginative. The solution does at first seem exciting. But its performance is another matter.
Riding the escalator system is not for those into speedy travel. And more importantly, using the escalators is obviously not like being seated in a bus. You need to stand, which makes having anything with you an extra burden. What’s more, you never take an unbroken ride up or down, but must walk between many shorter escalators. For example, the Santa Lucia is broken up into 26 separate ramps and there’s a 120-meter platform to cross at the bottom.
On top of this, maintenance has been neglected and you may need to use muscle power to tackle some sections. Even though you paid for a ticket to avoid that. As you might already guess, it doesn’t seem as many people use the escalators as has been envisioned. I saw only a handful of people using the escalators any time I was on them. Which is very little considering the capacity of just Santa Lucia is 9,000 riders per hour.
Potenza’s escalators show that coming up with whimsical public transportation alternatives is rarely a great idea.
3. Complexity and Modernism Don’t Match
Because I was visiting Potenza anyways for my project, I had to include an excursion to nearby Matera in my trip. Matera’s main sight is its amazing ancient cave city, the Sassi, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The dwellings in the Sassi – partially carved into steep rocky hills, partially built like regular stone houses – are stacked along narrow alleys and on top of each other. The result is unreal.
Besides its unique surroundings to explore, the city’s history also offers a classroom example of the damaging effect modernist planning ideas can have on organically grown communities. In a way, the Sassi has been a victim of a slum-clearance process in the mid parts of the 20 |
snow.
Such crystalline, deceptively simple writing is the work of a master at the pinnacle of his powers. There is great dignity here, and rich humor too – this working stiff seeing himself as a knight, an adventurer, a chef preparing a lethal stew, and winding up amazed that no one, “oddly enough,” welcomes him back from his epic adventure down inside a kingdom of fire that is, in truth, nothing but a poisonous pickling tank.
5. Gifts That Change Our Lives
Though now justly famous as a poet – if “famous poet” is not too ridiculous an oxymoron in 21st-century America – Levine also happens to be a superb writer of non-fiction. His 1994 book, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography, is less a memoir or straight autobiography than a collection of impressionistic essays about his boyhood and early manhood in Detroit, his later years in California, where he taught poetry, and his travels in Spain, where he fell under the spell of Gaudi’s architecture and Machado’s poetry and the legends of the doomed anarchists who’d inspired the Spanish Civil War. While writing the book, Levine reports, “I realized I was striving to account for how I became the particular person and poet I am.”
The book opens with a portrait of his two teachers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1950s, the disappointing Robert Lowell and the ferociously inspiring John Berryman. It was Berryman who instilled in Levine and his classmates – including Donald Justice, W. D. Snodgrass, Jane Cooper, William Dickey, and Robert Dana – the notion that writing poetry is a serious, nearly sacred pursuit, one that requires intensive study and a lifetime of hard work. Yet Berryman was not without a sense of humor. At the end of the semester, teacher and pupil had a conversation about what a poet should look like. “No poet worth his salt is going to be handsome; if he or she is beautiful there’s no need to create the beautiful,” Berryman told Levine. “Beautiful people are special; they don’t experience life like the rest of us.” (Lord Byron, apparently, was the exception who proved this curious rule.) After a pause, Berryman added, “Don’t worry about it, Levine, you’re ugly enough to be a great poet.”
Levine has reverential feelings for his two most influential mentors – Berryman, the future suicide, and Yvor Winters, who taught Levine that his soul is the part of him that leaves each time he lies. I’m convinced that this reverence goes a long way toward explaining why Levine came to regard his own teaching duties as a sacred vocation, why he has written so many letters on yellow legal paper critiquing the poems of Mona Simpson and all those other young poets who were driving trucks and picking oranges and struggling to be poets.
There is a lovely essay called “Entering Poetry” about boyhood nights when Levine climbed up into trees in the woods near his home in Detroit and spoke to the stars. “I would say ‘rain’ and ‘moon’ in the same sentence and hear them echo each other, and a shiver of delight would pass through me,” he writes. One night, noticing that his hands smell of earth and iron, he says to the stars, “These hands have entered the ground from which they sprang.” “That,” he reports giddily, “was the first night of my life I entered poetry.”
Not long after entering poetry, Levine discovered his first poet. “When I was in the eleventh grade and the war was still going,” he said in an interview with The New Yorker in 2006, “a teacher read us some poems by Wilfred Owen. And after class, for some reason, she called me up to her desk and said, ‘Would you like to borrow this book?’ How she knew that I was responding so powerfully to these poems, I’m not sure, but I was. She said, ‘Now, I want you to take it home, and read it with white gloves on.’ In other words, don’t spill soup on it. It was probably the most significant poetic experience I had in my whole life, and I was only seventeen.”
In the essay “The Poet in New York in Detroit,” Levine describes his young self as “a humiliated wage slave employed by a vast corporation I loathed,” namely General Motors. The chapter opens with a frank portrait of this wage slave’s unlikely path to poetry: “In the winter of 1953 I was working at Chevrolet Gear and Axle, a factory in Detroit long ago dismantled and gone to dust. I worked the night shift, from midnight to eight in the morning, then returned by bus to my apartment, slept for a time, and rose to try to write poetry, for I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life – or at least the part my work played in it – I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.” I have not read a more succinct portrait of an artist as a young man bursting with an impossible and gorgeous dream. Speaking of his heroes Berryman and Winters, Keats and Whitman, Machado and Garcia Lorca, Levine wrote words I wish I had written about Levine: “That’s what they give us, the humble workers in the fields of poetry, these amazingly inspired geniuses, gifts that change our lives.”
Levine concludes, from long personal experience, that Diego Rivera’s graceful, colorful frescoes of autoworkers at the Detroit Institute of Arts are “nonsense.” I agree, partly on aesthetic grounds and partly because Rivera, that great communist and champion of the working man, was paid out of the bottomless pockets of Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. Likewise his ill-fated mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City, which was paid for (and destroyed) by another family not known for its liberal politics or the sympathetic treatment of the working man.
The only weak stuff in The Bread of Time is an essay called “Class With No Class,” in which Levine throws a roundhouse punch at the people who have grown rich at the expense of wage slaves like himself, all those country club swells in Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills and Sherwood Forest. Levine, it turns out, is much better at celebrating than at denigrating. Yet “Class With No Class,” for all its flaws, had the salutary effect of revivifying the legends of class warfare all Detroiters grow up with. Now more than ever those legends demand to be remembered. In 1937, Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic, anti-union founder of the company my father would eventually work for, had sent his goons out from his River Rouge plant to bloody Walter Reuther and other United Auto Workers union organizers in the notorious Battle of the Overpass. A few months earlier, workers at one of GM’s Fisher Body plants in nearby Flint had shut down the assembly line and barricaded themselves inside the factory until the exasperated General Motors brass broke down and agreed to negotiate its first contract with the union. We’ve come a long way since those heroic days. We now live in an age of high unemployment when labor unions – that is, people who work for a middle-class wage teaching school and making cars and climbing down into pickling tanks – are being laid off and demonized for somehow causing the current economic malaise. Meanwhile, as vast corporations and rich individuals enjoy unconscionable tax breaks and immunity from the public’s wrath, the middle class doesn’t even realize that it’s been hoodwinked, or that it’s sinking faster by the day.
For this reason, among a great many others, I was thrilled when the Library of Congress announced that our next Poet Laureate will be a card-carrying member of the proletariat, a man who went to work in a Detroit soap factory at the age of 14 and, from that unpromising beginning, went on to write timeless poems and pass along his passion for poetry to hundreds of students like Mona Simpson and untold thousands of ordinary readers like me.
We’re an unmoored country that needs to be reminded what work is – and what it is not – and there’s no one more qualified for the job than Philip Levine.Prominent American author and speaker, Jordan Belfort, who is widely known for his stock market manipulation fraud crimes back in 1990, posted on his Facebook account that an event he was set to speak at in the Cairo International Stadium in December turned out to be a “total fraud.”
“Anyone who has bought tickets to this event, I want you to know that I am not — I repeat, I am not speaking at this event. The promoter has disappeared without paying my speaking fee or booking my travel, so if you bought a ticket, you need to try to track this guy down get a refund immediately,” he wrote on December 9.
Belfort warned the audience that if the promoter would not give the people who bought tickets for the event a refund they should alert the police.
“This is totally fraudulent and I alerted the local Egyptian newspapers and news shows,” he wrote.
Along with motivational speakers Dan Anderson and Waqas Suhail, Belfort was set to speak at an event called “Rise of the Entrepreneurs”. Online and offline advertisements were seen across the capital.
Two hours after Belfort posted on Facebook, the official page posted that the event had been canceled.
“The event has been canceled and all tickets will be refunded. We will get back to you with the details,” the page wrote. No further details were provided since then.
This was not the first time Belfort warns against this specific event. Earlier in October, he wrote a message saying, the promoter is a fraud and continues to lie to me every day, swearing money was sent to me. If you bought a ticket, you need to ask for a refund immediately. This is a total fraud.”
Belfort is a former stockbroker and entrepreneur who was found guilty in 1999 to fraud in connection with stock market manipulation. He was sentenced to four years in prison. Belfort only served 22 months after an agreement was made to cooperate with investigators about the accomplices in his crimes.
Belfort is currently a best-selling author and motivational speaker. His memoir “The Wolf of Wall Street” was adapted into a blockbuster film released in 2013 starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill.The European Judo Union has come to the realisation that the British Judo Association does not fit the EJU criteria to host the EJU flagship event.
The BJA had entered into a sponsorship agreement which did not meet the EJU values. BJA persisted in this, notwithstanding that it had been warned on a number of occasions that this arrangement was unacceptable to the EJU, which has a right under the event contract to approve or disapprove any sponsorships of EJU events.
In their several e-mails and telephone conversations the BJA refereed to a loss of funding. In addition, the BJA missed the agreed deadline to pay the event license fee, which is also a breach of contract.
Taking all of the above into consideration, and given the limited time to the staging of the European Championships, in order to protect the interests of the EJU national federations and European judoka, EJU Executive Committee have unanimously taken the decision to withdraw the event from Glasgow and designate as quickly as possible an alternative host who is willing and able to stage these continental judo championships.
Having informed the BJA regarding the termination of the Contract, the EJU has begun negotiations with alternative potential organisers. The EJU EC are confident that the best possible solution will be found in the shortest possible time. Further information setting out the change to the staging of the European Championships will be published after the end of negotiations.The tone is shifting on Wall Street, where many analysts have gone from taking the U.S. presidential election largely in stride to expressing concern about the lack of investor preparedness.
Analysts warned ahead of Monday evening’s first-of-three debate between Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and the Republican standard-bearer Donald Trump that it could cause turbulence or even sock stocks. After the event was all said and done, financial markets declared Clinton winner of the debate as stock futures rallied, pointing to an upbeat start for Wall Street Tuesday.
Goldman Sachs had described the debate in a note Monday as “the biggest matchup since the Mayweather/Pacquiao bout.” (For non-boxing fans, that May 2015 match was billed as “The Fight of the Century.”) In other words, Goldman — like other investment banks — is taking this election more seriously by the day.
With two more debates and just 41 days before the U.S. election, Goldman and others are telling investors it’s time to get ready.
David Kostin, chief U.S. equity strategist, and his Goldman team came out with some pre-election tips for investors, noting that central-bank policy is another issue roiling investors right now. The advice:
• Protect against the likely rise in equity uncertainty ahead of the U.S. presidential election.
• Buy companies with big government revenue exposure.
• Take the weak performance of defensives as a buying opportunity.
Public spending will likely increase no matter who wins, according to Kostin, adding that investors should seek out defense stocks and construction materials providers. Vulcan Materials Co. VMC, +1.65%, Martin Marietta Materials Inc. MLM, +1.32%, Summit Materials Inc. SUM, +1.73% and Eagle Materials Inc. EXP, -0.68% are names the Goldman team likes.
On the flip side, health care could be risky business after this election, given Clinton’s criticism of drug pricing and Trump’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Alternative energy and fossil fuels, financial-services regulation, minimum-wage hikes and trade policy are other themes with potential investment implications.
As for central banks, after the Federal Reserve and Bank of Japan meetings last week, Kostin said that if interest rates remain low, defensive stocks will likely rebound owing to their high dividend yields and mostly stable earnings. That sector is hugely underweighted by mutual- and hedge-fund portfolios, Goldman noted.
‘Oh, my God, this is bad’: Among the worriers on Wall Street ahead of the U.S. election, Erik F. Nielsen, group chief economist at UniCredit Research, had strong words about a market he said was far from fully bracing for the possibility of Republican nominee Trump winning the November presidential election.
Nielsen suggested that the markets woke up to a Trump-as-president possibility for the first time on the Monday after the Sept. 11 terror attack anniversary. That’s when Clinton was sidelined with walking pneumonia that seemed to intensify speculation about her overall health — concerns Nielsen said showed up in the polls.
“But while opinion polls [have] continued to slide in that direction, making it now uncomfortably difficult to guess the outcome of the election (Hillary is still slightly ahead when you go down into the details of swing states and the Electoral College), I have been amazed by how markets don’t seem to take much notice,” said Nielsen.
JP Morgan Asset MGMT's Mike Bell says the market is pricing in a low chance of Donald Trump winning #USelection -- lower than reality — Squawk Box Europe (@SquawkBoxEurope) September 26, 2016
Nielsen said his conversations with European investors fall into three “categories”:
• Oh, my God, this is bad.
• This is not good, but the American democracy’s checks and balances are strong enough to prevent him from doing too crazy things.
• Maybe he’ll be like Ronald Reagan.
The economist said he’s firmly in camp No. 1, with his single biggest concern a “complete lack of knowledge” as to what Trump’s policies might entail. The fact that the candidate doesn’t have an economic- or foreign-policy adviser with a known record of publication or views in the field at his disposal marks a troubling first in modern history, Nielsen said.
If the likelihood of a Trump presidency “increases in coming weeks, then you need to start questioning the Fed’s intentions [with interest-rate policy] for December, and you’ll want to reduce your exposure to, particularly, U.S. equities and the dollar,” he said.
Jasper Lawler, market analyst at CMC Markets, said in a note to clients Monday that a number of forecasters have raised the odds of a Trump presidency.
And Citi, which early last week raised its forecast possibility of such an outcome to 40% from 35%, said in its fourth-quarter commodities update released Monday that uncertainty around the U.S. elections, along with the possibility of a Fed interest-rate increase, will spell volatility for both foreign exchange and gold markets.
The analysts said gold US:GCZ6 could trade sideways between $1,300 and $1,350 an ounce until the Fed decision in December, but prices could crest above year-to-date peaks in a “knee-jerk move” if Trump wins the election.
How to position a portfolio ahead of the Nov. 8 election remains tricky for some, noted FXTM’s chief market strategist, Hussein Sayed. “Nasdaq’s Biotech index plunged 4.5% in two days [Aug. 24 and 25] in one tweet from Hillary Clinton criticizing the recent price hikes on EpiPens, which suggest that investors and portfolio managers are seriously considering having different asset allocation strategies on the outcome of the election,” said Sayed.January 31, 2013
Karen L. Gould
President, Brooklyn College
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11210
[email protected]
Dear President Gould:
The Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism (CODZ) supports and applauds your determination to stand firm against recent attempts by Zionist alumni/ae, students, and media to persuade the Brooklyn College Department of Political Science to withdraw its co-sponsorship from a panel discussion, sponsored primarily by the Brooklyn College Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), featuring two world-renowned figures, Professor Judith Butler and Palestinian spokesperson Omar Barghouti, on the topic of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS).
CODZ is a group of lawyers, professors, physicians, writers and others who came together in 2007 to counter our society’s pervasive suppression of criticism of Israel, often in a manner that reminds us of McCarthyism.
Heavy-handed efforts to suppress discussion of Palestinian perspectives have proliferated with the increasingly active opposition on US campuses to harsh Israeli practices used to contain the Palestinian population within ever-tightening boundaries that increasing world consensus holds resembles South African apartheid. We understand that there are now about 100 SJP chapters either active or in formation on our campuses. The neoconservative ideologue Alan Dershowitz, who turns his vitriolic counterattack from one campus to another, has now taken aim at Brooklyn College administrators, faculty, and students to have the panel discussion canceled. But his efforts have only strengthened the determination of campus activists to resist such bullying. We are glad to hear that you recognize how hostile such pressure is to the spirit of free inquiry and peaceful discussion of controversial issues of global import, which great colleges and universities seek to nurture and encourage rather than snuff out.
Among numerous false claims being made against the panel discussion is that proponents of BDS are anti-Semitic and immoral. As a scholar of French-Canadian literature as well as the president of a university with an historically open policy of admitting Jewish students and other religious as well as ethno-racial minorities, and of developing curriculum for analyzing issues of significance to these communities, you are demonstrating your understanding that criticism of a particular government, in this instance the state of Israel, is qualitatively distinct from condemnation of a racial or religious group that comprises the majority of that state’s population and also exists in large communities around the world.[1] The tide of public opinion is now turning—from intimidated silence on Israeli policies that bring shame upon a country which calls itself the only democracy in the Middle East, to a growing global chorus of condemnation of Israel’s segregation of Palestinians and bullying efforts to gag critics. The commitment of Palestinian civil society to nonviolent resistance, which its call for global BDS represents, is a commitment in the finest tradition of nonviolent movements for social change, from Gandhi to King and our own civil rights movement, all of which well deserve academic study and discussion.
To deny students and faculty their right to explore these issues on a campus that prides itself on its promotion of critical thinking, ethical action, and diversity would dishonor Brooklyn College’s historical mission and violate fundamental academic freedoms, and needlessly incite unreason and disunity on the Brooklyn College campus and beyond. We therefore publicly applaud your principled stand in favor of discussion, debate, and the modeling of practices for dealing with our differences that every institution of higher education attempts to provide for its students, and we add our voices to those of Brooklyn College students and faculty to urge you to continue to stand by the Department of Political Science’s decision to support the panel discussion at Brooklyn College on February 7.
Sincerely,
(*Organizations listed for identification purposes only.)
Terri Ginsberg, Ph.D.
Board member, International Council for Middle East Studies*
former Visiting Assistant Professor, Brooklyn College
Michael Steven Smith, Esq.
Board member, Center for Constitutional Rights
co-host, Law and Disorder radio show
Barbara M. Harvey, Attorney, Detroit
Board member, Association for Union Democracy* and Michigan Coalition for Human Rights*
former Legal Director, ACLU of Michigan
Joel Kovel, M.D.
Carl Schieren, M.I.A.
formerly with the American University in Cairo
Abdeen Jabara, Esq.
Board member, Center for Constitutional Rights*
Jonathan House, M.D.
Faculty, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Department of Psychiatry
former Secretary, American Psychoanalytic Association*
Dennis James, Esq.
Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens / Green Party
Chair, WBAI (99.5 FM) Local Station Board*
cc:
Provost William Tramontano – [email protected]
Director of Communications and Public Relations Jeremy Thompson – [email protected]
*************
[1] See “We Can’t Say This,” Jewish Daily Forward (13 July 2011) at http://www.forward.com/articles/139822/.PROTESTERS brought Melbourne CBD to a standstill last night with hundreds of thousands of workers facing a nightmare commute home after Flinders St was shut down.
Around 4000 protesters chanting about indigenous rights started their protest at 4pm and continued to rally through the evening rush hour, causing chaos in the city.
Tram services faced massive disruptions with commuters struggling to find a way home.
Protesters marched through the city via Bourke St before settling at the junction of Flinders St and Swanston St shortly after 5pm.
While commuters were able to pass into the train station, people trying to use trams and cars faced long delays.
The protest was organised by a group called Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance.
Lord Mayor Robert Doyle criticised the protesters, saying they were being “self-indulgent”.
“What a great way to gain sympathy to your cause: by disadvantaging and inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of people just trying to get home at the end of the week,’’ Cr Doyle said.
media_camera The rally continued past peak hour. Picture: Jake Nowakowski
“As always, protest is legitimate but surely not when it impacts so unfairly on so many people.” After the protesters arrived in Flinders St hundreds sat down on the road and tram tracks while several speeches were made.
Police were out in force, blocking off sections of Flinders St to traffic and ensuring commuters could get into the train station.
Officers monitored the rally but showed no sign of trying to move the protesters on.
A spokeswoman for Victoria Police said the rally was “peaceful”.
Commuter Jon Forbes, 38, who was trying to catch a tram to St Kilda from the CBD, said: “It is selfish to do this on a Friday afternoon when people just want to get home after a long week of work.
“People have the right to protest but it would surely be fairer for everybody if they held it on a weekend.”
media_camera A smoking ceremony during the protest. Picture: Jake Nowakowski
Kate Hutchinson, 23, who was struggling to get to Brunswick, said: “It’s a joke.
“People just want to get to where they are going on a Friday and a bunch of selfish people are stopping thousands of people from doing that.”
The rally came six days after ugly scenes played out at Federation Square where anti-Islam and anti-racism protesters clashed.
Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance stated it was holding the rally to protest against “the forced closure of Aboriginal communities”.
Steve Jolly, a member of the Socialist Party and a councillor at the City of Yarra, told the Herald Sun he supported the protest.
“There was a lot of support for it,” he said.
“The whole point of a protest is about being inconvenient.
“You need to do that to get your point across. You need to do it at a time when you get the most attention.
“If you did it 10am on a Sunday nobody is going to see it.”
[email protected]
Twitter: @davidhurleyHSThis is a big round for Thailand, but it won’t be for long: Expect the country to become a huge source of e-commerce activity
Bangkok-based payments startup Omise just reeled in a major Series B funding round for the Thai market, hooking $17.5 million in financing led by Japan’s SBI Investments.
The round included infusions from Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Digital ventures, Thai-based Ascend Money and Singaporean follow-on investor Golden Gate Ventures. That brings its total haul to over $25 million.
The service interested the Japanese market last month and Singapore earlier this year with Malaysia scheduled to follow soon, according to the company’s statement on its blog (Japanese).
This also isn’t the first we have heard about Ascend Money in the last month, another Thai payments company currently valued at around $60 billion. Alibaba-backed Ant Financial announced in June it wanted a 20% stake in the new Omise investor. Indeed, Southeast Asia is seeing a boom in e-commerce startup funding, led most notably by Alibaba’s and Rocket Internet’s $1 billion backing of would-be Asian Amazon clone, Lazada.
Google and Temasek released a joint report in May that called Southeast Asia the “world’s fastest growing internet region,” translating into a $200 billion e-commerce market by 2025. Much of that is led by an extremely young population (70% under the age of 40) and a growing middle class, according to the forecast. All that being said, getting there would require “~$40-50 billion of additional investments over the next 10 years.”
Thailand was recently selected as a beta market for online purchases via Facebook brand pages, an effort being led by Singapore startup 2C2P. The news here is a sign that Bangkok might already be playing with the big boys in Singapore and Jakarta, the other major Southeast Asian fintech and e-commerce hubs, especially given what Tech in Asia‘s Terence Lee calls a ‘fragmented Southeast Asian payments landscape.’ But that might also be signs of the competition, as Amazon is investing $600 million in the region.
Omise, founded in June 2013, operates out of three locations in Bangkok, Tokyo and Jakarta. It was co-founded by CEO Jun Hasegawa and COO Ezra “Donnie” Harinsut.While three-dimensional printing has come a long way, engineers still struggle with fabricating objects smaller than a quarter. In those small structures, the upper layers crush and distort the weak lower ones. To solve this problem, researchers at the University of Illinois have come up with a novel solution: print out a flat sheet, and then fold it, origami style, into the desired shape.
Creating this origami crane as proof of concept, the researchers have hit upon a technique that could produce any number of microscopic medical or mechanical devices through folding, rather than layered printing.
The researchers start by printing out a flat sheet of titanium hydride. Normally, this material is too rigid to fold, but the printing process imbues the "ink" with a number of solvents that soften it up enough for manipulation. In the case of the crane, it took 15 steps to go from a flat sheet to a finished bird.
This material is malleable enough to fold, but strong enough to retain its shape once the folding process is complete. Additionally, titanium hydride can be treated after folding to become pure metallic titanium. That way, a potential medical device could be folded into the desired shape, and then transformed into a substance that the body wouldn't reject.
The scientists have just begun to explore the implications of this technique, so it might be a while before a doctor actually uses a stent or implant created by folding titanium hydride. However, Japanese legend holds that if someone folds 1,000 origami cranes, a real crane will grant their wish. So all the researchers need to do is fabricate 999 more of these, and just wish for a practical application for this technology to arrive within a year. Easy!Garfield Emerson, the publisher of GovernanceCanada.com, is a corporate director and adviser.
Poor governance at a public corporation does not necessarily lead to shareholder loss, but where a major equity erosion occurs, failed governance is generally present.
Home Capital Group Inc. is not an exception. The Ontario Securities Commission has made allegations (which have been not proven) against the company and three individuals – the company's chief executive officer, chief financial officer and president at the time – of making materially misleading disclosures for 2014 and in 2015. The OSC allegations of failed disclosure were not made public until about two years later, on April 19, 2017. Regulatory proceedings are now under way. Shrewd investors shorted the stock months earlier. A proposed class action lawsuit has been filed. The alleged actions of the defendants and governance failings of the board of Home Capital will be pursued in the normal manner.
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Investors became aware of OSC enforcement proceedings when Home Capital, not the OSC, advised on Feb. 10 that it had received enforcement notices. Why did the OSC's investigation into 2015 events remain undisclosed and take so long while significant shareholder value was at risk and retail investors traded on information the OSC now alleges was materially misleading? At the beginning of 2015, the shares traded around $42 per share; they are now rated speculative, closing at $8.04 on April 28, after sinking to $5.99 earlier in the week.
For subscribers: Is Home Capital's crisis the pin that pops the housing bubble?
Read more: The rise and fall of Home Capital
Of related interest is the recent announcement of Canada's multiple securities agencies that they are considering reducing the "regulatory burden on reporting issuers" and identifying areas of securities legislation that "could benefit from a reduction of undue regulatory burden, without compromising investor protection and the efficiency of the capital markets". The focus includes reducing "the ongoing costs of remaining a reporting issuer [i.e. continuous disclosure requirements]." At the end of the day, it is the retail investor that bears the cost of reduced "regulatory burdens".
There are several other regulatory issues to note. Many senior bank executives and controlling shareholders of other financial institutions also constantly express critical views of the heavy costs of regulatory burdens and unnecessary compliance obligations. Many market-orientated economists, including those in public office, have pressed for deregulation to reduce costs.
However, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, however, did recant his prior testimony of the ability of financial institutions to self-regulate after he witnessed the 2008 Great Recession associated with the subprime mortgage crisis and that related housing bubble. The current generation of Canadian financial supervisors should not easily forget the threatening flames from the $34-billion default of so-called "asset-backed securities". After pleas from the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, a major player in this market, the Bank of Canada and Department of Finance actively intervened to prevent a potential systemic destabilization, including by agreeing to indemnities from liability for the domestic and foreign banks involved. Regulators' acceptance of the supplications of those they regulate often results in future losses to investors, taxpayers and the public generally.
The safety, soundness, prudent business practices and governance of Home Capital's operating subsidiaries, Home Trust and Home Bank, are supervised by the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions and Canada Deposit Insurance Corp. These financial businesses operated with an unstable business model, providing subprime mortgages and consumer loans financed by short-term, high-interest deposits and investment certificates. Has Ottawa not learned the severe consequences that can erupt from this funding mismatch after earlier experiences? Presumably, Home Trust and Home Bank were high on Ottawa's watchlist, but shareholders and depositors, whose money was exposed, were not aware.
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So where were the regulators? What did they know and when did they know it? This is not a call for increased regulation. It is an appeal for more efficient supervision and greater transparency between the regulators and the public whose interests they serve, not the primary concerns of the regulated. If this requires changes in law and policy, let's re-address them so that retail investors and consumers of financial services can make fully informed decisions.Share
Vintage design, low cost, and great sound have had us smitten with just about everything famed English guitar amp pioneer Marshall has sent our way since it began licensing headphones a few years ago. The wired and wireless versions of the company’s Major II on-ear were a mainstay in our office’s testing stable for months thanks to their warm sound, great controls, and excellent battery life.
With even more dynamic sound and still-superb functionality, the company’s new Mid Bluetooth headphones are everything we hoped to see in an upgrade. Though they offer a somewhat more restrained sound signature than their playful predecessors (as they should with this higher price point), the Mid subtly shape audio in a way that we love, providing a thin, fuzzy blanket to wrap around our favorite tracks du jour.
Out of the box
Right from the get go, you’ll find personality in the Marshall Mid. The headphones come in a medium-sized black box with the company’s classic logo on the front, an image of tattooed hands raising them to the lords of rock on the rear. Opening the box reveals the black headphones inside a dark inner lair, held securely by a molded lower section. Brass-colored accents immediately draw the eye, popping from a sea of black like amplifier knobs on a dark stage.
In-box accessories include a 3.5mm audio cable and micro-USB charging cable. Like all Marshall Headphones cables, they’re shaped like shrunken-down guitar cables, with the headphone cable sporting small textured brass accents near both jacks. A simple black user manual occupies the bottom of the box.
Features and design
The Mid stick to a similar visual aesthetic as the Major II, but with a few new style elements; the textured vinyl with brass accents are still here, but this time the rectangular, amp-shaped earcups are slightly more sculpted. The company’s iconic white cursive logo appears prominently as ever on the outside of each earcup, a visual cue that makes it seem as though a set of tiny half-stacked amps are pumping rock straight into your cerebellum.
Despite a more modern design, the Marshall Mid are aimed at those with a soft spot for vintage rock and roll. Two coiled cables run between each earcup — an old-school look sported by studio headphones at the height of the ‘70s studio era — and the textured exterior leaves little to draw your eye, aside from the classic Marshall font. In keeping with the gold-and-vinyl theme, the right and left earphones are marked by stamped brass R+L symbols on the lower section of the headband. These are on-ears that pair well with cowboy boots, dark blue denim, and a nice leather jacket.
Everything you listen to through the Mid sounds like it’s filtered through a tube amp.
The vast majority of the physical differences between the Major II and the Mid come as upgrades to modest design problems. Case in point: The lower section that attaches the headband to the earcups is thicker and sturdier than it is on the Major II, which featured less-durable wire brackets. And while the padded earcups and headband appear to be virtually identical on both models, Marshall’s Mid ditches the rattan-stitched interior driver covers, opting instead for a soft audio cloth that likely improves clarity.
The headphones fold into a pinched “U” shape when not in use, indicative of their relatively heavy clamping force. While this means the Marshall Mid have impressive passive noise isolation, it can also make them uncomfortable for long listening sessions, especially for those with larger heads or glasses. Like their predecessors, the Mid fold easily into a compact ball thanks to hinges on the band, only they’re lower now to more easily allow for size adjustment.
Speaking of adjustment, the headband’s brushed-black metal clicks between various size settings in approximately quarter-inch increments, rather than the free-flowing manner employed by many headphone makers, which keeps the band more secure during storage.
Bill Roberson/Digital Trends
Like the Major II, the Mid’s included audio cable is coiled to keep it out of the way, as well as giving the forgetful among us a bit of a physical reminder before we inadvertently reach the end of our tether when plugged in. A single-button control piece and microphone allow for receiving calls analog style.
As for on-board controls, we’re happy to see the Mid employing the same pencil-eraser shaped control key as its predecessor, located at the back of the left earcup. Pressing up or down on the brass knob raises volume, side-to-side movement changes songs, and pressing directly down allows for pause/play or fielding calls. In the interest of simplicity, the knob has also replaced the Major II’s power key, making it all powerful and making the Mid that much cleaner in design. Other on-board features include dual jacks for audio input and charging respectively at the bottom of the right earphone.
The 30 hours of battery life we enjoyed on the Major II are also carried over in the Mid; The headphones lasted nearly a full week at the office, with a relatively short recharge time of under an hour.
Setup
Setting up the Marshall Mid headphones is as simple as pressing the brass button twice, waiting for an ascending series of tones to indicate that they are on, then selecting the headphones on your device’s pairing menu. Once paired, the Mid headphones are extremely fast to reconnect during future listening sessions.
As is typical with wireless headphones, wired playback is plug-and-play — no juice required.
Audio performance
Like other Marshall Headphones gear we’ve tested over the years, the Mid are by no means a flat, audiophile-tuned operator — a fact the company is so open about that it shows off its scooped equalization profile on the back of the box.
Instead, a re-tuned set of 40mm dynamic |
then provide a basic set of activities with the key, name, corresponding to the activity's property name that we listed in our double-bracket notation, and a value, which is a string representing the activities that we want to accomplish today.
While this application is complete, it's not overly practical. Most web applications house lots of data stored on remote servers. If you've got your data stored on a server somewhere, we can easily replace the array with a call from Angular's AJAX API:
We've simply replaced the native JavaScript array object of hashes with a specialized HTTP GET function, provided by the Angular API. We pass in the name of the file that we watch to fetch from the server (in this case, a JSON file of activities) and we are returned a promise from Angular, much in the same way that the promise pattern works in jQuery.
Learn more about promises in jQuery here on Nettuts+.
This promise can then execute our success function when the data has been returned, and all we have to do is bind the return data to our activities, which as previously stated, was provided by dependency injection, via the $scope parameter.
A static to-do list is nice, but the real power stems from how easily we can manipulate the page without having to set up a bunch of JavaScript functions to listen and respond to user interactions. Imagine that we need to sort our activities list alphabetically. Well, we simply add a drop down selector to allow the user to sort the list:
Add the model directive to the drop down:
Finally, we modify the <li> tag to recognize sortModel as a way to order our list:
All of the heavy lifting is intelligently done by AngularJS.
And that's it! The secret is the filter we've added to the ng-repeat directive in the list item. The orderBy filter takes an input array (our list of activities), copies it, and reorders that copy by the property outlined in the select tag. It's no coincidence that the value attribute of the option tag is name, the same value that is provided by our JSON file as the property of an activity. This is what allows AngularJS to automagically turn our HTML option value into a powerful keyword for sorting our activities template.
Notice how we aren't listening for user interaction events. Our code isn't riddled with callbacks and event handlers for dealing with objects we've clicked, selected, touched or enabled. All of the heavy lifting is intelligently done by AngularJS to find the controller function, create the dependency between the template and the controller, and fetch the data to render it on the screen.
AngularJS provides a full and robust tutorial, which creates a very similar web app and expands it even more - all in a matter of minutes!
Conclusion
AngularJS is quickly becoming the dominant JavaScript framework for professional web development. You can find plenty of AngularJS scripts and apps on Envato Market to help you achieve more with Angular JS, such as cropping tools, online store templates, rating apps, and more.
In this tutorial:
We've reviewed how Google came to develop this framework as a way to make the most of HTML.
We've examined the basic core features and functionality that make Angular such a pleasure to work with.
Finally, we've developed a dynamic, fully-functional demo in a matter of minutes to demonstrate the true power of how easy it is to go from nothing, to a full application.
If you're looking for a robust, well-maintained framework for any sized project, I strongly recommend that you take a look at AngularJS. It can be downloaded for free at AngularJS.org, which also contains a wealth of information, including the full API documentation, as well as numerous examples and tutorials that cover every facet of front-end web development. Good luck!ROCKLAND -It may be days before the fate of a rhinestone encrusted piano, formerly owned by of famed pianist Liberace, is known after a roof collapse in Rockland Tuesday.
Firefighters say no one was hurt when the roof of a Rockland piano showroom collapsed under the weight of mounting snow early Tuesday morning.
The Rockland firefighter's union posted pictures from the Piano Mill building on Central Avenue showing a large section of the pitched roof caved in. Another picture showed bits of insulation, snow and other debris piled up inside the building.
Gas and power to the building was shut off and a structural engineer was on hand to determine if the building was safe to enter.
The Piano Mill, located at 217 Centre Ave., had been home to a rhinestone-encrusted 9-foot Baldwin concert piano that had been once of the most prized possessions of Liberace, the late pianist and entertainer. Robert Norris, the owner of Piano Mill, said Tuesday morning he didn't know whether the piano had been damaged in the collapse.
As of Tuesday afternoon it was still unclear if the piano had been damaged and it may be days until that can be determined, Rockland Fire Chief Scott Duffey said.
“I haven’t seen it yet but there’s a piano that was once owned by Liberace. Unfortunately I think it is in the collapse zone,” Duffey said. “Either the whole building will need to be torn down with the product inside or they’re going to have to sure portions of it up.”
The South Shore has seen more than a half-dozen structure collapses in the last week -- including two Monday in Rockland -- as snow continues to pile up from a record-breaking series of storms. Officials warn that more buildings will be at risk if temperatures warm and snow turns to rain.New media companies regularly lambast the old media guarde as part of their investor pitches, but after more than decade of online media, it is time it’s time to admit the new media revolution hasn’t lived up to its promise. There are lots of inspiring white papers on how digital media is going to save the world, but no one wants to talk about its downsides. Was media better off before the “digital revolution”?
The claims listed here are hardly scientific, but there is little research on how technology affects the working class of creators, or the culture around new media in general. This is what my colleagues in the film and other creative industries are stressed about. These are not the issues CEOs discuss on stage, or what is published on corporate news sites. These are some of the concerns that employees are whispering about in the office. This is what is discussed over beers when the boss isn’t around.
The promise: Independent filmmakers will be able to make a living distributing their films online.
The Reality: Middle class filmmakers are broke, and independent talent isn’t being supported anymore. Even the most established filmmakers are having an impossible time financing independent projects that deviate at all from the blockbuster bubblegum formula. Those who are successful on YouTube make a small fraction of the money they would if they were to reach the same size audiences on television or in theaters. Filmmakers are now forbidden from finding their own sponsors for their projects on YouTube, squeezing creators even further. Details on deals reached between Netflix and indies are scarce because the fees are embarrassingly low. Three sources have told me Netflix is paying less than $50,000 for independent film rights, a very small fraction of the budgets of the projects sold. Others have said YouTube is paying just pennies.
Filmmakers working on small to mid-size corporate projects are seeing rates plummet. The same people who told me about the embarrassingly low pay rates offered by Netflix and YouTube also say TV veterans are shooting projects for $200-$300 a day after decades of producing award-winning work, lower than the rate I charged fresh out of college. About a half dozen friends and colleagues have told m that in NYC, rates have remained stagnant or have decreased over the last ten years. Even though there are more platforms, there are too many people who are willing to work for nothing, and many producers don’t care enough about the quality of their online videos. With these impossible freelance rates, there won’t be trained and experienced professionals available to work on mid-level projects. Fixing toilets will fetch fees exponentially higher than working in corporate video or news in most cities.
The Promise: Internet media will give marginalized groups a voice and a place to commune and organize
The Reality: Online media has become a cesspool of harassment putting marginalized groups on the defensive. The atmosphere around any controversial topic has become toxic online. I get hate messages, and death threats from Nazis, and trolls around my project, Punk Jews, every week. That is less hate than many creators get, but I can attest that when you say anything about an outsider group, it opens them up for an attack that might be more profound than the media that is produced to advocate for them. So what is the point of media advocacy if everything you post is a rallying cry for your detractors?
The Promise: Without big media conglomerates, controversial topics that were taboo in traditional media will be able to be addressed in online media.
The Reality: While the internet is made up of niches, if the niche is too small, money can’t be made on it. If money can’t be made on it, web publishers aren’t going to let their staff report on it, same as ever. When I would walk into Tower Records in the 90s, it seemed like there was far more quality content being made for smaller communities. Quality outsider journalism is almost gone in online media, it seems. Solid writing and information that used to drive subscriptions of newspapers and magazines doesn’t drive the economy of internet media, creating a journalistic world of low-quality clickbait.
The Promise: Digital media will provide detailed analytics, giving producers, advertisers, and audiences detailed information about the popularity of projects.
The Reality: Fake likes, and fake views, have all but destroyed credibility for digital video stats. Nicki Minaj, Justin Bieber and Alicia Keys have all been caught with fake views, and YouTube is allegedly still charging advertisers for views watched by computer code, profiting from the fraud. Users are claiming Facebooks video view counts are just also fraudulent, and likes generated from Facebook’s own advertising program have also been seen coming from fake accounts. While YouTube claims to be cracking down on fake views, when I recently asked an exec from a very popular YouTube channel about how many fake views he thought were on the main YouTube channels after the crackdown. He told me “about half,” and that generating fake views was a necessary part of a competitive strategy.
The Promise: Everyone has a voice, and can be seen on the internet.
The Reality: As social networks have monetized, news feed and search result filters favor companies who advertise and pay for SEO, essentially censoring independent voices. As traditional media money enters the world of online media, being heard requires less talent and more money. Sure, your grandma will see your Facebook posts, but if you want to rock the world with political news, you need to have someone behind you who can pay to push it.
The Promise: New media offices won’t be sweatshops
The Reality: Okay, I don’t know if this was ever a promise, but I don’t think anyone anticipated labor conditions to disintegrate as quickly as they have. Everyone around me seems to be working ungodly hours — two decades into their digital media careers I know media makers have always worked long hours, but now people are expected to be available 24- hours a day, seven days a week. People are tired after regular 60-80 hour weeks, and while they are making a living wage, rent and property prices continue to climb in the big cities. As a result, fewer content producers working full time jobs at corporate media companies can afford to buy, or even rent, housing on their own. At least some folks are unionizing. Hopefully they can leverage our power.
So what is the solution?
YouTube, and other social networks that rely on advertising for big money, need real competition in order to realize its most valuable asset: content creators. We need a platform that charges a fair advertising rate, and pays creators a fair share of advertising revenue, and allows us to get our own sponsors so we can raise real budgets and pay real crews. Until then, it is a race to the bottom. When you get paid $600-$1,000 for producing content that reaches a million people, something is very broken. An episode of a TV show that reaches 500,000 to 2 million people will have a budget of at least $100,000. The discrepancy is insane.
We need to embrace platforms that that favor the marketplace of ideas and not the marketplace of misleading advertising. Here are a two other things you can do:
If you don’t want your information manipulated by advertising filters, get your news from an unfiltered source like an RSS news service. Getting your news from anywhere besides Facebook and Google is progress.
Subscribe and share publications you trust and enjoy. Support them with your money so workers can pay they can pay their swellings rents.
If we want something more than dumb sensationalism and cat videos, the social networks that are downing in money are going to have to share with the people who make the content that bring people to their sites.
Do you have a response to this post? Agree or disagree? Let us know your thoughts and reactions in the comments below!Formula 1 bosses are planning to introduce driver head protection for the 2017 season.
Governing body the FIA has told teams it wants to introduce a device called a 'halo', designed to protect drivers' heads from large airborne debris.
The FIA sees no reason why it cannot be introduced and is working with teams to finalise plans, BBC Sport has learned.
GP Drivers' Association chairman Alexander Wurz said drivers were "happy" a commitment had been made.
Wurz made clear last week, before a meeting of F1's technical chiefs, that the drivers felt it was time for the 'halo' to be introduced.
Ayrton Senna was killed at Imola in 1994 when a suspension arm detached and pierced his helmet during a crash
Wurz told BBC Sport: "Obviously the drivers are happy that the technical team representatives agreed for the additional head protection to come in for 2017 following the drivers' recommendation and the FIA research.
"We will now enter the design phase, where the drivers need to be open to a slightly different visibility spectrum due to the additional structure. I am also curious as to how the teams will make the new solution look cool and fast."
The FIA has focused on the halo after tests of a number of devices revealed it was the best compromise in terms of increasing safety with the fewest side-effects, such as compromised vision or extrication in the event of an accident.
The device is in the shape of an ellipse above the driver, attached to the car on each side of the rear of the cockpit and with a single strut in front of the driver.
Teams are analysing how the device can be incorporated into the car's structure, with all teams using the same design.
The FIA is also investigating the possibility of using a bullet-proof screen as part of the device to further enhance protection, although it remains to be seen whether that is incorporated on the device's introduction in 2017.
Increased driver head protection has been pursued by the FIA ever since the death of Ayrton Senna in 1994.
The Brazilian legend was killed when a suspension arm pierced his helmet after a wheel was torn off in a crash at the San Marino Grand Prix.
Until now, most developments have centred on reducing a driver's vulnerability to side impacts, by raising and strengthening the cockpit sides.
The FIA has been researching ways of protecting drivers from impacts from the front or above and work intensified following two incidents in 2009.
Henry Surtees, son of the 1964 F1 world champion John Surtees, was killed by a loose wheel in a Formula Two race, while Ferrari driver Felipe Massa suffered a fractured skull when hit by a suspension piece from another car at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The halo is unlikely to have prevented the injuries suffered by Frenchman Jules Bianchi, who died last July, nine months after his Marussia collided with a recovery vehicle during the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix.
But it might stop incidents like the one that killed English IndyCar driver Justin Wilson last August. He was struck by debris from an earlier crash.New
NEW!
The Nazca Sun-Star
as the Magic Square of Mercury
by Joseph E. Mason
Saint Francis, the Popes, and Crop Circles
The Chualar Crop Circle Formation = The New Jerusalem
Crop Circles - Their Meaning
and Connections to Dreams
Index to Articles
by Joseph E. Mason
IN THE END EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT:
IF EVERYTHING IS NOT ALRIGHT IT IS NOT THE END!
BE PREPARED
THIS CAN HAPPEN NEXT WEEK
DURING THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION
http://www.greatdreams.com/planets/venus-mars.html
NO NEED TO WAIT FOR OBAMA,
CLINTON OR TRUMP
TO REVEAL THE TRUTH TO AMERICA
HERE IT IS:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/15/hillary-clinton-ufo-investigation
BRAND NEW INFORMATION
ABOUT THE NEW JERUSALEM MESSAGE
OF THE CROP CIRCLES
http://www.greatdreams.com/njccs/njccs.htm
THE ANSWER TO ALL OUR PROBLEMS
IMAGINE - BY JOHN LENNON
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwUGSYDKUxU
THE ISOSCELES TRAPAZOID
WHO KNEW THIS SHAPE WAS SO IMPORTANT?
THIS SYMBOLISM WILL ASTOUND YOU!!!
IS PRESIDENT OBAMA GOING TO FINALLY REVEAL
THE PRESENCE OF ALIENS ON EARTH?
12-31-15
HERE ARE ALL THE ANSWERS TO DONALD TRUMP'S PROBLEMS
http://www.greatdreams.com/utopia.html
QUEEN: UNDER PRESSURE
IF YOU ARE FEELING IT, YOU AREN'T ALONE
CLEAR YOUR HOME OF EMF WAVES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mm8yHT2rKs
THIS IS HAPPENING NOW
INVASION OF AMERICA www.greatdreams.com/political/invasion_of_america.htm - I was still awake, when suddenly I heard a trumpet sound. A voice cried out to me,
"Stand!" In my vision, I was in America. I walked out out of home, and began to... 12-8-15 WHAT IS A TALKING HEAD? http://www.greatdreams.com/talking-heads.html 12-6-15 WATCH OUT FOR BIG BIRD BIG BIRD AND POLITICS http://www.greatdreams.com/big-bird.html
updated 12-6-15
U.S. MONEY IS GOING TO BE DEVALUED
SEE WHAT HAPPENED TO PREVIOUS PRESIDENTS
WHO MESSED WITH U.S. MONEY
http://www.greatdreams.com/pres-money.html
THIS COULD BE THE REAL END FOR US
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!
CHEMTRAILS
11-15-15 VISION - I was watching CNN giving details about the terrorism in Paris. My eyes got tired, so I paused the show and closed my eyes. Suddenly I was seeing a large crowd of people, all looking upward with eyes wide open. It was dark outside, and everyone was wearing winter coats. It was apparent they were looking up at something coming towards them, yet none of them tried to run away or anything. They just stood there and stared upward. Eyes wide open!
NEW - 6-10-16
THIS IS THE MOST FRIGHTENING - SHOCKING VIDEO OF ALL TIME
PLAN FOR MARTIAL LAW AHEAD OF TIME
HERE COMES PLANET X - THE AUTHOR - FLETCHER ACCEPTS BROUSSARD'S PLANET 7 X THEORY - YOUR GOVERNMENT WILL NOT PROTECT YOU - THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT THEMSELVES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KgkYPJE0vs
THIS COULD BE THE END FOR MANY
HERE COMES PLANET X
THEY'VE CHANGED ITS NAME TO 'AUNT ETHEL'
SO PEOPLE DON'T GET SCARED
MARCH - 2016 & & & & IT WILL LAST A LONG TIME
WITH MUCH DAMAGE TO EARTH
START PREPARING NOW
INTERVIEW TWO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycEx1BNAB7Y
VERSION TWO OF THE MARCH PLANET X
OR IS IT THIS ONE?
DECEMBER 2016
NEW MARSHALL MASTERS TALKS ABOUT PLANET X NEW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcnsV1wplBA
BLACK OKLAHOMA
DANGER RIGHT UNDER YOUR NOSES
PLANETARY CONJUNCTIONS CAUSE BAD WEATHER?
10-17-15
NEW AGENDA 2030 OF THE UNITED NATIONS NEW OUR AMBASSADOR TO BENGHAZI ASKED FOR MORE PROTECTION 87 TIMES IN 2012 BEFORE HE WAS KILLED BY A TERRORIST OUR GOVERNMENT SAID NO!!!!!!!!!! THAT'S HOW MUCH THEY CARE ABOUT PEOPLE!!!! NEW PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON AND HIS BILLIONAIRE FOUNDATION NEW ARE WORKING FOR THE UNITED NATIONS AGENDA 2030 10-9-15 9/11 could have been stopped THERE WERE NO PEOPLE ON THE PLANES - AND THE PLANES DID NOT EVEN FLY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm7vs-pBZoc WATCH AND BE SHOCKED AT THE EVIDENCE A TRAINED STEWARDESS GIVES EVIDENCE AND NAMES NAMES
KEY TO THE GATE - TSOT
THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH
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BE THE FIRST TO READ IT TODAY
YOU MAY BE SHOCKED
AT THE SUBJECT MATTER
THE SUPER BLOOD MOON
LAST OF THE TETRAD IN JERUSALEM
9-28-15
TRANSCRIPT OF JIM BAKKER AND MARK BILTZ
27 THINGS GOING TO HAPPEN IN SEPTEMBER 2015
INCLUDES NEWS OF THE DAY
AS WE TRANSITION THIS PERIOD OF TIME
POPE FRANCIS SPEECH TO CONGRESS 9-24-15
POPE FRANCIS SPEECH TO THE UNITED NATIONS 9-25-16
THE LATEST ON CERN
SCHEDULED TO TEST ON 9/23
PSALM 83 WAR - WHEN?
9-22-15
9-18-15
IS FAMINE COMING SOON?
COMMUNISM IN AMERICA
9-14-16
HILLARY PLANS TO REEDUCATE YOU
9-5-15
PASTOR CHUCK MISSLER
GOD'S WRATH
ON THE JIM BAKKER SHOW
TRANSCRIBED DURING AUGUST, 2015
CORRUPTION IN THE NGO WORLD
WHERE DOES YOUR MONEY GO
DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE?
ARE YOU CERTAIN?????
REMEMBER THE CIVIL WAR?
MARGARET MITCHELL DID
GONE WITH THE WIND
ALL ABOUT HEALING CRYSTALS AS WELL
HOW CLOSE ARE WE TO THE GOG-MAGOG WAR?
THE JEWISH YEAR OF JUBILEE - THEIR WAR YEAR -
BEGINS SEPTEMBER 14TH, 2015
APOSTLE GUILLERMO MALDONADO
PRAYS FOR YOU TO PROSPER
8-29-15
JOHN SHOREY AND DAVID WILKERSON
JOHN KILPATRICK AND RABBI JONATHAN CAHN
WARNING TO AMERICA
THE TRIBULATION
8-27-15
WAR IN HEAVEN - THE HISTORY AND THE FUTURE?
8-21-15
THE NEWEST HORROR IN THIS COUNTRY JULY 15, 2015 - SEPTEMBER 15, 2015 UNDERGROUND TUNNELS 10 WESTERN STATES TO BE TERRORIZED Martial Law? NOBODY SEES ANYTHING HAPPENING videos to explain what is going on 8-8-15 THE OATHKEEPERS VS GUN CONTROL
CANNIBILISM IN AUTUMN
A PAINTING BY THE FAMOUS ARTIST DALI
IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE FOR REAL
WILL IT?
PROOF THAT THE UNITED STATES WAS NEVER A CHRISTIAN NATION
THIS IS ONLY ONE STEP LESS SCARY THAN PLANET X
IT INCLUDES A LINK TO A VIDEO THAT REVEALS A SECRET CONNECTION
OF A FAMOUS PERSON YOU WILL RECOGNIZE, TO
THE MYSTERY OF PERGAMON
AND THE HITLER CONNECTION OF THE PAST
LOS ANGELES SUBDUCTION ZONE LEAKING HELIUM
THIS IS VERY DANGEROUS
http://www.greatdreams.com/LOS-ANGELES-SUBDUCTION.html
RABBI JONATHAN CAHN STATES:
7-5-2015
The world has entered what the apostle Paul
called the “falling away” or the apostasy.
TRANSCRIPT OF RICK WILES FROM TRUNEWS.COM
AND JIM BAKKER - LATE MAY AND JUNE 2015
MANY SPIRITUAL PROPHECIES
AND LINKS TO PREVIOUS TRANSCRIPTS OF JIM BAKKER SHOWS
ARE YOU WILLING TO VOTE FOR A MEMBER OF THE CABAL?
THE BILDERBERG GROUP APPROVED OF THE PERSON
IN THE CABAL
JUNE 25, 2015
BILDERG MEETING - 2015 June 9, 2015
THE COMING OF THE MAHDI
THE DREAM TODAY
6-3-2015
MENA LEE GREBIN
PROPHETESS
WHAT IS TO COME IN THE END TIMES
IT'S WORSE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE
THE END TIMES ARE NOW!!!!!
THE NAZCA SUN-STAR
as the
MAGIC SQUARE OF MERCURY
A FOUR PETALLED CROP CIRCLE
and it's associations
WHEN WILL QUETZALCOATL RETURN?
US DEBT CLOCK - UPDATED CONTINUOUSLY
POPULATION CLOCK
http://www.poodwaddle.com/Stats/
OUR FACEBOOK GROUP PAGE FOR CHURCH OF THE HOLY GRAIL
THIS IS A NON-DENOMINATIONAL SPIRITUAL GROUP
WORKING IN CONJUNCTION WITH EARTH MOUNTAIN VIEW GROUP
NEW BIBLICAL STUDY PAGES ON THIS SITE NEW
WE WERE FINALLY INCORPORATED OFFICIALLY IN EARLY DECEMBER
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DURING 2016
HERE IS THE ORIGINAL SITE
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OUR FACEBOOK PAGE FOR NEW INVENTORS
NEED A MENTOR? - BE A MENTOR!
ARTICLES OF A SPIRITUAL NATURE
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DOOM AND GLOOM BABES!A high-end ticket broker was instructed to divert almost $1.9 million that he owed Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump for business transactions to Trump’s private foundation instead, the Washington Post reported yesterday, citing two unnamed sources.
Such a diversion, known among tax lawyers as “an assignment of income,” would ordinarily violate the law unless the taxpayer also reported the funds as income on his tax returns. Trump has not disclosed his income tax returns—the first presidential candidate in decades not to do so—and his campaign declined to tell Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold (or Fortune) whether he reported the Ebers income on his return.
In an email to Fortune, the Trump campaign flatly denied the Post allegations. The Post‘s claim “is inaccurate in every respect and completely and totally unfounded,” Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks wrote in the email.
Though Farenthold’s reporting had previously raised questions about a possible pattern of relatively modest improprieties by the foundation, the new allegation raises the ante considerably. If $1.9 million in taxable income went unreported, that would be more serious, and if the failure to report were proven to be knowing and willful, it could be a criminal matter, according to tax law experts.
The Post’s two unnamed sources said they did not know if it was Trump himself or an employee who instructed that Ebers’s money be sent to the foundation rather than to Trump. (If anything improper occurred, Trump would still owe taxes, but might be less culpable if it was merely an employee’s mistake.)
The disputed donation relates to four huge gifts to the Donald J. Trump Foundation paid between 2011 and 2014 by Richard Ebers, the chief sales officer for a company then called Inside Sports. The company obtains sought-after sports and concert tickets for customers, and also often books them reservations at ultra-luxury hotels and posh golf resorts. My colleague Shawn Tully wrote about Ebers and his donations last week, noting that Ebers’ donations accounted for 58% of all funds contributed to the foundation during those four years. Ebers’ donations amounted to 96% of Trump Foundation funds raised in 2014.
Ebers’s donations, marked in the foundation’s tax returns as coming from “Richard Ebers Inside Sports and Entertainment,” made him the second largest donor to the Trump Foundation since 2007. The largest donor since 2007 was World Wrestling Entertainment, which contributed $5 million between 2007 to 2009. NBC Universal Media, which aired Trump’s Apprentice series for 14 years, was the third largest. It donated $500,000 in 2012. Trump has not donated a dime to his eponymous fund since the end of 2008, according to publicly-filed returns, as Farenthold first reported.
Inside Sports has since been purchased by CAA and is now known as CAAPremium. A message left there was not immediately returned, and an email was returned “undeliverable,” with an explanation that the company “only accepts messages from people in its organization or on its allowed senders list.” (A message left there for Ebers by my colleague Shawn Tully last week was never returned.)
The Ebers contributions were unusual on their face, because of both their size, given that Inside Sports was not a huge public company, and because they were not round-figure sums, like most charitable donations. He gave $450,960 in 2011; $522,828 in 2012; $435,832 in 2013; and $477,400 in 2014, according to the foundation’s tax returns. (Unlike private taxpayers, private foundations and public charities are required to file their returns publicly. Fortune has viewed the returns from 2003 to 2014, the last year for which a return has yet been publicly filed.)
In his article, the Post‘s Fahrenthold—who has broken most of the key news concerning the Trump Foundation (see here, here, and here)—also reported that a $400,000 donation made to the foundation by Comedy Central in 2011, in payment for Trump’s appearance at a celebrity roast, was also an assignment of income. But the Trump campaign told him that it had reported that money as taxable income.
When income is diverted to a foundation or charity, the recipient of the income is usually supposed to report the income on his tax return, according to Marcus Owens, a partner at the law firm of Loeb & Loeb and a past director of the Internal Revenue Service’s exempt organizations division. The recipient can then also take a tax deduction for having then donated the money to the tax-exempt organization where the money ended up, Owens explains. But since tax deductions are capped, and some taxpayers may not be paying any tax to begin with—due to losses or other deductions—recipients may still have to pay some tax on assigned income. (At yesterday’s presidential debate, Trump appeared to concede that he may have owed no federal taxes in some years.)
Deductions for donations to a private foundation, like the Trump Foundation, have a lower cap (30% of adjusted gross income) than do donations directly to a public charity (50% of adjusted gross), raising further questions about why Ebers would have opted to donate so much to a private foundation, rather than directly to a public charity.
The whole topic of assignment of income was effectively raised as an issue last Wednesday when, oddly enough, Lynne Patton, a senior assistant to three Trump children and the vice president of the foundation of Trump’s son Eric, gave an interview to the Des Moines Register. Patton was attempting to contradict the notion that the Donald J. Trump Foundation was, since 2008, composed entirely of other people’s money.
“A lot of times,” she told the Register, “Mr. Trump will give a speech somewhere or he’ll raise money in some way and he asks that that entity, instead of cutting a personal check to him, cut it to his charity.... That’s money that otherwise would’ve been in his personal account, right?”
Three tax experts told me last week that Patton’s comment immediately raised red flags about assignment of income, though, as noted, assignment of income is not illegal so long as the income diverted to the foundation is also reported as taxable income.
Campaign spokesperson Hicks did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether Patton’s comment was accurate. Fahrenthold reports that Trump senior advisor Boris Epshteyn originally told him Patton was wrong, and that there were no such diverted payments, but later told him that the Comedy Central donation was such a payment, but had been reported as taxable income.
Epshteyn then also told Fahrenthold, the Post reported, that Trump sometimes would follow the dictates of a 1942 federal appeals court precedent under which he could “provide a service, renounce any fees, and then merely suggest that the other party make a donation to a charity of their choosing,” Fahrenthold wrote, paraphrasing the spokesperson.
Asked about the Ebers’ gifts last week, in light of Patton’s comments, Owens, the former director of the IRS exempt organizations division, told Fortune that if Ebers’s donations to the foundation were actually payments for bookings, then they would have to be treated as taxable assignments of income.
“It’s theoretically possible that this scalper wanted to support Trump’s philanthropy,” he continued. “It’s like what Warren Buffett wanted to do with the Bill [and Melinda] Gates Foundation. It does happen. It’s a bit unlikely that a ticket scalper would do that with a New York casino/hotel mogul. But maybe not. Lots of things can happen.”Rick Snyder said he learned of the surge in the disease days before disclosing it last month. In fact, high Michigan officials had known about it since March
High-ranking officials in Governor Rick Snyder’s administration were aware of a surge in legionnaires’ disease potentially linked to Flint’s water long before the Michigan governor reported the increase to the public last month, internal emails show.
After the release of the emails, the Michigan Democratic party called for Snyder to step down on Thursday.
When Snyder disclosed the spike in legionnaires’ cases on 13 January, he said he had learned about it just a couple of days earlier. But emails obtained by the liberal group Progress Michigan through public-records requests show Snyder’s own office was aware of the outbreak since last March. At the time, others in the administration were scrambling to respond to suggestions that bacteria in the city’s new water source, the Flint river, could be the culprit.
The outbreak was also well known within state agencies, according to emails obtained separately by the AP and other news organizations. Together, the emails offer more evidence that some state officials were dismissive of county health authorities who raised concerns about the safety of the community’s drinking water.
“The increase of the illnesses closely corresponds with the timeframe of the switch to the Flint River water. The majority of the cases reside or have an association with the city,” Jim Henry, Genesee County’s environmental health supervisor, wrote on 10 March to Flint leaders, the city’s state-appointed emergency financial manager and the state department of environmental quality, known as the DEQ.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michigan officials knew of a possible link between a legionnaires’ disease outbreak and Flint’s water in March 2015. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP
“This situation has been explicitly explained to MDEQ and many of the city’s officials,” Henry said in the email that was forwarded by the DEQ to a Snyder aide three days later. “I want to make sure in writing that there are no misunderstandings regarding this significant and urgent public health issue.”
Legionnaires’ disease is a type of pneumonia caused by bacteria in the lungs. People get sick if they inhale mist or vapor from contaminated water systems, hot tubs or cooling systems.
There were at least 87 cases across Genesee County during a 17-month period, including nine deaths, but the public was never told about the increase when it was happening – even after an initial wave of more than 40 cases was known by early 2015.
The back and forth behind the scenes occurred while residents were complaining about poor water quality, even before lead contamination became an extraordinary health emergency roughly six months later.
The emails reveal tension between the county health department, which was on the frontline of the legionnaires’ outbreak, and the city and state about how to investigate the disease. The emails also show some angst in the Snyder administration over the controversy.
Brad Wurfel, who was DEQ spokesman at the time, informed Snyder’s director of urban initiatives, Harvey Hollins, about a “significant uptick” in legionnaires’ cases but said it was “beyond irresponsible” for Henry to link the disease to the river without an adequate investigation. He copied the then DEQ director Dan Wyant on the email.
Wurfel noted that the county had resubmitted an open-records request to the city for water testing results and other information because of what Henry called the city’s “lack of cooperation”.
Wurfel said it would be “highly unlikely” to find legionella bacteria around the water treatment plant. However, he acknowledged the accusation about a link to the river was “serious” and said all agencies should come together “asap to share what information we have and develop a response/screening strategy before the weather gets warm again”.
Both Wyant and Wurfel resigned on 29 August.
Snyder’s spokesman, Dave Murray, citing the large executive office staff, said this week that the Republican governor only learned about the legionnaires’ outbreak days before he publicly disclosed it – despite Hollins being flagged 10 months earlier. Snyder’s former chief of staff, Dennis Muchmore, has said neither he nor Snyder knew but they should have been told earlier.
“Important information flow isn’t always forthcoming,” he said in mid-January on WKAR-TV’s Off The Record show.
Lonnie Scott, executive director of Progress Michigan, said the emails expose “another glaring example of Snyder saying one thing and emails really revealing something different”. The group, which has asked Snyder to release staff |
The only good New Yorkers are the hard-working blue-collar ironworkers and cops and firemen who populate the outer boroughs (and only join unions because they are forced to by corrupt Democratic political machines.) Which brings us back to Cruz, who on Friday put out this statement “apologizing” for his criticism of “New York values” in Thursday night’s debate:
“I apologize to the millions of New Yorkers who’ve been let down by liberal politicians in that state…I apologize to all the cops and firefighters and 9/11 heroes who had no choice but to stand and turn their backs on Mayor de Blasio because Mayor de Blasio over and over again stands with the looters and the criminals rather than the brave men and women in blue…”
In the annals of dickishness, this statement will go down as an all-time classic. In the annals of Republican politics, it will go down as a very canny move. After first dividing all of New York from American values, Cruz has now divided the “good” New Yorkers – the blue-collar working class, the hard-working small businesspeople, the brave public servants – from the “bad” New Yorkers who populate the liberal media and flip brownstones for millions of dollars and have gentrified Brooklyn. See, “good” New Yorkers, Cruz is saying. You are just like the real Americans who live west of the Hudson. You just labor under an occupation of horrid liberalism. And I, Ted Cruz, will be your salvation from the godless gun-grabbers who rule your state!
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He will be helped in this effort by the tribalism of our current politics, which allows conservatives to shake their fists at Wall Street banks over their crimes while praising, say, the Republican Supreme Court for throwing out any restrictions on political contributions from those same banks through the vehicle of Citizens United. It allows Republicans to criticize Wall Street banks while embracing a candidate whose wife collects a six-figure paycheck from one of them, or driving Donald Trump, the New Yorker’s New Yorker, to the top of its field of candidates.
This is all such a cynical play by Cruz that one thinks he must be privately shaking his head and laughing at the fact he is pulling it off. Unfortunately for the rest of us, he might be laughing all the way to the nomination.Here’s an interesting mystery. Back in 2012, astronomers finished the construction of an array of 256 radio antennas in the high deserts of New Mexico called the Long Wavelength Array. The array is designed to listen for radio waves with frequencies of between 25 and 75 MHz produced by gamma ray bursts, one of the most energetic phenomena in universe and thought to be associated with the collapse of a rapidly rotating stars to form neutron stars and black holes.
Gamma ray bursts are usually followed by an afterglow of radiation at longer wavelengths, from x-rays through to radio waves. But of these, the radio component is the least well observed. So there is significant interest in the data from the Long Wavelength Array, which produces images of the whole sky as it appears in the radio part of the spectrum.
Earlier this year, this data threw up something of a mystery. Having observed gamma ray bursts at other frequencies, astronomers were combing through the data from the Long Wavelength Array looking for afterglows in this part of the spectrum.
In some 200 hours of data, they found two transient radio signals of interest. But to their surprise neither of these signals were actually associated with gamma ray bursts. That caused some head scratching: what else could have produced these kinds of signals?
Today, Ken Obenberger at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and a few pals say they have solved the mystery and say the source of these radio signals is much closer to home. Having combed through thousands of hours of data from the Long Wavelength Array, they have found good evidence that these radio bursts are produced by fireballs or large meteors as they burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Obenberger and pals analysed some 11,000 hours of all-sky images produced by the Long Wavelength Array since it began gathering data in April 2012. This process resulted in the discovery of 49 transient radio signals with a duration of several tens of seconds.
The signals show a very definite pattern. Most are point sources, meaning they’re limited to an area of the sky less than about 4° across. But some of them extend much further. On 21 January 2014, one source left a trail covering more than 90° of the sky in less than 10 seconds. This trail then slowly receded to an endpoint which glowed for around 90 seconds.
This type of signal points to a certain origin. “The only known source that could cover this distance across the sky in less than 10 seconds and leave a persistent trail is a fireball,” say Obenberger and co.
To test this idea, the team compared the position of all the transient signals with data from NASA’s All Sky Fireball Network, a system of 12 cameras that record the three-dimensional position, speed, absolute magnitude and mass of fireballs as they pass across the sky. Significantly, two of these cameras are situated in southern New Mexico and so monitor some of the same part of the sky as the Long Wavelength Array.
As it turned out, 39 of the radio transients could not have been picked up by the NASA network because they were either out of view or occurred during the day. But of the other signals, five correspond more or less exactly to fireballs detected by the NASA network. These fireballs are all relatively bright with magnitudes greater than four.
“The chance overlap in space and time of 5 events found randomly in [the Long Wavelength Array] data with fireballs brighter than magnitude −4 within the 11,000 hours of data is about 1 in 10^28,” say Obenberger and co. In other words, the match cannot be a coincidence. “This implies that a large fraction of the events not seen by the network are most likely meteors as well.”
That’s a fascinating discover that raises various other questions. For a start, how do fireballs produce radio waves at this frequency? One possibility is that the trails they leave are simply reflecting radio waves produced on the ground. Meteor trails are known to reflect radio waves and indeed this has been one way of spotting them in the past.
But Obenberger and co reject this idea for a number of reasons. First, human radio transmissions are usually polarised and so any reflections ought to be polarised as well. The team found no evidence of this.
At the same time, human radio transmissions have easily identifiable spectra but the team found no evidence of this either in the data from the Long Wavelength Array.
“It is therefore our conclusion that fireball trails radiate at low frequencies,” they say.
Obenberger and co go on to discuss how meteor trails might produce radio waves at these frequencies. They calculate that the total radio energy emitted is a tiny fraction of the kinetic energy of a typical fireball, perhaps one part in 10^12. So there is no problem with energy.
The fireballs also produce a trail of plasma that the team calculates would be too cool to generate radio waves at this frequency from thermal emissions alone. So something else must be causing the trails to radiate.
Exactly what this might be, nobody quite knows. But Obenberger and co are hoping that data from the Long Wavelength Array will allow them to study the process in more detail.
They end their discussion by raising an interesting link with another mysterious radio phenomena known as Perytons, radio bursts of unknown origin that some astronomers believe are produced in the atmosphere. Obenberger and co suggest that the fact that meteors are now known to produce radio signals means they ought to be considered more seriously as the source of Perytons.
So there’s plenty more work to be done here for radio astronomers. In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions as to how meteor trails can produce radio emissions of this kind, please post your ideas here.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1405.6772 : Detection of Radio Emission from FireballsThe father of Modern Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov postulated the “Three Laws of Robotics”:
1.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2.A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
This was way back in 1941 in the short story “Rundown”. The story talks of an expedition to the planet Mercury in 2015. Though modern science has evolved by leaps and bounds and we have landed on the moon, mining for precious minerals on other planets is still a far prospect. What has become a reality is the growth of electronics, the miniaturisation of computing devices, the growth of Artificial Intelligence or AI and the evolution of robotics.
This article will look at the state of robotics in India, the scope of robotics as a viable career option, some of the leading institutions offering programmes in Robotics, entry requirements and course structure and the associated costs.
Robotics in India
These are exciting times for those looking to study robotics and make a career out of it. There is a massive requirement to automate processes across industries and boost productivity and minimise human risk. From plants assembling automobiles to unmanned drones that can monitor areas of conflict and long coastlines, we need brilliant minds that can create low-cost and effective robots. The influx of DIY robot kits from China and Japan and videos on YouTube have increased the popularity of robots and created interest in the subject among children. In fact, there are dedicated hobby groups comprising children, young men and women and the middle-aged who tinker around with kits and create robots and run racing competitions.
Robotics as a full-time degree programme is still in its nascent stages in India. Most students study Robotics as a part of their core engineering degree and those truly passionate about the subject and with the means to fund their studies seek to do a postgraduate degree in Robotics abroad.
Leading the Way
The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University(RI) is consistently ranked among the best places in the world to study a postgraduate programme in Robotics. The Robotics Institute was started in 1979 to examine the possibilities of using robots to automate tasks in industrial manufacturing. Over the years, the institution grew in size, stature and the scope of research work that was carried out here led to RI becoming the first institution in the world to offer a PhD in Robotics in 1988. Currently, a number of postgraduate degree options and undergraduate minor in Robotics are on offer for students at CMU.
View a detailed list of institutions offering postgraduate programmes in Robotics in the USA.
Rule Britannia
In the UK, the University of Bristol offers a highly acclaimed MSc in Robotics programme. This programme is offered by the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England. The Bristol Robotics Laboratory is the largest academic research center for Robotics in the UK. Other leading universities offering postgraduate programmes in Robotics include – the University of Plymouth, London South Bank University, University of Birmingham, Middlesex University and the University of Sheffield. Prospective students can view a detailed list of institutions offering postgraduate programmes in Robotics in the UK.
A Shade ‘Down Under’
In Australia, a number of universities combine Robotics and Mechatronics and offer a variety of programmes. Institutions like RMIT and La Trobe University offer such programmes. Charles Sturt University and the University of Sydney offer a number of PhD options in Robotics.
Robotics in Japan
As stated at the beginning of this article, Japan leads the world in Robotics research and probably the best place to study and conduct research in Robotics would be Japan. The Japanese government offers the Monbukagakusho (MEXT) Scholarships, which fund higher education in Japan for international students. The University of Tokyo and Kyoto University would be great places to study Robotics. It is recommended for an international student to have completed a basic course in Japanese to help acclimatise to life in Japan.
Entry Requirements
At the postgraduate level a minimum IELTS score of 6.5 or equivalent is mandatory for students looking to join a Robotics programme. A relevant undergraduate degree with a strong focus in Physics, Computing, Mechanical or Electronic Engineering is recommended. Students are required to have excellent research skills and the patience to sift through lots of data.
Costs
The costs are dependent on the duration of the programme and the country of study. A one-year degree may cost about INR 16 lakhs to INR 20 lakhs. Those enrolling for research programmes should check for the availability of grants, fellowships and scholarships to fund their studies. Students should also earmark funds for living and accommodation costs. On-campus accommodation usually works out as the best option for students!
Career Opportunities
The career opportunities for those who have completed a postgraduate programme in Robotics are varied. From designing industrial robots to working on cutting-edge products that can be used in medical science and exploration of the oceans to designing humanoid robots that can replicate basic human tasks; the possibilities are indeed infinite. Many students venture into research and teaching as well. The salaries are quite high in this field and skilled robotics engineers can earn upwards of INR 2 lakhs a month.
Activity
Here’s a fun activity for you! Build your own paper robot!
Need Help?
Still confused about which Robotics programme to choose? Don’t worry; call us now on 1-800-103-2581 for expert study abroad advice. Experts are available from Monday through Saturday from 9:30 AM to 7 PM. Pick the phone and call us. We will help you find the perfect postgraduate programme in Robotics.
Image Source - Asimo HondaSample of Roman Fomin’s 1926 map of streetcar and interurban map available on Transit Toronto
Transit Toronto is a great website dedicated to, well, all things transit in Toronto. In the archives section, there’s a wealth of old reports, schedules, advertisements, and official maps and track diagrams of the TTC dating back to 1930, a wonderful resource for the armchair historian or transit enthusiast.
The most interesting of Transit Toronto’s recent additions is a map (a screen shot is shown above) illustrating the entire rail transit system in Toronto as of 1926, the peak of Toronto’s street railway and interurban network. Toronto’s radial railways at their peak connected places such as Woodbridge, Guelph, Sutton, Port Credit and Schomberg. The Guelph and Woodbridge lines were operated by Canadian National Railways, while the other radials were, at that time, operated by Ontario Hydro. The map, which is a cartographic delight, was created by enthusiast Roman Fomin and includes the street and mainline railway networks as they existed in that period. I was only able to spot a few trivial errors in this extremely detailed work.
This map, which is a 71 MB PDF, is here.
In 1926, there were only a few short TTC bus routes that are not shown on this map: on Jane and Annette Streets, in Rosedale, the Port Lands (replacing the Ashbridge streetcar that’s partially shown on this map), and on Oakwood between St. Clair and Davenport.
Just two years later, by 1928, the Schomberg, Woodbridge and Lambton lines were abandoned, the latter two replaced by buses. Within ten years, they were joined by the Guelph interurban and city systems, the former Lake Simcoe Line north of Richmond Hill, the Port Credit and most of the Scarborough radials, as well as the Davenport streetcar were all replaced by TTC and Gray Coach buses.
Similar maps created by Fomin on Transit Toronto illustrate the TTC streetcar system in 1945 (3.5 MB) and the streetcar and trolley bus system as of 1965 (4.3 MB), just prior to the opening of the first phase of the Bloor-Danforth Subway.The Belfast Royal Academy (commonly shortened to B.R.A) is the oldest school in the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland.[1] It is a co-educational, non-denominational voluntary grammar school situated in north Belfast. The Academy is one of eight schools in Northern Ireland whose Headmistress is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference.
History [ edit ]
The Academy was founded in 1785 by Rev. Dr. James Crombie. Originally situated near St Anne's Parish Church in what is now Academy Street, it moved to its current location on the Cliftonville Road in 1880. For more than a century the school was named Belfast Academy. On 27 November 1887, Queen Victoria granted permission for the school to style itself Belfast Royal Academy, and its name was officially changed in January 1888[citation needed]
"Barring out" incident [ edit ]
Early in the morning of 12 April 1792 a group of schoolboys (eight boarders and two day boys) barricaded themselves in the mathematical classroom. In doing so they “declared war against the masters until their requests should be granted[2]”. As they expected to be holed up for some time, they had taken a quantity of provisions from the academy kitchens; further they managed to arm themselves with 5 pistols and a large quantity of gunpowder and shot. A letter, headed “Liberty Hall”, was sent by the students to their masters in which they stated they would not surrender until their demands had been met. The academy authorities, in an attempt to break the siege, sent workmen to break down the door and pour water down the chimney, without success, as the boys opened fire on them. Finally the Sovereign of Belfast, Rev. William Bristow, was summoned, he “read the Riot Act” to the boys but failed to end the barring out, and one of the boys opened fire on him. Later that night the siege ended; the boys were later beaten and then expelled.[3]
Headmasters [ edit ]
Rev. James Crombie, DD, (Universities of St Andrews and Glasgow) (1785–1790)
Rev. William Bruce, DD, (Trinity College, Dublin and the University of Glasgow) (1790–1822)
Rev. James Gray, DD, (1822–1826)
Rev. Reuben John Bryce, MA, LLD, (University of Glasgow) (1826–1880)
Dr William Collier, LLD, (Trinity College, Dublin) (1880–1890)
Mr T. W. Foster, MA, (Trinity College, Dublin) (1890–1898)
Mr T. R. Collier, MA, (Queen's College, Belfast) (1898–1923)
Mr Alexander Roulston Foster, MA, (Queen's University, Belfast) (1923–1942)
Mr John Darbyshire, MA, (University of Liverpool) (1943–1968)
Mr Louis Lord, MA, (Trinity College, Dublin) (1968–1980)
Mr William Sillery, MA, (St. Catharine's College, Cambridge) (1980–2000)
Mr William Young, MA, (Queen's University, Belfast) (2000–2008)
Mr Moore Dickson, MA, (Pembroke College, Cambridge) (2009–2017)
Mrs Hilary Woods, BSc, (2017- )
School crest [ edit ]
The school crest comprises the rose, the thistle and the shamrock, along with the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom, the Arms of the City of Belfast and those of the Province of Ulster. The three significant dates mark the foundation of the school in 1785, the transfer to the present site in 1880 and the approval by Queen Victoria of the designation Belfast Royal Academy in 1888.
Preparatory department [ edit ]
The school's preparatory department, Ben Madigan Preparatory School, is located on the Antrim Road in the shadow of Cave Hill. Originally opened in 1829, it moved to its current site in 1965. A pre-prep was opened in 1998.
House system [ edit ]
When a pupil enters the Academy he or she is placed into one of the four houses: Shaw, Currie, Pottinger or Cairns, named after distinguished past pupils: James Shaw, Donald Currie, Henry Pottinger, and Hugh Cairns, 1st Earl Cairns, for whom the house colours are yellow, green, red, and blue, respectively; each pupil must wear a tie with a stripe of his or her house colour on it.
Honours system [ edit ]
As a pupil progresses through the Academy, he or she can earn honours through excellence in sport and/or the arts. There are minor honours, allowing a pupil to wear a minor honours tie (blue owls) and major honours (gold owls). In addition, a pupil gaining major honours in sport is entitled to wear a distinctive maroon blazer with blue braid and a gold school badge. Pupils who receive major honours in the arts, be it for music, drama, or art & design are entitled to wear a blue blazer with maroon braid and a gold school badge. The honour, e.g. Cricket XI 2004 or Music 2002, is stitched in gold letters under the badge.
Notable alumni [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Belfast Royal Academy: 1785–1935, by Hugh Jackman
, by Hugh Jackman Belfast Royal Academy: The First Century 1785–1885, by A.T.Q. Stewart
, by A.T.Q. Stewart Belfast Royal Academy: The Second Century 1885–1985, by Edward McCamley
Coordinates:That is what happened in 1976, with disastrous results, when James Callaghan became prime minister in a minority Labour government after his predecessor, Harold Wilson, resigned. Labour was forced to deal with members of various tiny parties, who used their unexpected clout to hold up legislation and make difficult demands. Mired in economic crises, the government eventually had to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
The leading wild card in all this is the Liberal Democratic Party. During an unexpected, and short-lived, surge in public opinion polls during the campaign, the Liberal Democratic leader, Nick Clegg, intimated that he would be reluctant to enter into a formal deal with another party but that he would consider legislation on a case-by-case basis.
He has also said that the party that wins the most seats and the most votes is entitled to his party’s “support,” though he has not said what he means by that. But his own electoral performance fell far short of most projections before Thursday’s election, narrowing his options.
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Many elements of Mr. Clegg’s legislative program, which includes scrapping college tuition and overhauling the parliamentary election system, are anathema to the other parties, and it is unclear what kind of demands Mr. Clegg would feel he could make.
An interesting twist, British constitutional experts say, is that Gordon Brown, as the sitting prime minister, has the right to remain in office until another party can prove that it has the confidence of Parliament — that is, that it can amass enough votes to pass legislation.
Such an effort can prove risky and embarrassing, as the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath found in the general election of 1974, which also resulted in a hung Parliament. In that case, the Conservative government lost the election to the Labour opposition, but tried to remain in government by negotiating a deal with the Liberal Party.
But the effort failed, and Mr. Heath was forced to resign just four days later, paving the way for Mr. Wilson and his ill-fated minority Labour government to take over.
Many European countries are smoothly run by coalitions made up of different parties, but the British system does not comfortably accommodate coalitions.
Its legislative chamber is physically set up so that the governing party sits on one side and the opposition on the other. And even if the parliamentary parties are inclined to make deals, the leaders might have a hard time persuading grass-roots members to follow.
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For a final element of unpredictability, because the sitting prime minister has the right to call an election whenever he or she wants, it is impossible to plan for long-term cooperation on any sort of legislative agenda, an unhappy prospect for the junior partner in the coalition.European Union ministers today admitted that a giant EU-US trade deal is dead in its current form, with drastic change needed to salvage any hope of a deal going ahead.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership has sparked a widespread backlash and now lies in tatters in the wake of massive protests across the continent.
Austrian Economy Minister Reinhold Mitterlehner said that the pact now has, “such negative connotations”, that the best hope was to “completely relaunch with a new name after the US elections.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
Mitterlehner also demanded “more transparency and clearer objectives.“ Negotiations for the free-trade zone have so far been held behind closed doors.
Slovak economy minister Peter Ziga, was similarly pessimistic, saying that a “new start or some new approach [was] needed, while EU trade commissioner “ Cecilia Malmstroem said the likelihood of a deal was “becoming smaller and smaller”, as she entered the talks.
Several EU representatives blamed US intransigence for the gridlock. The deal now has “only a small chance of success unless the United States starts to give a bit of ground,“ Belgian Finance Minister Didier Reynders said.
Shape Created with Sketch. The 6 reasons why we should be scared of TTIP Show all 6 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The 6 reasons why we should be scared of TTIP 1/6 The NHS Public services, especially the NHS, are in the firing line. One of the main aims of TTIP is to open up Europe’s public health, education and water services to US companies. This could essentially mean the privatisation of the NHS. The European Commission has claimed that public services will be kept out of TTIP. However, according to the Huffington Post, the UK Trade Minister Lord Livingston has admitted that talks about the NHS were still on the table Getty 2/6 Food and environmental safety TTIP’s ‘regulatory convergence’ agenda will seek to bring EU standards on food safety and the environment closer to those of the US. But US regulations are much less strict, with 70 per cent of all processed foods sold in US supermarkets now containing genetically modified ingredients. By contrast, the EU allows virtually no GM foods. The US also has far laxer restrictions on the use of pesticides. It also uses growth hormones in its beef which are restricted in Europe due to links to cancer. US farmers have tried to have these restrictions lifted repeatedly in the past through the World Trade Organisation and it is likely that they will use TTIP to do so again Getty 3/6 Banking regulations TTIP cuts both ways. The UK, under the influence of the all-powerful City of London, is thought to be seeking a loosening of US banking regulations. America’s financial rules are tougher than ours. They were put into place after the financial crisis to directly curb the powers of bankers and avoid a similar crisis happening again. TTIP, it is feared, will remove those restrictions, effectively handing all those powers back to the bankers Getty/Bloomberg 4/6 Privacy Remember ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)? It was thrown out by a massive majority in the European Parliament in 2012 after a huge public backlash against what was rightly seen as an attack on individual privacy where internet service providers would be required to monitor people’s online activity. Well, it’s feared that TTIP could be bringing back ACTA’s central elements, proving that if the democratic approach doesn’t work, there’s always the back door. An easing of data privacy laws and a restriction of public access to pharmaceutical companies’ clinical trials are also thought to be on the cards AFP/Getty Images 5/6 Jobs The EU has admitted that TTIP will probably cause unemployment as jobs switch to the US, where labour standards and trade union rights are lower. It has even advised EU members to draw on European support funds to compensate for the expected unemployment. Examples from other similar bi-lateral trade agreements around the world support the case for job losses. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico caused the loss of one million US jobs over 12 years, instead of the hundreds of thousands of extra that were promised Dave Thompson/Getty Images 6/6 Democracy TTIP’s biggest threat to society is its inherent assault on democracy. One of the main aims of TTIP is the introduction of Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS), which allow companies to sue governments if those governments’ policies cause a loss of profits. In effect it means unelected transnational corporations can dictate the policies of democratically elected governments AFP/Getty 1/6 The NHS Public services, especially the NHS, are in the firing line. One of the main aims of TTIP is to open up Europe’s public health, education and water services to US companies. This could essentially mean the privatisation of the NHS. The European Commission has claimed that public services will be kept out of TTIP. However, according to the Huffington Post, the UK Trade Minister Lord Livingston has admitted that talks about the NHS were still on the table Getty 2/6 Food and environmental safety TTIP’s ‘regulatory convergence’ agenda will seek to bring EU standards on food safety and the environment closer to those of the US. But US regulations are much less strict, with 70 per cent of all processed foods sold in US supermarkets now containing genetically modified ingredients. By contrast, the EU allows virtually no GM foods. The US also has far laxer restrictions on the use of pesticides. It also uses growth hormones in its beef which are restricted in Europe due to links to cancer. US farmers have tried to have these restrictions lifted repeatedly in the past through the World Trade Organisation and it is likely that they will use TTIP to do so again Getty 3/6 Banking regulations TTIP cuts both ways. The UK, under the influence of the all-powerful City of London, is thought to be seeking a loosening of US banking regulations. America’s financial rules are tougher than ours. They were put into place after the financial crisis to directly curb the powers of bankers and avoid a similar crisis happening again. TTIP, it is feared, will remove those restrictions, effectively handing all those powers back to the bankers Getty/Bloomberg 4/6 Privacy Remember ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement)? It was thrown out by a massive majority in the European Parliament in 2012 after a huge public backlash against what was rightly seen as an attack on individual privacy where internet service providers would be required to monitor people’s online activity. Well, it’s feared that TTIP could be bringing back ACTA’s central elements, proving that if the democratic approach doesn’t work, there’s always the back door. An easing of data privacy laws and a restriction of public access to pharmaceutical companies’ clinical trials are also thought to be on the cards AFP/Getty Images 5/6 Jobs The EU has admitted that TTIP will probably cause unemployment as jobs switch to the US, where labour standards and trade union rights are lower. It has even advised EU members to draw on European support funds to compensate for the expected unemployment. Examples from other similar bi-lateral trade agreements around the world support the case for job losses. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico caused the loss of one million US jobs over 12 years, instead of the hundreds of thousands of extra that were promised Dave Thompson/Getty Images 6/6 Democracy TTIP’s biggest threat to society is its inherent assault on democracy. One of the main aims of TTIP is the introduction of Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS), which allow companies to sue governments if those governments’ policies cause a loss of profits. In effect it means unelected transnational corporations can dictate the policies of democratically elected governments AFP/Getty
“The Americans have not been willing to make offers the way Canada has so it's guaranteed there will be no agreement this year,” said German Economy Minister and Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, adding that if talks could be rekindled under a new US president, they would need a “different attitude”.
In August Gabriel said that TTIP had failed “but no one is really admitting it”.
On the other side of the Atlantic, analysts see little chance of a deal any time soon. “Very unlikely,” Caroline Freund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said. “Europe is struggling with Brexit and migration, and the TTIP is hugely unpopular in Germany.”
After three years of secretive talks, seemingly intractable differences remain over issues such as working conditions and agricultural practices. For example, Europe bans washing chicken with chlorine and routinely treating cows with growth-promoting hormones, practices which are common in the US.
Detractors also say the pact will erode wages and working conditions, as well as give corporations the power to sue nation states for introducing regulations that harm their businesses.
Under a similar trade deal the government of Ecuador was ordered to pay German oil company Occidental $2.3 billion for, apparently legally, terminating a contract.
On Saturday, more than 300,000 people protested against TTIP, while on Tuesday thousands demonstrated outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels.
Guy Taylor, trade campaigner with Global Justice Now said “the death of TTIP is a victory for the ordinary people across Europe who stood alongside trade unions, civil society groups, activists and consumer watchdogs to prevent this massive corporate power grab."
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
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Subscribe nowCecile Fabre/ Jeff McMahan/ Gabriel Wollner
Listen to the podcast
Thursday 13 February 2014, 6.30 – 8pm
Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, LSE
Cecile Fabre, Professor of Political Philosophy, University of Oxford
Jeff McMahan, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University
Chair: Gabriel Wollner, Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, LSE and Forum for European Philosophy Fellow
The 100th Anniversary of the outbreak of World War I reminds us of the importance of ethics in war. Under what conditions may states wage war on each other? And what are the moral principles governing the conduct of war? Cecile Fabre and Jeff McMahan argued that traditional answers to these questions fail to convince: traditional just war theory stands in need of revision and the role of ethics in war needs to be reconsidered.Intense precipitation can easily overrun urban infrastructure meant to manage water runoff and drainage, especially in cash-strapped cities unable to maintain those systems in optimal working order. But what happens when weather becomes increasingly extreme in terms of frequency and ferocity?
In Amman, pump failures resulted in instant flooding of highway underpasses, clogging city traffic for hours. In Israel, lightning strikes prompted service shut-down on the Israeli Railroad. In Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency declared an emergency when extreme weather and severe flooding exacerbated an already dire humanitarian situation. Hundreds of residents in the flooded areas around the Sheikh Radwan storm-water lagoon were forced to evacuate their homes.
A new report from the World Bank called “Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal” warned of increasingly severe weather for much of the world as a result of planetary warming. Key findings specific to the Middle East include increased vulnerability to coastal flooding and inland water shortages.
As the Earth warms, scientists say that weather extremes that today occur once every 100 years will become the “new climate normal,” creating increased risks and instability, and putting the livelihoods of millions of people at risk.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said, “We’re already seeing record-breaking temperatures occurring more frequently, rainfall increasing in intensity in some places, while drought-prone regions like the Mediterranean are becoming drier.”
Is this simply weird winter weather or an introduction to global warming? Swim through some images of the Middle East’s newest “beaches” and tell us what you think.Introducing Lemur
Netflix Technology Blog Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 20, 2015
by Kevin Glisson, Jason Chan, and Ben Hagen
Netflix is pleased to announce the open source release of our x.509 certificate orchestration framework: Lemur!
The Challenge of Certificate Management
Public Key Infrastructure is a set of hardware, software, people, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. PKI allows for secure communication by establishing chains of trust between two entities.
There are three main components to PKI that we are attempting to address:
Public Certificate — A cryptographic document that proves the ownership of a public key, which can be used for signing, proving identity or encrypting data. Private Key — A cryptographic document that is used to decrypt data encrypted by a public key. Certificate Authorities (CAs) — Third-party or internal services that validate those they do business with. They provide confirmation that a client is talking to the server it thinks it is. Their public certificates are loaded into major operating systems and provide a basis of trust for others to build on.
The management of all the pieces needed for PKI can be a confusing and painful experience. Certificates have expiration dates — if they are allowed to expire without replacing communication can be interrupted, impacting a system’s availability. And, private keys must never be exposed to any untrusted entities — any loss of a private key can impact the confidentiality of communications. There is also increased complexity when creating certificates that support a diverse pool of browsers and devices. It is non-trivial to track which devices and browsers trust which certificate authorities.
On top of the management of these sensitive and important pieces of information, the tools used to create manage and interact with PKI have confusing or ambiguous options. This lack of usability can lead to mistakes and undermine the security of PKI.
For non-experts the experience of creating certificates can be an intimidating one.
Empowering the Developer
At Netflix developers are responsible for their entire application environment, and we are moving to an environment |
GitHub or the Terraform Module Registry. But, before instantiating the module, we want to make sure that our AWS provider is properly configured. If you make use of named AWS credential profiles, then all you need set in the provider block is a version and a region. Exporting AWS_PROFILE with the desired AWS credential profile name before invoking Terraform ensures that the underlying AWS SDK uses the right set of credentials.
provider "aws" { version = "~> 1.2.0" region = "us-east-1" }
From there, we create a module block with source set to the GitHub repository URL of a specific version (Git tag) of the terraform-aws-emr-cluster module.
module "emr" { source = "github.com/azavea/terraform-aws-emr-cluster?ref=0.1.1" name = "BlogCluster" vpc_id = "vpc-2ls49630" release_label = "emr-5.9.0" applications = [ "Hadoop", "Ganglia", "Spark", ] configurations = "${data.template_file.emr_configurations.rendered}" key_name = "blog-cluster" subnet_id = "subnet-8f29485g" instance_groups = [ { name = "MasterInstanceGroup" instance_role = "MASTER" instance_type = "m3.xlarge" instance_count = "1" }, { name = "CoreInstanceGroup" instance_role = "CORE" instance_type = "m3.xlarge" instance_count = "2" bid_price = "0.30" }, ] bootstrap_name = "runif" bootstrap_uri = "s3://elasticmapreduce/bootstrap-actions/run-if" bootstrap_args = ["instance.isMaster=true", "echo running on master node"] log_uri = "s3n://blog-global-logs-us-east-1/EMR/" project = "Blog" environment = "Test" }
Besides the EMR module, we also make use of a template_file resource to pull in a file containing the JSON required for EMR cluster configuration. Once retrieved, this resource renders the file contents (we have no variables defined, so no actual templating is going to occur) into the value of the configurations module variable.
provider "template" { version = "~> 1.0.0" } data "template_file" "emr_configurations" { template = "${file("configurations/default.json")}" }
Finally, we want to add a few rules to the cluster security groups. For the head node security group, we want to open port 22 for SSH, and for both security groups we want to allow all egress traffic. As you can see, we’re able to do this via the available module.emr.*_security_group_id outputs.
resource "aws_security_group_rule" "emr_master_ssh_ingress" { type = "ingress" from_port = "22" to_port = "22" protocol = "tcp" cidr_blocks = ["1.2.3.4/32"] security_group_id = "${module.emr.master_security_group_id}" } resource "aws_security_group_rule" "emr_master_all_egress" { type = "egress" from_port = "0" to_port = "0" protocol = "-1" cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"] security_group_id = "${module.emr.master_security_group_id}" } resource "aws_security_group_rule" "emr_slave_all_egress" { type = "egress" from_port = "0" to_port = "0" protocol = "-1" cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"] security_group_id = "${module.emr.slave_security_group_id}" }
Taking the Module for a Spin
Once we have all the configuration above saved, we can use Terraform to create and destroy the cluster.
$ tree. ├── configurations │ └── default.json └── test.tf
First, we assemble a plan with the available configuration. This gives Terraform an opportunity to inspect the state of the world and determine exactly what it needs to do to make the world match our desired configuration.
$ terraform plan -out=test.tfplan
From here, we inspect the command output (the infrastructure equivalent of a diff) of all the data sources and resources Terraform plans to create, modify, or destroy. If that looks good, the next step is to apply the plan.
$ terraform apply test.tfplan... Apply complete! Resources: 11 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed. Outputs: id = j-3UHI5QFY5ALNH master_public_dns = ec2-54-210-208-229.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Now that we’ve got the head node FQDN, let’s SSH in and use the yarn CLI to ensure our cluster node count is accurate.
$ ssh -A -l hadoop ec2-54-210-208-229.compute-1.amazonaws.com [hadoop@ip-172-31-41-41 ~]$ yarn node -list | grep "Total Nodes" Total Nodes:2
Once we’re done with that, we’ll want to clean up all the AWS resources so that we don’t run up a huge bill.
$ terraform destroy... Plan: 0 to add, 0 to change, 11 to destroy. Do you really want to destroy? Terraform will destroy all your managed infrastructure, as shown above. There is no undo. Only 'yes' will be accepted to confirm. Enter a value: yes... Destroy complete! Resources: 11 destroyed.
Conclusion
We think the terraform-aws-emr-cluster is off to a decent start, and we hope that it can successfully replace all our past approaches to provisioning EMR clusters. We also hope that this post helps folks make sense of Terraform modules, Amazon EMR, and our desire to combine the two to make our lives easier.
If you’re interested in learning more about Terraform, some really thorough guides exist within the official Terraform documentation. Also, Yevgeniy Brikman has done a great job assembling a comprehensive guide to Terraform on his company blog. If you’re interested in learning more about Amazon EMR, the official AWS documentation covers a ton of ground.
Lastly, if you’re a user of Amazon EMR and Terraform, and get an opportunity to make use of our module, please let us know what you think.AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — The Travis County judge in Texas’ state capital made her sentiments visible last week, donning a “pussyhat” to preside over a meeting at which she forcefully advocated for women’s reproductive rights.
County judges in Texas are not judicial officers; they are the county’s executive officers, and preside over county commission meetings. Like all county commissioners, county judges are elected. Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt is the first woman elected to the post in her county.
Eckhardt wore a pink pussyhat during the commission’s Jan. 24 meeting, at which the commission considered a proclamation supporting reproductive health care. Travis County, based in Austin, is a liberal enclave in Texas.
The pink, knitted beanie with pointy cat ears has become a symbol of solidarity with women’s rights, particularly since the nationwide Women’s Marches on Jan. 21.
Eckhardt, who took 62 percent of the Travis County vote in 2015, said, “Get my cat ears going here for this one,” at last week’s meeting, as she adjusted her hat while introducing the reproductive choice proclamation.
When the commission met again this Tuesday to vote on a revised version of the proclamation, neither the judge’s pussyhat nor the word “abortion” made an appearance.
The proclamation, which also has been proposed as a resolution in the Austin City Council, was timed to coincide with the 44th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade.
It followed close on the heels of the introduction of a bill in the Texas legislature that would prohibit abortion from “fertilization until birth” and allow murder charges to be filed against women who have abortions and doctors who perform them.
“There are one in three pregnant, capable people in this country who need abortion care in their lifetime,” Eckhardt said at the Jan. 24 meeting. “It’s a decision that should be left to the individual as a personal, private matter without government interference, which is what we’re here to honor today. And for many other families and individuals, this is not just a decision that they’re making, but it’s also life-saving health care.”
Commissioner Gerald Daugherty called the original proclamation “a little problematic” because it mentioned “abortion” seven times.
“There’s no more electrifying subject matter, especially today with what’s happened in the last couple weeks, to where that is such a lightning rod of a word,” Daugherty said at the original meeting. “And for somebody that is so supportive of women’s health care, I just hate to be boxed in a spot where I’ve got to go out and defend why I would support something that has to … get in your face over, you know, the abortion issue.”
Eckhardt agreed to postpone a vote on the proclamation for a week, to refine the language in search of a unanimous vote.
She achieved it on Tuesday. The revised version was nearly identical to the original, though the word “abortion” had been edited out entirely, replaced with phrases such as “termination of a pregnancy” and “reproductive choice.”
Eckhardt’s pussyhat was also missing. Her spokesperson Loretta Farb declined to comment as to why.
Travis County Attorney David Escamilla said this week that his office had not received any complaints about Judge Eckhardt’s hat, and that he is not aware of any law that restricts clothing choices for county commissioners.
But Farb said the judge’s office has received complaints and messages of support about Eckhardt’s hat. Social media commentators were not restrained; at least one called her “unprofessional and unethical” for wearing the pussyhat. One called her a criminal for wearing the hat.
“You should be removed immediately!” one Facebook poster wrote. “You have incriminated yourself and confirmed your bias with your behavior and you no longer deserve nor command the respect that typically accompanies the position of a judge.”
Across the country, other elected officials have been spotted wearing pussyhats.
Congresswoman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, wore one to the recent presidential inauguration.
Former Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis wore a matching pink dress with her pussyhat to speak at the Women’s March in Austin.
Creators of the PussyhatProject say they created the hat and website to “reclaim” the word “pussy” as a means of empowerment.
Many women who wore the hats to the Women’s Marches carried signs, “Pussy Grabs Back,” a response to Donald Trump’s recorded comments about grabbing women “by the pussy.”
“Pussyhat Project is a movement, not just a moment,” the creators declared on the project’s website after the marches. “Hold onto your hats, and wear them loudly and proudly.”
Eckhardt’s spokesperson said the judge does not plan to wear the hat to a meeting of the commissioners court again.
Like this: Like Loading...>> Tomorrow night, a new documentary on the relationship between Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen premieres on British television. The documentary, McQueen and I, includes rare McQueen footage and interviews with his brother, ex-boyfriend, friends, co-workers, models, and Blow's husband.
McQueen's brother Michael is shown revisiting the crowded house where they grew up in on London's East End and tells the filmmakers: "It was three boys all in one bedroom. You could see the birds flying around the top there. If you see Lee’s shows there was a lot of feathers and birds going on. That is where Lee got a lot of his ideas." Asked about McQueen's death, which came shortly after their mother passed away — an event the designer struggled to cope with — Michael replied: "She wouldn’t have been over the moon with my brother for what he did. I’m afraid no one was. It was very disappointing in that respect. He always thought the world of our mum." The film also relates how McQueen's mother made sandwiches backstage for the models at some of his first shows to keep budget down.
The designer's former design assistant Catherine Brickhill recalls in an interview that at one of his Givenchy shows: "There wasn’t a lot of space, people were running around and I remember [McQueen] running over to Eva Herzigova and cutting the laces on her corset and saying ‘You f**king bitch' and y’know dragging her to get her to exit on time. She was in tears by the time she was out there. No one had ever treated her that way."
Former head Givenchy publicist Eric Lanuit is captured in the documentary saying: "The press officer’s role is also to be a nanny. [McQueen] would call to ask for certain ‘vitamin substances’ to help him stay up all night and through the day of a fashion show. I’m not talking about vitamin C, I am talking about cocaine."
And model Jodie Kidd says: "I was just beginning as a model and he was just beginning as a designer. Every time we went out on the catwalk we would be lined up and he would say ‘Come on Jode, go for it,’ psyching me up and then he would say ‘Out’ and off we would go."Giles Muhame, managing editor of the Ugandan publication Rolling Stone, with a recent issue in Kampala. The paper published the names and photos of 14 Ugandans it identified as gay. Marc Hofer/AFP/Getty Images
Last month, after an international firestorm opposing its proposed anti-homosexuality law known as the kill-the-gays bill, which would have imposed the death penalty for acts of “aggravated homosexuality,” the Ugandan Parliament approved a less severe version of the law, with the penalty for such conduct set at life in prison. “Aggravated homosexuality” includes sex with minors or disabled individuals, sex when one individual is HIV positive and repeated sex between consenting adults of the same gender. The revised law, which awaits President Yuweri Museveni’s signature, also criminalizes those who fail to report homosexual conduct and imposes a seven-year prison term for those who perform same-sex marriages. The law reverberates in the U.S. both for the outrage it caused and its potential impact on a lawsuit currently before the federal district court in Springfield, Mass. The suit was filed in March 2012 by the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), a coalition of Ugandan lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) advocacy groups. Ugandan lawmakers say the legislation is necessary to protect families from Western gays who attempt to recruit their children. That purported threat was aggressively promoted by American evangelicals. The anti-gay bill was introduced in 2009 only months after a conference in Uganda titled Seminar on Exposing the Homosexual Agenda. Several prominent evangelical pastors, including Scott Lively, a minister and self-proclaimed expert on the gay movement from Springfield, spoke out vehemently against the dangers posed by gays. Lively’s how-to book “Redeeming the Rainbow” advises opponents of gay rights to counteract sympathy for gays by highlighting instances of rape and child recruitment. This strategy is now at work in Uganda. In SMUG v. Lively, the plaintiffs allege that Lively was engaged in a persistent pattern of collaborating with Ugandan officials and leaders to foment repression by helping craft oppressive legislation like the anti-homosexuality bill and for inflaming societal hostility toward LGBTI individuals. Last August, by declining to dismiss the case against Lively, U.S. federal Judge Michael Ponsor provided additional support for LGBTI rights. Ponsor held that persecution on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is in violation of international norms and that it amounted to a crime against humanity. Progress in enshrining LGBTI rights and protecting members of that community from violence has been uneven across the globe. Significant advances in gay rights in Western Europe and the Americas have been balanced by notable setbacks elsewhere. For example, in June, Russia passed an anti-gay law banning “propaganda” that equalizes straight and gay relationships and the distribution of gay-rights literature. In December the Indian Supreme Court issued a ruling recriminalizing homosexual acts. There are renewed efforts to pass retrograde legislation across Africa, though few are as extreme as Uganda’s death-penalty bill.
Gay rights in Africa
The etiology of African resistance to LGBTI rights is complicated. Many African countries still criminalize consensual, same-sex relationships, and de facto discrimination against and criminalization of LGBTI people is prevalent in countries without explicit bans. Cultural opposition to homosexuality runs deep in the continent. Last year the Pew Global Attitudes Project found over 90 percent disapproval for gay rights in five of the six African countries surveyed and a widespread belief that homosexuality is “un-African.” While Africa is not culturally, religiously or geopolitically monolithic, various observers attribute the broad agreement on anti-gay sentiment to several overlapping factors. First, many of the laws in Africa against homosexuality are rooted in British statutes, embedded in moral codes or indecency laws that are vestiges of the continent’s colonial legacy. Second, conservative religious branches of Christianity and Islam foment antipathy to LGBTI rights, and the influence of foreign evangelism fuels virulent homophobia. As religious leaders from abroad travel to Africa with the express goal of propagating intolerance, evangelical homophobia inspires increased Western gay activism, leading to further backlash against the perceived imposition of Western values. Third, domestic politics plays a role, as some local leaders demonize gays to deflect attention from intractable socioeconomic ills. Human Rights Watch and other rights groups have accused African leaders, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, for making scapegoats of gays for his country’s economic and social woes. He condemns Western efforts to condition aid on the recipient country’s acceptance of gay rights. Other African leaders who are reluctant to resist complying with international norms despite homophobic national attitudes may fear a backlash from voters and traditional religious leaders. For instance, last October when Malawian cleric and scholar Sheikh Mdala Ali Tambuli spoke out in support of gay rights, prominent members of the country’s Muslim leadership immediately denounced his statement. Finally, opposition to gay rights is sometimes cast as a nationalistic rejection of Western values and the forces of globalization. The push-back forced Barack Obama’s administration to tread carefully in implementing the 2011 presidential memorandum that directs federal agencies to promote and protect gay rights overseas, balancing LGBTI advocacy with an understanding of the counterproductive anti-Western resentment that the U.S. policy might generate. The complex cultural and historical context of homophobia in Africa demands a nuanced, sensitive and carefully planned international response that considers the potentially adverse local impact of advocacy efforts intended to dismantle it.
I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven... I mean I would much rather go to the other place. Archbishop Desmond Tutu
In some parts of Africa, the struggle against persecution and the criminalization of gay behavior is a matter of life and death. In January 2011, prominent and outspoken Ugandan gay-rights activist David Kato was bludgeoned to death in his home. In July 2013, Eric Ohena Lembembe, a gay-rights activist in Cameroon, was murdered, his neck and legs broken and his body bearing burns. In June and July of that year, Kenyan activists reported a wave of hate crimes and violence against gay men. The U.S. federal court ruling contributes to the international jurisprudence supporting the universality of LGBTI rights, covered by panoply of protections, including free association, free expression, free assembly, privacy, family life, nondiscrimination, liberty and security of the person and the right to life. In the wake of pervasive discrimination and violence, in June 2011 the United Nations Human Rights Council affirmed the rights of LGBTI people in a groundbreaking resolution supporting equal rights for all people, irrespective of sexual orientation. The resolution commissioned a formal U.N. study to document discriminatory laws, practices and violence against sexual orientation and gender identity and to explore the use of international human-rights law to end violence and other human-rights violations on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Yet protection of gay rights remains bitterly divisive. The U.N. Human Rights Council’s resolution passed only narrowly: Of the council’s 47 members, 23 countries voted yes, 19 voted no and three countries abstained. The polarized politics prompted proponents of the U.N. resolution to urge South Africa, the first country to codify gay rights in Africa, to introduce the resolution in an effort to soften resistance to the perceived influence of Western constructs and priorities. However, despite strong support from countries such as Brazil and Colombia, a number of African nations and others decried the resolution. Even after approval by the Human Rights Council, only 85 countries — fewer than half the 193 U.N. member states — signed the resolution. In July 2013, alarmed by escalating rhetoric and violence against gay men and lesbians, the U.N. reinforced its resolution by launching a global education initiative called Free & Equal, designed to build consensus around LGBTI rights. The Free & Equal campaign was announced in South Africa for symbolic and strategic reasons. LGBTI rights enjoy popular support from prominent members of South African clergy, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who recently affirmed the depth of his backing by stating, “I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven... I mean I would much rather go to the other place.” Many years earlier, South African anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela, who died in December, added moral gravitas to the concept of equal rights as an African value. His postapartheid administration oversaw the inclusion of these rights in the progressive South African constitution. Even with favorable attitudes and a progressive constitution that enshrines the protection of LGBTI rights, anti-gay violence and corrective rape are prevalent across South Africa.
The road aheadThings went slightly differently in Dele Alli’s mind. Almost an hour into Tottenham’s excellent win over Burnley, the England international was played in on goal down the right-hand side. One could see the gears moving: with Ben Mee closing in, Alli envisaged flicking the ball over the centre-half’s head and firing past Nick Pope to double his side’s lead.
In reality, it was more Paul Chuckle than Paul Gascoigne. The 21-year-old planned a deft touch to deceive Mee but instead lobbed the ball straight into the air and into the welcoming arms of Pope. ‘Dele Alli, what a w*nker,’ came the charming chant from the home fans.
Alli is no stranger to such reactions: Raheem Sterling appears to have passed the mantle of despised young Englishman. His temperament has been questioned throughout his Premier League career, his attitude critiqued. From Claudio Yacob’s stomach to Kevin de Bruyne’s ankle, with a brief detour to Brecht Dejaegere’s shin, the forward is leaving his stamp on the football anatomy in more ways than one.
If the main accusation levelled at Alli is that he is petulant when under pressure, like the unruly child who throws a tantrum after being caught stealing another kid’s toys, these past few weeks have offered plenty of opportunity to see him in full flow. His woeful challenge on De Bruyne came when Manchester City were teaching Tottenham a football lesson, his performances having been scrutinised for months. Before this weekend, he had no goals and two assists in his last eight Premier League games.
Saturday evening was Alli in excelsis. Within the opening ten minutes he was booked for a late challenge on Charlie Taylor, before encouraging Kevin Long to dangle a leg to assist him in his successful attempts to win a penalty. As ever, he was Tottenham’s hero but the overall villain of the piece.
Harry Kane converted from the spot, and but for a brief period before half-time, Tottenham did not look back.
It was almost fitting that the pair combined for Kane’s hat-trick goal. Kane tracked back to win the ball in Burnley’s half, Ben Davies found Alli on the outside of the area and two touches later, Kane had converted his 36th Premier League goal of the calendar year. He has one game left to claim Alan Shearer’s record for his own outright.
But even in scoring three goals, Kane was overshadowed – he might be the most rebellious of modern day footballers, but he is the lead happy to let supporting actors like Alli take centre stage. If Kane is the well-mannered school prefect, Alli is the one who sits at the back of the class throwing pencils and making fart noises. It is impossible to even imagine opposition fans branding Kane a ‘w*nker’, or even booing him. The differences in his and Alli’s character and playing style really do suggest that opposites attract.
Kane was the difference on Saturday, but Alli, as he often is, was Tottenham’s lightning rod. It was he who was resoundly booed upon his late substitution, it was he who the pundits discussed at half-time, and it will likely be Alli who Sean Dyche reserves much of his disgruntled post-match musings for.
Not that Alli, Kane or Mauricio Pochettino will mind. The Tottenham manager has not moved from his stance on the under-performing Alli, insisting that he can play him back into form instead of resting or dropping him. That no player created more chances (3) suggests that the light at the end of the tunnel might soon become more than a speck.
Most impressive about Kane’s 20-goal season thus far is that his partner in crime has been little more than a passenger. His and Alli’s previous telepathic understanding has been almost completely absent, but this was the latter’s fourth Premier League assist of the season: three have been for Kane.
If Pochettino can harness their relationship once more, Tottenham have a chance of salvaging something from this season. With Kane as the goalscoring hero and Alli as the pantomime villain, they make a powerful and potent combination.
Matt SteadMolly Miller, whose Munsee name is Wasalaangweew (Bright Star), is a clan mother among the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians. Historically, clan mothers were decision makers in the community. They represented the will of the people in selecting chiefs and other important decisions. As a clan mother and member of the Language and Culture Committee, today, Molly works to revitalize the Mohican language, culture, and community. Mohican language is taught in the Bowler School District two days a week, which is where the majority of the students from the community attend school. The tribe also holds language classes at the Mohican Family Center on the reservation.
Culture to Molly means trying to live the way of the seven teachings, with respect being the number one value. The others are honesty, love, bravery, humility, truth, and wisdom. Molly is focusing on wisdom, because she believes this is something she can offer the younger members in her community. She wants to teach them the good things of life and help them to make healthy and wise choices in their own lives. Molly sees her role as a clan mother as an important part of her identity and daily routine. Whenever she has the chance, she greets and hugs the youth in her community. This simple gesture, Molly believes, will help her community heal. In this way, she makes sure to hug or speak with any young person she encounters. Molly has also constructed a lodge in her yard for teaching, naming and talking circles.
When she completes her master’s degree in community counseling, Molly plans to combine this formal education with Native teachings to work as a counselor with Native people. She will use the Historical Trauma Theory, which holds that Native people are still deeply wounded by what happened to their ancestors, particularly the Indian boarding school experience of the elders. In the case of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans, the damage started in the early 1600’s when their community originally was in the present day New England area. European contact caused immense changes to their way of life, including dependence on trade goods and alcohol. Loss of land, language, and traditional ways were accompanied by the loss of many people to diseases and wars. Then Indian boarding schools finished the job by taking away traditional parenting skills and Native ways.
These boarding schools, often called Indian Schools, were actually intended to destroy Native cultures, identity, and languages. In order to assimilate children into European-American culture, they were forced to speak English, cut their hair, wear uniforms and convert to Christianity. Parents often refused to enroll their children and hid them from government agents, but by 1900 almost all Native children had been taken from their homes. Some were able to visit home on weekends or during the summer, but many remained in these boarding schools and did not see their parents or families for years, if at all.
The Mohican Nation is a sovereign nation with a reservation in northeastern Wisconsin; the Stockbridge-Munsee Community is located on this reservation, although enrolled tribal members live in other parts of Wisconsin, the United States and the world. During the early 1800’s, Mohicans including the Stockbridge band were forced to give up their lands in what is now New York and move many times, eventually settling in Wisconsin on land purchased from the Menominee and HoChunk. The Munsee band of Delaware Indians faced the same fate, and they joined to form Stockbridge-Munsee. Today they live on 22,139 acres in Shawano County.Intel, added the Celeron N2830, the first of the Bay-Trail-M SoC (System on Chip) to the official price list, last week. However it has now updated the official price list with 2 more SKUs. Not only that but they have also revealed more information about the Celeron N2830
Intel Updates Pre-Order Price List for Bay Trail-M SKUS – Further Details Celeron N2830
The N2830 is basically a successor of the N2820 and apparently it only had improved CPU and GPU clock speeds. However intel released a few more details on the processor this week. Intel revealed that the N2830 has two new features, mentioning in the same breath the N2930 and Pentium 3530. Now the N2830 basically has 2 cores which share between them 1 MB of L3 Cache. The N2830 is clocked at 2.16 Ghz and has burst up to 2.41 Ghz. Now these are about the same as the N2820 with a margin of around 10 Mhz. Now here are the things Intel pointed out:
The N2830 Features Newer Core Stepping
The N2830 features support for DDR3L-1333 memory
The N2830 has Quick Sync Technology enabled.
However on the other hand the Celeron N2930 and Pentium 3530 are both Quad Cores. They are clocked at 1.83 Ghz (2.16 Ghz max) and 2.16 Ghz (2.58 Ghz max) respectively and as nomenclature would dictate, are very similar to the N2920 and N3520 SKUs. Now interestingly compared to the predecessors the burst frequency has been increased by 160 Mhz which is quite significant in the Celeron and Pentium series. The N3530 has a higher GPU baseclock by 42 Mhz while the N2930 supports DDR3L-1333 memory. Both support Quick Sync Tech. TDP of these SoCs is 7.5 W throughout the lineup.
Model Cores /
Threads Base / burst
frequency L2
cache GPU
Frequency Memory TDP Price Celeron N2820 2 / 2 2.13 / 2.39 GHz 1 MB 311 / 756 MHz DDR3L-1066 7.5W $132 Celeron N2830 2 / 2 2.16 / 2.41 GHz 1 MB 313 / 750 MHz DDR3L-1333 7.5W $107 Celeron N2920 4 / 4 1.86 / 2 GHz 2 MB 311 / 844 MHz DDR3L-1066 7.5W $132 Celeron N2930 4 / 4 1.83 / 2.16 GHz 2 MB 313 / 854 MHz DDR3L-1333 7.5W $107 Pentium N3520 4 / 4 2.17 / 2.42 GHz 2 MB 313 / 854 MHz DDR3L-1333 7.5W $180 Pentium N3530 4 / 4 2.16 / 2.58 GHz 2 MB 313 / 896 MHz DDR3L-1333 7.5W
Table courtesy of CPU-World.com
#Intel updates Bay Trail-M Price List. Reveals details about N2830. http://t.co/Qch4z23Y5E — Usman Pirzada (@usmanpirzada) March 3, 2014by Alphaville Herald on 15/09/09 at 8:43 pm
Lawsuit seeks injunction against Linden Research to prevent intellectual property rights infringement in Second Life
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
Shannon Grei and Kevin Aldermann's Eros LLC have filed a complaint in US District Court in Northern California against Linden Reseach alleging "Linden Lab, with knowing and conscious intent to do so, profits in multiple ways and at multiple stages from the illegal conduct" and asks for an injunction to halt the activity. Eros LLC markets a line of sex animations for the virtual world of Second Life, and has built a successful business – but the accumulated frustrations with the weak enforcement of intellectual property rights on the part of Linden Lab seem to have reached the breaking point.
When the Herald contacted Stroker Serpentine for comment, Mr. Serpentine (Kevin Aldermann in real life) said, "This is not about financialgain. Seldom do class actions result in substantial class settlements.This is about a pattern of ambivelence over six years. We wantfundamental change in the regard to the very content and creators thatmade SL what it is today."
The complaint begins:
"Plaintiffs Eros, LLC (“Eros”) and Shannon Grei, d/b/a Nomine (“Grei”) (collectively, “Plaintiffs”), bring this class action complaint against Defendants Linden Research, Inc. and Linden Research International, Inc. (collectively, “Linden Lab” or “Defendant”), headquartered in San Francisco, California, for its practice of violating the real-world intellectual property rights of proprietors of virtual content within the Second Life virtual world (“Second Life”), which Linden Lab owns and operates."
The illegal conduct alleged includes
"directly and secondarily violated the intellectual property rights of Plaintiffs and other Second Life proprietors. Linden Lab directly and secondarily infringes the trademark of Plaintiff Eros by using Eros’s mark to sell infringing virtual goods within Second Life and by providing the tools to other infringing Second Life users. Linden Lab directly and secondarily violates the copyrights of Plaintiff
Grei by reproducing and displaying her copyrighted works within Second Life, and by materially contributing to and supervising the infringing conduct of others within Second Life."
We will have much more on this breaking story once we finished reading the complaint – if Stroker is as successful with this legal action as he has been with legal actions in the past, the Lindens may have their hands full.This morning in NYC international pranksters The Yes Men and The Anti-Advertising Agency printed and distributed thousands of copies of a fake version of the New York Times dated July 4, 2009 with the headline “Iraq War Ends”. They recruited volunteers through the website Because We Want It to distribute the fake paper.
Gawaker describes how the prank came together and here’s the reaction from the New York Times. There is also an online version of the fake paper, including a PDF.
UPDATE 1: Noneck has a few copies of the fake NYT that he is selling on eBay.
UPDATE 2: Here’s a CNN interview with Andy Bichlbaum (The Yes Men) and Steve Lambert (Anti-Advertising Agency).
UPDATE 3: De Beers Threatens Legal Action Against Fake New York TimesRotational Stability
Time for an experiment! Find a book and secure it shut using tape or a rubber band. Now experiment with spinning the book while tossing it into the air. You’ll notice that when the book is spun about its longest or shortest axis it rotates stably, but when spun about its intermediate-length axis it quickly wobbles out of control.
Every rigid body has three special, or principal axes about which it can rotate. For a rectangular prism — like the book in our experiment — the principal axes run parallel to the shortest, intermediate-length, and longest edges, each going through the prism’s center of mass. These axes have the highest, intermediate, and lowest moments of inertia, respectively.
When the book is tossed into the air and spun, either about its shortest or longest principal axis, it continues to rotate about that axis forever (or until it hits the floor). For these axes, this indefinite, stable rotation occurs even when the axis of rotation is slightly perturbed.
When spun about its intermediate principal axis, though, the book also continues to rotate about that axis indefinitely, but only if the axis of rotation is exactly in the same direction as the intermediate principal axis. In this case, even the slightest perturbation causes the book to wobble out of control.
The first simulation above shows a rotation about the unstable intermediate axis, where a slight perturbation causes the book to wobble out of control. The second and third simulations show rotations about the two stable axes.
Unfortunately, as far as my understanding goes, there’s no intuitive, non-mathematical explanation as to why rotations about the intermediate principal axis are unstable. If you’re interested, you can find the stability analysis here.
Mathematica code posted here.I was glad to see that the Congressional Baseball Game went on as planned last night. They didn’t let some left-wing lunatic ruin it by trying to kill GOP congressmen for disagreeing with him. It was a show of unity. It was a beautiful display of the things that bring us together, no matter what sets us apart from each other. It was American AF.
So of course, Democrats had to try to ruin it.
Stephen Dinan, Washington Times:
Dozens of congressional staffers erupted into boos, jeers and even vulgar gesticulations Thursday when President Trump appeared in a video at the Congressional Baseball Game at Nationals Park…
One man shouted an expletive at the video screen as Mr. Trump was telling the fans: “We are showing the world we will not be intimidated by threats.”
This while Rep. Steve Scalise is still fighting for his life |
for Analytics, Big Data, Data Science, Data Mining, and Machine Learning. Gregory is a co-founder of KDD (Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, the top research conference in the field) and a co-founder and past chair of ACM SIGKDD, the professional association for Data Mining and Data Science.
See also http://www.kdnuggets.com/gps.html or Gregory's Wikipedia page.
Michael Li founded The Data Incubator, a New York-based training program that turns talented PhDs from academia into workplace-ready data scientists and quants. The program is free to Fellows, employers engage with the Incubator as hiring partners.
Previously, he worked as a data scientist (Foursquare), Wall Street quant (D.E. Shaw, J.P. Morgan), and a rocket scientist (NASA). He completed his PhD at Princeton as a Hertz fellow and read Part III Maths at Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. At Foursquare, Michael discovered that his favorite part of the job was teaching and mentoring smart people about data science. He decided to build a startup to focus on what he really loves.
Michael lives in New York, where he enjoys the Opera, rock climbing, and attending geeky data science events.Sprengisandur is an ancient, unpaved road veering across the rugged, volcano-strewn central highlands of Iceland. Twelve centuries ago, the 125 mile-long windswept pass, whose name derives from sprengya, the Icelandic verb for riding a horse to its death, was one of the routes by which residents made the long trek to Althing, the midsummer parliament.
Today, the scenic road, now traversed by tourist caravans, is at the nexus of two disparate agendas which have emerged on the fast-changing island, as it continues to recover from the great Icelandic crash of 2008.
On one side, the center-right government and Landsvirkjun, the National Power Company of Iceland, appear anxious to strengthen Iceland’s already overloaded energy grid to both expand the industrial sector and make the country an energy exporter.
On the other, a surging environmentalist movement led by Björk, the “queen of Icelandic music,” wants to halt this trend, which has already seen the construction of four smelting factories, and turn the highlands, one of Europe’s largest remaining wilderness areas, into a national park.
Green land vs green energy
“Iceland currently has the largest untouched area of nature in Europe,” said Björk at a packed press conference in Reykjavik last month. “The government has plans to build over 50 dams and power plants,” the musician said, referring to the number of possible sites considered under the multi-phase energy master plan drawn up by Landsvirkjun and approved by Parliament.
In addition to the proposed power line at Sprengisandur, green-minded Icelanders were also alarmed by a British-Icelandic joint task force, announced in October, to explore building an undersea cable linking the two countries' power grids.
The so-called Icelink, which theoretically would ultimately supply 10 percent of Britain’s electricity needs, was enthusiastically received in energy-parched Britain. However preservationists in Iceland see both the overhead power voltage line at Sprengisandur and the envisioned undersea link to Scotland as harbingers of the same environmental doom.
“The Sprengisandur overhead power line is being proposed independent of the sea cable to Scotland,” concedes Gudmundur Ingi Gudbrandsson, managing director of the Icelandic Environment Association, a nongovernmental organization. “However if the sea cable would be constructed, the Sprengisandur power line would need to be strengthened.”
That is why, Mr. Gudbrandsson says, he and his allies have decided to draw the line at Sprengisandur.
A considerable number of Icelanders appear to agree. According to a new Gallup poll, 60 percent of respondents support the idea of a highlands park, an increase from 2011, with only 12.5 percent opposed. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 Icelanders, close to 15 percent of the population, have affixed their signatures to an IEA-sponsored petition to create the park.
The one thing that preservationists don’t want to see is more heavy metal factories like the giant Alcoa smelter at Kárahnjúkar, in the east of the country, for which several large rivers were diverted and a large reservoir covering a 20-square-mile area was created.
An overreaction?
For its part, the government contends that preservationists’ concerns are, at the least, premature.
“First, nothing has been decided by the government as [Björk] claimed," Elin Arnadottir, the minister of Industry and Commerce, told the Monitor. “Second, the government has no plans to build 50 dams as was stated.”
Ms. Arnodottir points out that the proposed power line must first undergo an environmental impact assessment (EIA) before it proceeds any further, and that the government is not trying to push the project “down the throat of the country,” as Andri Magnason, the noted Icelandic writer, charged.
As far as the so-called Icelink is concerned, the minister struck a cautious note, noting that “certain aspects of this matter [have to be analyzed] before a decision [can] be made on whether to embark upon such a project or not.”
But some believe that the government is perhaps not so secretly pushing its own agenda.
“We can’t afford to wait and see. That’s what we did at Kárahnjúkar,” says Mr. Magnason, who took leave from his imaginative work to write "Dreamland: Self-Help for Frightened Nation," in which he depicts the damage to the environment that results from damming rivers to power aluminum smelters like the one at Kárahnjúkar. “Look what happened – it’s a mess.”
“I think that everyone understands and wants to encourage the use of renewable resources,” says Gudbrandsson, who points to the fact that heavy industry now absorbs 77 percent of Iceland’s primary energy. “In the Icelandic context, that has already been done to a great extent, not only for Icelanders, but to fuel multinational companies.”
“This means that a lot of beauty has been taken away from Iceland,” he says. “We simply believe that we can’t lose anymore and that this is a good time to stop.”
A matter of scale
Gylfi Magnusson, an economist at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, points out that what's bad for Iceland environmentally may still be good on the global scale.
"Iceland’s energy sources do not involve any burning of fossil fuel," he notes. "Expanding their use and hopefully reducing the world’s reliance on fossil fuels to some, albeit very small, degree instead is thus a positive step from the viewpoint of fighting global warming."
And to be sure, not all Icelanders agree with the Björk-IEA agenda. “There is a romanticized view that the interior is like the heart of the country and the core of our identity,” says Egill Helgason, a prominent journalist and former talk show host. “This is actually quite a recent phenomenon. Previously most Icelanders would have said that language and literature were our cultural mainstays.”
In response, environmentalists say, the case against expansion of Iceland’s energy industry is not entirely romantic.
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Further damming or digging to create more geothermal or hydroelectric plants, they say, will inevitably hurt Iceland’s booming tourist industry – the country's largest – which has made the island’s “unspoiled beauty” its principal selling point. More than 1 million tourists visited Iceland in 2014, up 33 percent from the 2013, drawn in part by images of the country’s “pure” environment.
Either way, says Professor Magnusson, "it is quite important for Icelandic society to reach a reasonable compromise on how far to go in expanding the energy sector so that the environment is spared to a large extent."Unlike bacteria, humans have big, complex cells, packed with nuclei containing DNA and mitochondria that produce energy. All so-called eukaryotes share our cellular complexity: animals, plants, fungi, even single-celled protozoans like amoebae.
Scientists estimate that the first eukaryotes evolved about 2 billion years ago, in one of the greatest transitions in the history of life. But there is little evidence of this momentous event, no missing link that helps researchers trace the evolution of life from simple microbes to eukaryotes..
On Wednesday, a team of scientists announced the discovery of just such a transitional form. At the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, they found microbes that have many — but not all — of the features previously only found in eukaryotes. These microbes may show us what the progenitors of complex cellular organisms looked like.
“This is a genuine breakthrough,” said Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information who was not involved in the research. “It’s almost too good to be true.”Julian Assange
International scandals—such as the one precipitated by this week’s WikiLeaks cable dump—serve us by illustrating how our governments work. Better than any civics textbook, revisionist history, political speech, bumper sticker, or five-part investigative series, an international scandal unmasks presidents and kings, military commanders and buck privates, cabinet secretaries and diplomats, corporate leaders and bankers, and arms-makers and arms-merchants as the bunglers, liars, and double-dealers they are.
The recent WikiLeaks release, for example, shows the low regard U.S. secretaries of state hold for international treaties that bar spying at the United Nations. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, systematically and serially violated those treaties to gain an incremental upper hand. And they did it in writing! That Clinton now decries Julian Assange’s truth-telling as an “attack” on America but excuses her cavalier approach to treaty violation tells you all you need to know about U.S. diplomacy.
As WikiLeaks proved last summer, the U.S. military lied about not keeping body counts in Iraq, even though the press asked for the information a million times. Indeed, the history of scandal in America is the history of institutions and individuals routinely surpassing our darkest assumptions of their perfidy.
Whenever scandal rears its head—Charles Rangel’s financial dealings, the subprime crash, the Valerie Plame affair, Jack Abramoff and Randy Cunningham’s crimes, Bernie Kerik’s indiscretions, water-boarding, Ted Stevens’ convictions, the presidential pardon of Marc Rich, the guilty pleas of Webster Hubbell, the Monica Lewinsky thing, the Iran-contra scandal, the Iran-contra pardons, the savings-and-loan fiasco, BCCI, and so on—we’re hammered by how completely base and corrupt our government really is. *
We shouldn’t be surprised by the recurrence of scandals, but, of course, we always are. Why is that? Is it because when scandal rips up the turf, revealing the vile creepy-crawlies thrashing and scurrying about, we’re glad when authority intervenes to quickly tamp the grass back down and re-establish our pastoral innocence with bland assurances that the grubby malfeasants are mere outliers and one-offs who will be punished? Is it because our schooling has left us hopelessly naïve about how the world works? Or do we just fail to pay attention?
Information conduits like Julian Assange shock us out of that complacency. Oh, sure, he’s a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies. And he often acts without completely thinking through every repercussion of his actions. But if you want to dismiss him just because he’s a seething jerk, there are about 2,000 journalists I’d like you to meet.
The idea of WikiLeaks is scarier than anything the organization has leaked or anything Assange has done because it restores our distrust in the institutions that control our lives. It reminds people that at any given time, a criminal dossier worth exposing is squirreled away in a database someplace in the Pentagon or at Foggy Bottom. Assange’s next stop appears to be Wall Street. According to the New York Times’ DealBook, WikiLeaks has targeted Bank of America. Assange foreshadowed this scoop by telling Computerworldin 2009 of the five gigabytes of data he’d acquired from a B of A executive’s hard drive; this month he told Forbesof an “ecosystem of corruption” he hopes to uncover. Today, he reiterated his intention to take on banks in an interview with Time.
As Assange navigates from military and diplomatic exposés to financial ones this year, his Wall Street targets won’t be able to shield their incompetence and misconduct with lip music about how he has damaged national security and violated the Espionage Act of 1917 and deserves capital punishment. But I’m sure they’ll invoke trade secrets, copyright, privacy, or whatever other legal window dressing they find convenient. Rather than defending their behavior, they’ll imitate Clinton and assail Assange’s methods and practices.
As the Economistput it yesterday, “secrecy is necessary for national security and effective diplomacy.” But it “is also inevitable that the prerogative of secrecy will be used to hide the misdeeds of the permanent state and its privileged agents.”
Assange and WikiLeaks, while not perfect, have punctured the prerogative of secrecy with their recent revelations. The untold story is that while doing the United States’ allies, adversaries, and enemies a favor with his leaks, he’s doing the United States the biggest favor by holding it accountable. As I.F. Stone put it, “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”
Slate V: Julian Assange
******
What am I smoking? Send your diagnosis to [email protected]. Drop Twitter for feed into your bong. (E-mail may be quoted by name in “The Fray,” Slate’s readers’ forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)
Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a “Press Box” correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word distrust in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to [email protected].
Correction, Dec. 1, 2010: This article originally misspelled Monica Lewinsky’s last name. ( Return to the corrected sentence.)
Like Slate on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.DALLAS (105.3 THE FAN) — Middle linebacker Rolando McClain, fighting through a groin injury that has kept him from practice all week, returned to the Valley Ranch field on Friday, as expected…presumably with his “gun out of its holster.”
That’s Jerry Jones vernacular for the leadership McClain is bringing to the 4-1 Cowboys, who play Sunday in Seattle against the defending-champ Seahawks.
“(McClain) is going to play,” Jones told 105.3 The Fan’s G-Bag Nation. “We need him, obviously. He’s a leader. I know last week at practice … he undressed one of our young receivers out there and just kind of stuck his gun back in his holster or he blew the smoke off the end, stuck his gun back in the holster. Just walked on back up to the line of scrimmage, ‘Let’s go!’ Everybody’s eyes got big.
“He said, ‘Now, bring Houston on! Let’s go!'”
Dallas beat Houston in OT last Sunday and understands its challenge against a loaded Seahawks team, but the Cowboys have been convinced by McClain — the previously troubled 25-year-old who has retired from the NFL twice since being a No. 8 overall pick by the Raiders a few years ago — that he’s deserving of a contract beyond his present cheap $700,000 one-year deal.
“He’s can be a difference-maker,” Jones said. “Of course, you’ve got to back it up, but his body language, just his approach to the thing is real inspirational to the team.”
(©2014 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
Latest Sports:A long-time cryptoenthusiast and a programmer from Luxemburg claims to have survived mostly on bitcoins for the first half of the year.
According to a blog post, Felix, a 27-year-old programmer from Luxembourg, is travelling around the world since 1 January, 2015.
“My challenge basically boils down to 3 simple rules:
a) Use Bitcoin whenever possible to pay for food, accommodation and travel.
b) Never use a debit/credit card or ATM.
c) Limited usage of cash in form of local currency is allowed, but can only be obtained by trading Bitcoin with local people.”
Felix started his journey in Berlin and made his first stop in Prague, where he was able to get lodging, food and shopping for bitcoins. He also visited SatoshiLabs and several bitcoin event.
After this date something went wrong –and Felix did not post anything until 22 May, when he managed to buy paragliding tour in Turkey with bitcoins. It is not clear where he is now and in which country he travels using his bitcoins.
The programmer from Luxembourg is not the first one who tries to survive on bitcoins for some time. Earlier this year, CoinFox wrote about another cryptoenthusiast, Jack Nickogosian from Coinify, who tried to survive for a month in Denmark using only bitcoins.
During the challenge, Jack lost some kilos, but managed to reach his aim with the help of his friends. Jack had to buy food from a small number of available shops, avoid public transport and explain Bitcoin to many people who did not know about it.
“I can definitely survive on Bitcoin, but it was different from my normal lifestyle, due to the things I had to omit this month,” said the man after he had completed the challenge.
Roman KorizkySupport for this video player will be discontinued soon.
Read in a while
The provisional calendar for next year’s MotoGP™ World Championship has been released.
MotoGP’s provisional 2016 calendar is as follows:
Round Date Grand Prix Venue 1 20/03 Qatar Losail International Circuit 2 03/04 Argentina Termas de Río Hondo 3 10/04 Americas Circuit Of The Americas 4 24/04 Spain Jerez de la Frontera * 5 08/05 France Le Mans 6 22/05 Italy Mugello 7 05/06 Catalunya Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya 8 26/06 Netherlands TT Assen 9 10/07 Germany Sachsenring 10 17/07 Great Britain Silverstone 11 14/08 Austria Red Bull Ring 12 21/08 Czech Republic Brno * 13 11/09 San Marino e della Riviera di Rimini Misano 14 25/09 Aragon MotorLand Aragon 15 09/10 Malaysia Sepang International Circuit 16 16/10 Japan Twin Ring Motegi 17 23/10 Australia Phillip Island 18 06/11 Valencia Comunitat Valenciana - Ricardo Tormo
* Subject to contractArticle VI, clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution requires all senators and representatives to take an oath of office. This oath requires them to swear allegiance to the Constitution. Rep. Calvert's (R-Calif.) proposed amendment to a 2016 spending bill allowing the Confederate flag to be displayed on National Park Service land violates this oath and encourages others to support an insurrectionist government, the Confederate States of America.
Over one hundred and fifty years ago, my family led the insurrection. My great-great-great grandfather, Howell Cobb, was the president of the Provisional Confederate Congress. His brother, Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb, is credited with writing the Confederate Constitution. Their cousin, General Henry Benning, for whom a Georgia fort is named, led Confederate troops into battle against the Union.
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They led the insurrection because my family didn't want to give up their slaves. The war had nothing to do with state's rights. It was all about slavery and the money it brought to the family. What they did was wrong and I'm appalled that Calvert wants to recognize them and other Confederate soldiers who fought to enslave African-Americans.
The Republican Party of Lincoln made my family pay for their actions. General Sherman torched Grandpa Cobb's plantation. He told his soldiers "to spare nothing." General Sherman ordered this action because my great-great-great grand-father was an insurrectionist who turned his back on the United States.
Howell Cobb took the same oath of office as Calvert. From 1849-1851, he was the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. He swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States when he assumed this office. He then took a second oath when he became Secretary of Treasury for President Buchanan. Again, he swore to uphold the Constitution.
Instead of encouraging Congress to vote for the Confederate flag, Calvert should be advocating on behalf of the U.S. flag and the men and women who have died to defend it. They took the same oath of office to defend the U.S. Constitution. Placing the Confederate flag next to them violates their oath and the one Congress members took at the beginning of this session.
Krepp, a former chief counsel for the U.S. Maritime Administration, is the great-great-great granddaughter of Howell Cobb, one of the founders of the Confederacy and, as president of the Provisional Confederate Congress, the Confederate head of state until Jefferson Davis took office.× ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Harry Potter’ composer John Williams to conduct Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. – John Williams, the man behind some of the most iconic movie scores, is coming to the Circle City next year for a special concert experience.
The legendary composer and conductor will lead the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in a program of some of his most popular film music.
Williams has composed music and served as music director for over 100 films, including “Jurassic Park,” “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” three “Harry Potter” films and the “Star Wars” franchise.
Williams is donating his time and talent as a gift to the organization. All proceeds from the concert will directly benefit the musicians and artistic endeavors of the hometown orchestra.
“We are so grateful to have the trust and respect of Maestro Williams,” said Principal Pops Conductor Jack Everly. “His gracious offer and appearance at our Hilbert Circle Theater home is simply extraordinary.”
The show is set for 6 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 11, 2018. Tickets go on sale to the public at 10 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 11. A presale is available for ISO subscribers and donors ($500 and above) beginning at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 6.
For more information, click here or call the ISO Box Office at 317-639-4300.Gavin Wilkinson:14 People Who Made a Difference in 2014
Wilkinson has been involved with the Timbers for a number of years, dating back to the club’s pre-MLS days. He played for and coached the timbers before being named director of the club’s expansion into MLS.
He’s also vertically integrated the club’s talent acquisition program. The Timbers have an under-23 team, along with u-18 and u-16 teams in its academy.
Wilkinson, however, isn’t resting on his laurels and waiting for talent to roll in — he went out and got some big name-signings this offseason, including Ghanaian Goalkeeper Adam Michael Kwarasey.
The club also signed Jamaican Alvas Powell and Brazilian Defender JeAnderson.
Related Slideshow: 14 People Who Made a Difference in 2014
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With soccer’s popularity in Portland higher than ever, Wilkinson is solidifying the Timbers’ spot as a glocal club by signing big-ticket players.Each week, our resident basketball analysts will discuss some of the hottest topics involving the Sixers.
Running the Give and Go are CSNPhilly.com Sixers insider Jessica Camerato, CSNPhilly.com producer/reporter Matt Haughton, and CSNPhilly.com producer/reporter Paul Hudrick.
This week, we'll take a stab at the Sixers' opening night roster.
Camerato
The Sixers' roster is overloaded as it stands in late August. Decisions and moves will have to be made by opening night to narrow down and balance out the roster. Let’s break down the potential opening night outlook (15 players, active and inactive) as the team is today. Of course, the roster could look completely different if the Sixers were to make a trade to clear up their logjam of bigs in the frontcourt.
There are toss-up scenarios with overlaps. First off, Richaun Holmes and Carl Landry, the second-year player and the veteran. They fill similar needs and often were alternated on the court. Landry’s experience gives him the edge on the active roster with Holmes beginning on the inactive list.
What was once a position of need is now one of abundance. The Sixers signed two true point guards this offseason in Jerryd Bayless and Sergio Rodriguez. Ben Simmons plays point-forward and will assume floor general responsibilities during the season. Even if he is not slotted into the one-spot specifically, Simmons often will be running the court. This could leave T.J. McConnell as the odd man out. The undrafted McConnell was the underdog story of last season. He earned his minutes by grinding it out on each possession and garnered high praise from Brown, who frequently referred to him as a “marine.” The Sixers' needs are different this season at the point guard position, though, with backcourt versatility highly valued. During summer league, Brown said, “We’ve got Sergio and T.J. as who you’d stamp off on and say that’s a true point guard.” Out of the two, Rodriguez has the edge over McConnell.
Point guard Kendall Marshall’s contract is non-guaranteed for next season ($2.04 million). Given his lack of playing time last season and the additions at his position, it seems unlikely he will be back with the Sixers.
Shawn Long, Brandon Paul and James Webb III participated in the Sixers' summer league and signed non-guaranteed deals. They are fits for the Sixers' NBA Development League affiliate, the Delaware 87ers.
Active
Jerryd Bayless, PG/SG
Robert Covington, G/F
Joel Embiid, F/C
Jerami Grant, F
Gerald Henderson, G/F
Carl Landry, PF
Nerlens Noel, F/C
Jahlil Okafor, F/C
Sergio Rodriguez, PG
Dario Saric, F
Ben Simmons, F
Nik Stauskas, SG
Inactive
Hollis Thompson, SG
Richaun Holmes, F/C
Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot, G/F
Haughton
For the first time during his tenure as Sixers head coach, Brown will make roster decisions primarily based on ability instead of injuries, reaching the salary cap floor, etc.
With that being said, there should be only a couple tough decisions to make regarding the final 15 that make the team.
Point guard slots will go to Bayless, Rodriguez and McConnell. Marshall's status remains up in the air. However, the Sixers signed Bayless and Rodriguez as free agents for a reason and McConnell has again proven worthy of a spot.
The wing is where things start to get a little interesting. Covington and Grant are locks at small forward, but there will be five shooting guards in camp battling it out. Henderson certainly gets a nod after the Sixers went after him in free agency. I also believe that Stauskas will get another season to prove his worth. That leaves Thompson, Luwawu-Cabarrot and Paul. I believe Thompson, with his ability as a spot-up shooter on a team stacked with big men, will get an opportunity to stay for the final year of his contract. First-round pick Luwawu-Cabarrot will also get a spot and spend the season developing in the D-League, while Paul will be shown the door.
The Sixers know they have a loaded frontcourt, but that also means they understand not everyone can stick around. No. 1 overall pick Simmons, Saric, Noel, Okafor and Embiid are no-brainers for the final roster. The final spot all comes down to how the Sixers feel about their leadership. If they think new veterans Bayless, Henderson and Rodriguez can handle the job, then Holmes gets to stick around. If not, then Landry will return to give the young bigs a seasoned vet to lean on. In the end, Landry should get the call. Holmes is a nice find as a second-rounder, but with the potential star power on the Sixers' frontline, he would just be wasting away on the bench with no real potential of significant playing time.
Active
Jerryd Bayless, PG/SG
Robert Covington, G/F
Joel Embiid, F/C
Jerami Grant, F
Gerald Henderson, G/F
T.J. McConnell, PG
Nerlens Noel, F/C
Jahlil Okafor, F/C
Sergio Rodriguez, PG
Dario Saric, F
Ben Simmons, F
Nik Stauskas, SG
Inactive
Hollis Thompson, SG
Carl Landry, PF
Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot, G/F
Hudrick
If Stauskas can ever figure out how to make his shot fall consistently in NBA games, he'd be an excellent fit on this team. That's the skill that can separate him from the other guards on the roster. If he can't, then his minutes will slip. The Sixers have legitimate NBA players in their frontcourt with the free-agent additions of Bayless, Henderson and Rodriguez. Stauskas will have to perform or take a seat.
I don't think Thompson makes the club this year. Thompson can shoot the basketball, a skill this team certainly lacks. But Thompson often looks lost on defense and isn't a great ball handler. Not that Stauskas will be making any All-Defensive teams any time soon, but Stauskas' contract is guaranteed for $3 million. Thompson's is just a shade over $1 million. Brown may like Thompson, but he also likes Stauskas, at one point comparing him to Manu Ginobli (he said it, not me). Thompson is the odd man out.
Holmes misses out simply because of the numbers. He'll get a ton of minutes with the 87ers down in the D-League. Sure, Holmes is another big man, but I'd hold on to him. If the Sixers move a big (or two) having a player like Holmes in the system could come in handy. I also like his ability to play in an uptempo style, running the floor and hitting the occasional jumper.
I can't see a scenario where the Sixers don't keep McConnell in some capacity. Bryan Colangeo has said he'll utilize the D-League more than the team has in years past. Think of it like baseball: McConnell is a depth point guard in the "minors," ready to join the big club in case of injury while still getting valuable playing time in Delaware.
For the record, I'm saddened that I can't add Luwawu-Cabarrot to the active roster, but we have to be realistic. I thought he showed chemistry with Simmons in summer league action, moving well without the ball and hitting the occasional spot-up three, but he needs the minutes in the D-League.
Active
Jerryd Bayless, PG/SG
Robert Covington, G/F
Joel Embiid, PF/C
Jerami Grant, F
Gerald Henderson, G/F
Carl Landry, PF
Nerlens Noel, PF/C
Jahlil Okafor, PF/C
Sergio Rodriguez, PG
Dario Saric, F
Ben Simmons, F
Nik Stauskas, SG
Inactive
T.J. McConnell, PG
Richaun Holmes, PF/C
Timothe Luwawu-Cabbarot, G/F (begrudgingly)The Nintendo Switch looks amazing. The entire console appears to have been shrunken down to the size of the Wii U’s GamePad controller. And while the Switch doesn’t come out until next year, Hackaday seems to have found the next best thing in Sudomod forum user banjokazooie’s mod that turns an old Wii U GamePad into a fully functional standalone console.
The hack turns a broken Wii U GamePad into a portable console
The Wii U GamePad is meant to be a controller for the Wii U with the feature to use it as a display for the console and play without using a TV — but at the end of the day, all of the actual processing is still taking place over at the console. banjokazooie’s hack changes that, by overhauling a broken Wii U GamePad with a Raspberry Pi 3, a 6.5-inch HDMI display, and some extra batteries to convert the damaged controller into a portable emulator that runs RetroPie. The only downside — aside from the rather high level of technical skill you’d need to build your own — is that the GamePad-turned-console only gets about three hours of battery life on a charge.
Still, looking at the build process, and considering the amount of hardware that banjokazooie has managed to fit into the GamePad’s relatively small form factor, the whole thing really is quite an impressive hack. And just think: if a Raspberry Pi-powered emulator machine looks this good, just imagine what a dedicated, Nintendo-built portable console in this form factor could do.The arc of the American sitcom bends inward. Every great TV comedy, from M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Cheers and Seinfeld, is about a ragtag group of outsiders who find surprising solace and companionship inside a bubble of their own choosing, be it a triage tent in Korea, a newsroom, a bar, or their own sociopathic self-involvement. These are all family shows, whether the characters are united by blood or not: Families that form out of love and necessity. Families that come together not to help make sense of the the universe, but as a defense mechanism against it.
It’s a bunker mentality that extends to the audience as well. In 2015, TV dramas shock, challenge, and occasionally infuriate us. But TV comedies, particularly the dying breed known as network comedies, offer comfort above all else. There’s a warmth and familiarity to their rhythms. You can set your watch to the dexterous zingers. You can be lulled to sleep by the flirtatious banter. It’s funny, sure, but above all it’s stable. We’re in the midst of an incredible moment for television, able to witness such wonders as zombies devouring people and Oscar winners devouring scenery at the touch of a button. But isn’t it nice, on occasion, to take a break from all our worries? Sometimes all we really want from TV is a chance to hang for half an hour in a quiet place and be reminded that our troubles are all the same. (It helps, too, if it’s actually possible to know everybody’s name.)
Parks and Recreation, which ended a glorious seven-season run last night on NBC, was very much this sort of show. It didn’t entertain as much as it embraced. The motley crew of civil servants in the Pawnee Parks Department was steadfast and inseparable — a true family long before its members started pairing off and forming actual families of their own. (With three committed couples out of a 10-person cast, Parks was more devoted to intramarriage than most cults.) They clung together in the face of government obstruction, romantic folly, and sex-crazed librarians. They threw parties and cleaned rivers. They buried memories and saved a town.
But what they never did was settle. Parks and Rec was utterly unique among significant sitcoms of the past 30 years because it measured happiness not in the intensity of its characters’ retreat from the world but in their wild, open embrace of it. Parks was a show about misfits coming together to do more than lick wounds and eat Chinese food. To borrow Leslie Knope’s words from last night’s finale, their mission was to fight, scratch, and claw “to make people’s lives a tiny bit better.” It was about celebrating the merits of “small, incremental change every day.” Few comedies have been so unfailingly clever about highlighting the absurdity of day-to-day existence, the frustrations caused by petty bureaucracy, hurt feelings, and the perpetual scourge of other people. But for Parks, these observations weren’t a punch line. They were a challenge.
If you think any of this was easy, you’re crazier than Ira. It’s far, far simpler to get laughs by pointing fingers at insanity from a safe distance rather than strapping on your boots and wading in. (Do you think you have something insightful to say about feminism? Try saying it in 21 minutes with room for three dozen jokes and a puppet show about the Bill of Rights set to “Party in the U.S.A.”) But Parks and Recreation was dedicated to the importance of work — hard, unglamorous, often boring work. There were forms to be filled out in duplicate, copies to be collated, envelopes to be stuffed. Parks and Recreation, spurred on by the wonky optimism of its showrunner, Michael Schur, and the indefatigable positivity of its star, Amy Poehler, made caring seem cool. Its heroes were municipal workers, nurses, and accountants. Contra Seinfeld, there was an enormous amount of learning. There was an impossible number of hugs.
NBC
Do you want proof that this attention to small-bore busywork pays off? You don’t need to point to Parks’s miraculous survival — 125 episodes on the back of an anemic audience that, by the end, numbered less than half the population of Indiana — to find it. Instead, roll back the clock to the hiatus between Parks’s stunted, six-episode first season and its expansive, 24-episode second. In a recent interview with Alan Sepinwall, Poehler insisted that she played Leslie in more or less the same way from the beginning, and, looking back, she’s right. What changed was the way the rest of the world reacted to her. Initially, secondary characters like Tom |
. The brown beads are the days when pregnancy is very unlikely, and the glow-in-the dark white beads (beads 8-19) represent her fertile days.
The women who participated in the original 2002 study relied on CycleBeads to track their cycles. Many had not previously used any family planning method. They continued to use CycleBeads for up to two additional years in the study published in 2011.
In addition to Gribble, authors of "Continued Use of the Standard Days Method" are Irit Sinai, Ph.D. and Rebecka Lundgren, M.P.H. of the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University Medical Center.
Funding for the new study was provided by the Institute for Reproductive Health and a grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
With support from USAID, more than three million women in Asia, Africa, South and Central America have been exposed to the fertility awareness-based family planning methods developed by Georgetown researchers.
CycleBeads are a patented technology owned by Georgetown University that has been licensed to Cycle Technologies for commercialization. Jennings is one of the inventors on the patent.At about 12.40pm on 2 January 1996, Timothy Jackson took a jacket from the Maison Blanche department store in New Orleans, draped it over his arm, and walked out of the store without paying for it. When he was accosted by a security guard, Jackson said: “I just needed another jacket, man.”
A few months later Jackson was convicted of shoplifting and sent to Angola prison in Louisiana. That was 16 years ago. Today he is still incarcerated in Angola, and will stay there for the rest of his natural life having been condemned to die in jail. All for the theft of a jacket, worth $159.
Jackson, 53, is one of 3,281 prisoners in America serving life sentences with no chance of parole for non-violent crimes. Some, like him, were given the most extreme punishment short of execution for shoplifting; one was condemned to die in prison for siphoning petrol from a truck; another for stealing tools from a tool shed; yet another for attempting to cash a stolen cheque.
“It has been very hard for me,” Jackson wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as part of its new report on life without parole for non-violent offenders. “I know that for my crime I had to do some time, but a life sentence for a jacket value at $159. I have met people here whose crimes are a lot badder with way less time.”
Senior officials at Angola prison refused to allow the Guardian to speak to Jackson, on grounds that it might upset his victims – even though his crime was victim-less. But his sister Loretta Lumar did speak to the Guardian. She said that the last time she talked by phone with her brother he had expressed despair. “He told me, 'Sister, this has really broke my back. I'm ready to come out.'”
Lumar said that she found her brother's sentence incomprehensible. “This doesn't make sense to me. I know people who have killed people, and they get a lesser sentence. That doesn't make sense to me right there. You can take a life and get 15 or 16 years. He takes a jacket worth $159 and will stay in jail forever. He didn't kill the jacket!”
The ACLU's report, A Living Death, chronicles the thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed by the modern phenomenon of sentencing people to die behind bars for non-violent offences. It notes that contrary to the expectation that such a harsh penalty would be meted out only to the most serious offenders, people have been caught in this brutal trap for sometimes the most petty causes.
Ronald Washington, 48, is also serving life without parole in Angola, in his case for shoplifting two Michael Jordan jerseys from a Foot Action sportswear store in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2004. Washington insisted at trial that the jerseys were reduced in a sale to $45 each – which meant that their combined value was below the $100 needed to classify the theft as a felony; the prosecution disagreed, claiming they were on sale for $60 each, thus surpassing the $100 felony minimum and opening him up to a sentence of life without parole.
“I felt as though somebody had just taken the life out of my body,” Washington wrote to the ACLU about the moment he learnt his fate. “I seriously felt rejected, neglected, stabbed right through my heart.”
He added: “It's a very lonely world, seems that nobody cares. You're never ever returning back into society. And whatever you had or established, its now useless, because you're being buried alive at slow pace.”
Louisiana, where both Washington and Jackson are held, is one of nine states where prisoners are serving life without parole sentences for non-violent offences (other states with high numbers are Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina). An overwhelming proportion of those sentences – as many as 98% in Louisiana – were mandatory: in other words judges had no discretion but to impose the swingeing penalties.
The warden of Angola prison, Burl Cain, has spoken out in forthright terms against a system that mandates punishment without any chance of rehabilitation. He told the ACLU: “It's ridiculous, because the name of our business is 'corrections' – to correct deviant behaviour. If I'm a successful warden and I do my job and we correct the deviant behaviour, then we should have a parole hearing. I need to keep predators in these big old prisons, not dying old men.”
The toll is not confined to the state level: most of those non-violent inmates held on life without parole sentences were given their punishments by the federal government. More than 2,000 of the 3,281 individuals tracked down on these sentences by the ACLU are being held in the federal system. Overall, the ACLU has calculated that taxpayers pay an additional $1.8bn to keep the prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives.
Timothy Jackson, in an old license photograph. Photograph: Jackson family
'It doesn't have to be this way'
Until the early 1970s, life without parole sentences were virtually unknown. But they exploded as part of what the ACLU calls America's “late-twentieth-century obsession with mass incarceration and extreme, inhumane penalties.”
The report's author Jennifer Turner states that today, the US is “virtually alone in its willingness to sentence non-violent offenders to die behind bars.” Life without parole for non-violent sentences has been ruled a violation of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights. The UK is one of only two countries in Europe that still metes out the penalty at all, and even then only in 49 cases of murder.
Even within America's starkly racially-charged penal system, the disparities in non-violent life without parole are stunning. About 65% of the prisoners identified nationwide by the ACLU are African American. In Louisiana, that proportion rises to 91%, including Jackson and Washington who are both black.
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2.3 million people now in custody, with the war on drugs acting as the overriding push-factor. Of the prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent offences nationwide, the ACLU estimates that almost 80% were for drug-related crimes.
Again, the offences involved can be startlingly petty. Drug cases itemised in the report include a man sentenced to die in prison for having been found in possession of a crack pipe; an offender with a bottle cap that contained a trace of heroin that was too small to measure; a prisoner arrested with a trace amount of cocaine in their pocket too tiny to see with the naked eye; a man who acted as a go-between in a sale to an undercover police officer of marijuana – street value $10.
Drugs are present in the background of Timothy Jackson's case too. He was high when he went to the Maison Blanche store, and he says that as a result he shoplifted “without thinking”. Paradoxically, like many of the other prisoners on similar penalties, the first time he was offered drug treatment was after he had already been condemned to spend the rest of his life in jail.
The theft of the $159 jacket, taken in isolation, carries today a six-month jail term. It was combined at Jackson's sentencing hearing with his previous convictions – all for non-violent crimes including a robbery in which he took $216 – that brought him under Louisiana's brutal “four-strikes” law by which it became mandatory for him to be locked up and the key thrown away.
The ACLU concludes that it does not have to be this way – suitable alternatives are readily at hand, including shorter prison terms and the provision of drug treatment and mental health services. The organisation calls on Congress, the Obama administration and state legislatures to end the imposition of mandatory life without parole for non-violent offenders and to require re-sentencing hearings for all those already caught in this judicial black hole.
A few months after Timothy Jackson was put away for life, a Louisiana appeals court reviewed the case and found it “excessive”, “inappropriate” and “a prime example of an unjust result”. Describing Jackson as a “petty thief”, the court threw out the sentence.
The following year, in 1998, the state's supreme court gave a final ruling. “This sentence is constitutionally excessive in that it is grossly out of proportion to the seriousness of the offence,” concluded Judge Bernette Johnson. However, she found that the state's four strikes law that mandates life without parole could only be overturned in rare instances, and as a result she reinstated the sentence – putting Jackson back inside his cell until the day he dies.
“I am much older and I have learned a lot about myself,” Jackson wrote to the ACLU from that cell. “I am sorry for the crime that I did, and I am a changed man.”
Jackson expressed a hope that he would be granted his freedom when he was still young enough to make something of his life and “help others”. But, barring a reform of the law, the day of his release will never come.Alex Dowsett speaks out against pill culture in the pro peloton
Alex Dowsett is against the use of painkillers in professional cycling after having once tried the prescription analgesic tramadol in a training session.
The triple British national time trial champion has also highlighted the consumption of sleeping medication at races, echoing other young riders who have suggested the sport needs to move away from an apparent ‘pill culture’.
“I tried [tramadol] once in a training time trial as I didn’t want to try anything new in a race,” the Movistar rider told CW. “I actually didn’t like it at all and I completely disagreed with it as well because of what it did.
“It gave you a hangover the next day. I went out of the blocks way too hard and just blew my doors because you can’t feel anything. You’ve gone way over your limit but your body is unaware of it,” he added.
The comments come after CW reported earlier in May on the concerns that tramadol, prescribed to treat acute pain, was being used in the professional peloton during training and races to enhance performance.
Hurt pride
“Us time triallists, like [Taylor] Phinney, like Steve Cummings, who don’t take anything for a race, we pride ourselves on how much we can hurt,” Dowsett added. “Suddenly every rider in the peloton can take this tablet to just numb the pain, and that’s exactly what it does.”
The 25-year-old said his motivation for once testing tramadol was that “it seemed like the thing to do”, though he strongly emphasised taking it a single time was enough.
“It’s when an older rider says, ‘That’s what we all do in time trials,’ and the young rider is like, ‘Oh, alright, yeah. If they do it, it must be right,’ because of the experience there.
“The thing is, when we become the old, experienced pros and the youngsters come in and say, ‘What do you do before a time trial?’ we’ll say have a double espresso, warm up and go.”
Dowsett believes that a pill culture, including sleeping medication, remains an issue in the sport.
“It’s not present in other sports to rely so heavily on that kind of thing,” he said. “While we’re now one of, if not the cleanest sport, there is still this reliance on things that come in a tablet form. In every team that I’ve been in, the doctor does the rounds at night and it’s not a case of if they want the sleeping tablet, it’s how many, or which ones.
“That’s not normal in everyday life and I think it’s bad.”painkiller debate
UCI stance on tramadol
Following last week’s story, the UCI has since responded to CW’s request for a comment on the use of tramadol in cycling. A spokesperson said in a statement: “In March 2011 the UCI formally requested that WADA [World Anti-Doping Authority] consider adding tramadol to the List of Prohibited Substances.
As a consequence of the UCI’s initial request, tramadol was added to the WADA Monitoring List in 2012. The UCI’s position on tramadol remains the same as it was in 2011.”“You don’t see a lot of Syrian psychiatrists at Yale,” Jefee-Bahloul says, laughing. “We were basically the only two.”
They had also been grappling with the same dilemma – how to use their mental health expertise to help Syrians and Syrian refugees. Both had left their homeland before the 2011 uprising to do psychiatry training in the U.S. and their distance from Syria’s descent into war weighed heavily on them.
“You read the news, but you are sitting very far away, so you feel like you can’t do much and there is a big sense of hopelessness,” Barkil-Oteo says. “Either you try not to think about it, or you occupy yourself with different things, or you try to do something.”
The pair formed a close friendship and professional collaboration that led to the launch in 2014 of the Syrian Telemental Health Network, an online platform helping mental health workers treating Syrians to access training and supervision from specialists around the world.
Mental health workers in around a dozen clinics in Syria and neighboring Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan use the U.K.-based platform to request clinical guidance from a volunteer network of expert Syrian psychiatrists based in Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East.
They can upload case information, including video and audio recordings of their patients, to the secure platform in order to obtain direction and advice from psychiatrists. The network sees about 10–15 cases a month, although the number fluctuates as clinics become overwhelmed with refugees, or have to close or relocate owing to the fighting in Syria.- Three teens have been arrested after a female victim claimed she was sexually assaulted three times in one night in Cobb County.
According to Powder Springs Police, the victim was at a house party on July 1 with Matthew Perkins, 17, of Powder Springs, Michael Anderson, 19, of Powder Springs, and Kristopher Garner, 17, of Douglasville. Investigators said the victim was sexually assaulted at that party.
Then, according to investigators, someone drove the victim to Perkins' house in Powder Springs, where she was assaulted again by two of the three suspects.
Investigators said the victim was then driven to Anderson's home, where Anderson assaulted her.
Perkins, Anderson and Garner were arrested last week in connection with the sexual assaults.
Perkins was arrested for felony rape. Anderson has been charged with sodomy and aggravated sodomy. Both are being held without bond.
Garner was charged with aggravated sexual battery. Garner had visible scars and marks at the time of his arrest, according to a booking report.
Investigators said the victim knew the suspects before she was allegedly raped, and had a prior relationship with one of them.March and April were both busy months for Health Canada’s Office of Medical Cannabis, with five new licensed producers of medical cannabis added, and two new sales licenses being issued.
In March, the regulator issued three new cultivation licenses to, Ontario’s Del Shen Therapeutics, BC’s Evergreen Medicinal Supply Inc. and Alberta’s Acreage Pharms Ltd.
In April, one new licensed producer each in both Ontario and Manitoba received their cultivation licenses, and two others received their sales licenses. Manitoba’s Bonify Medical Cannabis received their cultivation license and Ontario’s MedReleaf received a cultivation license for their second facility in mid-April. Ontario’s Green Relief and WeedMD both received their sales licenses, and Manitoba’s Delta 9 began selling clones.
Except for a flurry of eight new licenses issued in March, 2014, over the past several years the average rate of approvals has been approximately one per month. But with the need to license potentially hundreds for commercial cannabis producers over the next few years due to recreational legalization, Health Canada has been ramping up their efforts. They recently even advertised for 15 new Program Directors.
Health Canada issues a cultivation license prior to issuing a sales license. Upon receiving their cultivation license (formerly called a production license), a licensed producer must then grow out, harvest, dry, process and pass testing for their cannabis before receiving a sales license. This process can take from about six months to well over a year, and allows the producer to build up a supply before going to market, as well as allowing the regulator to better ensure each new producer is able to adhere to the regulatory standards.
Currently, there are 43 cultivation licenses issued, and 29 sales licenses. Nineteen of these producers also have a sales license for cannabis oil, and another three with a cannabis oil production licenses that still awaiting a sales license. No producer has ever had a cultivation or sales license revoked or suspended.
On average, inspectors normally visit a licensed producer approximately once a month in a scheduled visit as well as random inspections. An inspection can last from several hours to, in some cases and depending on location, several days.“Scruff,” a dating app for gay, bisexual, and transgender men, has warned gay conservative commentator Chadwick Moore for allegedly having a pro-Trump account biography.
“Your profile has been reported due to inappropriate text,” wrote the platform in a message to Moore. “The SCRUFF profile guidelines prohibit text that incites racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind. They also prohibit text meant to threaten, intimidate, harass, defame, or insult another person. Please review our profile guidelines and remove any inappropriate text from your profile details.”
Moore’s account biography, which is used to show other users on the platform what sort of personality you have, had declared the following:
Proud Western chauvinist. The West is the best. Anti-Globalism, anti-free trade. Anti-war. Anti-racism. Anti-PC. Pro-America, Pro-Liberty, Pro-First Amendment, Pro-TRUMP. SHARIA KILLS. End 21st Century slavery and build that damn wall.
.@scruffapp what about my profile incites racism, bigotry, hatred, or physical harm? Please explain yourself pic.twitter.com/5Oydyx58Zd — Chadwick Moore (@Chadwick_Moore) August 3, 2017
“[Scruff], Do you welcome all gay people on your platform, or only ones who share the Democratic Party platform? I want an explanation,” asked Moore on Twitter following the sanction. “[Scruff] turns a blind eye to facilitating crystal meth use, unsafe sex, prostitution. But say ‘pro-trump’ and you’re flagged and warned.”
Moore, who used to work for OUT Magazine, was fired from the news outlet after he came out as a conservative.
“We are less than merely second class citizens in the gay community, we are reviled, much like black conservatives and any other minority group that says ‘no’ to the Left’s victimhood politics,” Moore claimed in an email to Breitbart News. “It’s truly amazing to see how they react to us, it exposes them for who they really are.”
In July, OUT Magazine published an article encouraging those in the LGBT community to sever ties with gay conservative friends.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook.Aside from staying up way too late catching up on our favorite tv shows, most of us don’t mess too radically with the 24-hour day cycle. True, night shift workers invert it and newborns and insomnia mess with it, but we are so profoundly ruled by Earth’s 24-hour rotation that very few of us ponder how this fact makes us uniquely unsuited for life beyond our home planet.
There are huge differences in the lengths of days on the planets in our solar system. The shortest day is on Jupiter - just 10 breezy hours - and the longest is a punishing 5,832 hours (crazy Venus!). Mars has the most similar day to ours, with each Martian day approximately 41 minutes longer than a day on Earth. That seems like a trivial enough difference that it wouldn’t be too disorienting, right? Artist Sara Morawetz is challenging herself to find out.
Living on Martian time; Image ©Sara Morawetz
Through August 22nd, Morawetz is living on Martian time as a performance art piece titled How the Stars Stand at Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her stunt will last 37 days - long enough for her days to completely invert and then slowly return to normal, not unlike a full waxing and waning cycle of the moon. By sheer coincidence, this month’s Scientific American Mind has a fascinating article on what exactly Morawetz is submitting her body to (spoiler: every organ in her body is likely in distress), but we’ll let her read that article after her experiment is over, shall we? In the meantime, you can see the effects for yourself: there is a live cam focused on her room in the gallery for your viewing enjoyment.
Artist Sara Morawetz living on Martian time at Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; Image ©Sara Morawetz
How the Stars Stand (project website) is on view at Open Source Gallery, 306 17th street, Brooklyn, NY 11215, through August 22, 2015. Check out the livestream of the performance and drop by the gallery at 6pm August 22 for a lecture by Dr. Michael Allison of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.Levels of genetic differentiation
The initial assignment of two population types based on laboratory mating behaviour suggested that there were two distinct groups, which correlated to hypogeous (enclosed) and epigeous (open) breeding sites. The genetic data also show significant support for the division of the London population of C. pipiens into two subgroups, pipiens and molestus, which correspond to the different breeding behaviour in the laboratory. This result is readily apparent from the ordination of G ST values, which clusters the populations into two groups. The separation into two distinct clusters indicates that gene flow between the two is absent or limited. Each subterranean population was paired with a surface population close by, so appreciable gene flow over a few hundred metres would have been sufficient to produce a thorough intermingling of the two categories of population in the ordination.
Two observations suggest that even where molestus and pipiens populations are in contact gene flow is limited or, conceivably, absent. First, the Oval population (▵, Fig. 1), clusters with the surface populations on the criteria of genetic distance and postmating and premating reproductive isolation, despite being underground (although open to the sky). Similarly, a previous study by Chevillon et al. (1995) found that mosquitoes collected from what they termed ‘open hypogeous sites’ were not differentiated from epigeous populations. Secondly, the Beckton population (□, Fig. 1) is clearly flying on the surface to reach its human victims. Although the breeding sites beneath houses have been blocked, other sites have not yet been located by the pest control authorities; one possibility is the large containers on an adjacent but inaccessible derelict industrial site. The genetic data only give a hint of gene flow: Beckton clearly clusters with the Underground populations, but it does show higher heterozygosity than the Underground populations, which might be a consequence of limited gene exchange with the local surface populations.
The Underground populations are much less tightly clustered than those overground, suggesting that gene flow is more limited or genetic drift relatively stronger. The significant genetic differentiation between lines (see Table 4) can be explained as a consequence of the shaping of gene flow by the tunnel system. Whereas the lines run through tunnels connected principally at the interchange stations, the piston-like action of trains within a tunnel creates a strong draught that may move the adults between breeding sites on the same line.
This picture of isolation contrasts with genetic studies from more southerly populations (France, Spain and Italy), where there is more evidence of extensive gene flow between pipiens and molestus populations. The penetration of insecticide-resistance genes into hypogeous populations (Rivet & Pasteur, 1993; Chevillon et al., 1995) provides the most straightforward case. This transmission of resistance alleles is not necessarily an indication of frequent gene exchange, as the strong selection pressure imposed by insecticide use could have established resistance in the hypogeous populations from a very small number of successful migrants. More straightforward evidence comes from Italy (Urbanelli et al., 1981). Three types of population were found on the basis of genetic surveys of allozyme loci: those consisting solely of C. pipiens pipiens, others consisting solely of C. p. molestus and also populations which were intermediate and were presumed to have arisen by hybridization of the other populations.
Reproductive isolation
The lack of demonstrable gene flow between the two forms in London may, in part, be explained by the implications of the breeding experiments, in which no offspring were recorded from crosses between Underground and surface populations. The ability to mate in confined spaces (stenogamy) may be a major contribution to premating reproductive isolation. Intriguingly, the Oval population, which seems to be an essentially overground population living underground (but below open sky) produced one (F 1 ) egg raft. The F 2 eggs, however, failed to hatch.
The genetic distances measured by the present study between the Underground and surface populations (0.07–0.24) would suggest that the relationship between the two population types is between that of local populations and subspecies (see Ayala, 1975). However, genetic distances may not be useful in populations where demographic effects are the dominant factor in the population history; for example, they do not reliably separate domestic livestock breeds (see, e.g. MacHugh et al., 1997). Using Nei's formula (see Nei, 1987), the estimated time since separation of the surface and Underground populations is ≈100 000 years, even using the correction for drift in one population. This time-scale is, of course, inconsistent with the known history of the tunnels, most of which are less than 100 years old. A second illustration of the imprecise nature of such estimates of separation time is provided by the Mogden population, which has only existed as a caged population for ≈10 years and yet is as distinct as molestus and pipiens. These differences can be explained as a combination of severe genetic drift and the effects of selection in a caged environment. This laboratory history may be analogous to that of populations that adapt to a subterranean life in the wild: they may also be presumed to have experienced strong selection and substantial genetic drift.
Origin of the Underground populations
Two possible sources were considered for the colonization of the London Underground—local London surface populations and long-distance migrants from Mediterranean populations.
Long-distance migrants
Populations of C. pipiens from the Mediterranean region, especially those from North Africa, show similarities to molestus populations from Britain. In particular, they have reduced polymorphism and higher frequency of some alleles associated with the Underground populations (Villani et al., 1986). Little evidence has been found to support the proposal that the London Underground was colonized from this source. The alleles found in the Underground do not include any that are otherwise found only outside Britain. Only Got-1 is fixed for an allele that is rare on the surface but that is frequent in molestus-type individuals from other areas (Chevillon et al., 1998). The identity of alleles was confirmed by cross-checking with control strains provided by M. Raymond.
Local colonization
The data are more consistent with local populations being the source of molestus populations in the Underground. However, Fig. 1 shows that there is no association between individual Underground populations and local surface populations, which suggests that multiple independent colonizations are unlikely or, at least, that such events are rare. The most parsimonious explanation is a single colonization. This would explain the fixation of a single allele at multiple allele loci such as the esterases. The similarity of the Underground populations to the more distant Beckton population (nearest Underground line 4 km) raises the possibility that adaptation to the underground environment may have occurred only once, and that the established subterranean populations are the source for subsequent colonizations.
Adaptation, population fragmentation and reproductive isolation
The distinction between pipiens and molestus forms appears to increase with latitude. This pattern can be interpreted in terms of the interplay of deterministic and stochastic processes that can lead to reproductive isolation. The requirement for a winter diapause at high latitudes may play a pivotal role. In North Africa (below 38°N) the above-ground populations are diapause-incompetent, a pattern that may be related to day length (Zimmerman et al., 1985). At the other extreme of the range, northern European subterranean populations become isolated from the surface populations with the onset of diapause in the surface form in the Autumn. Gene flow is therefore restricted for two reasons. First, there is a shorter period when breeding in the two forms overlaps. Secondly, if subterranean populations set up satellite populations above ground, they will not survive the winter and will only have a limited life during which they could act as stepping-stones for gene exchange.
These trends vary in a predictable way from the south to the north of the range. The intervening northern Mediterranean populations show the expected evidence of intermediate gene flow and this would explain the diminished differentiation into molestus and pipiens forms. Two stochastic processes also come into play in the north of the range. Genetic drift will tend to fix molestus traits in subterranean populations. The consequent linkage disequilibrium with eurygamy above ground and lack of diapause below ground will further hamper gene flow throughout the genome. In addition, the establishment of different clones of the Rickettsia-like bacterium Wolbachia pipientis can provide the coup de grâce to gene flow by leading to incompatibility of matings between differently infected populations. The crossing types are sufficiently labile to change from place to place and through time in the same population (Raymond et al., 1986; Magnin et al., 1987). Indeed C. pipiens shows a high number of incompatible cytotypes relative to other insects, despite the unexceptional degree of genetic divergence between their strains of Wolbachia, which may indicate interactions between Wolbachia and Culex genomes (Guillemaud et al., 1997).
This combination of factors can explain why gene flow is negligible or absent between the two forms in the populations that were studied. As it appears plausible that colonization of the London Underground has occurred only once, the reproductive isolation could have accumulated in the few hundred generations since then. Conversely, in the south of the range, where climate promotes more frequent gene flow, this may be sufficient to prevent the establishment of reproductive isolation, even though the pleiotropic effects of selection in the underground environment are the same.The following is excerpted from Mystic Chemist: The Life of Albert Hofmann and His Discovery of LSD by Dieter Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller, the authoritative new biography of Albert Hofmann being released this week by Synergetic Press. This book, which contains a thorough historical survey of the impact of LSD on culture and nearly 500 photographs, many of which have never been seen before, is now available directly through the Synergeticpress.com website at a massive 35% discount for Reality Sandwich readers who type in the discount code REALITY. Please support independent publishing and purchase direct!
Read Part 2 here.
LSD Finds Its Discoverer
Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind. -Louis Pasteur
In the Beginning was the Ergot
Ergot is the name given to the spore, the sclerotium, of the parasitic filamentous fungus Claviceps purpurea which attacks various cereal grains and wild grasses, especially rye. The sclerotium is a black-violet, slightly curved, conical body, a few millimeters to up to six centimeters in length that can develop in place of a pollen grain. The name ergot (Mutterkorn in German) derives from its earlier use as an abortifacient and a midwifes aid, since the components trigger labor. The ergot of rye, Secale cornutum, is primarily used medically. Depending upon the habitat, host grass, and climate, the fungus contains different ergot alkaloids, for the most part lysergic acid derivatives. It was long used medicinally in many areas of the northern hemisphere.
Ergot first figured in the historical record during the early Middle Ages when it caused the mass poisoning of thousands. The poisoning was caused by consuming bread that, in extreme cases, contained up to twenty percent ergot. Most affected were the poorer classes who ate rye bread in quantity, whereas the wealthier had more wheat at their tables. Epidemics of ergot poisoning occurred in different regions of Europe and North America. St. Anthony was the patron of the sick and the Antonines the order which cared for the afflicted. Because of the terrible effects of ergot poisoning, known as St. Anthonys Fire or Ergotism, it was deemed to be divine punishment until the true cause was discovered in the 17th century. This knowledge, along with improved planting methods, led to the decline of such epidemics.
The healing effect of ergot was discovered quite early. The first written record of its medical use is found in Herbal, published in 1582 by Frankfurts city physician, Adam Lonitzer. He recommends it for labor pains and mentions that ergot extracts have long been used by midwives to promote contraction of the uterus and to speed up birth. In 1907, the English chemists George Barker and Howard Carr isolated an ergot alkaloid mixture that affected the uterus. Because of its toxic side effects, it was named ergotoxine and was never used medically. After 1932, the English gynecologist Chassar Moir used aqueous ergot extracts which strongly affected the uterus.
Harvesting rye by hand
Albert Hofmanns superior, Arthur Stoll, began investigating ergot in 1917 and by the following year had succeeded in isolating pure alkaloids of ergotamine. The compound was brought to market in 1921 as Gynergen®. After that, Stoll ended his research in this area.
In 1935, Albert Hofmann was looking for a new project and suggested to Stoll that he resume investigation of ergot alkaloids. Based on what was known about them so far, Hofmann believed things looked promising. His objective was to continue Stolls work and develop new medicines out of ergot. Stoll approved, but warned about the difficulty of working with these unstable substances It was 1938 before Hofmann applied the Curtius Synthesis, a method which enabled him to combine and stabilize lysergic acid with basic groups for further ergot research… Hofmann achieved the first synthesis of a natural ergot alkaloid by combining lysergic acid with propanolamine. After Stolls isolation of ergotamine, this was a further step in ergot research and proved to be of practical as well as scientific importance. This partial synthesis made it possible to convert the other alkaloids in ergot into ergobasine, which was valuable in obstetrics. Hofmanns method of synthesis became the generally recognized basis for producing a number of related structures from the original ergot alkaloid.
Hofmann subsequently produced many more lysergic acid derivatives, among them the twenty-fifth on November 16, 1938, which was lysergic acid diethylamide; hence the designation LSD-25. He was planning to synthesize an analog to the cardiovascular agent Coramine which was produced by Ciba, a competing pharmaceutical firm on the opposite bank of the Rhine He recalled: I hoped that lysergic acid diethylamide would be a new and improved cardiovascular stimulant.8 The experiments carried out by the pharmacological department at Sandoz with LSD-25 found it had approximately seventy percent of the effect of ergobasine. The trial audit mentioned slight restlessness in lab animals. Because the effects observed were less than expected, the physicians and pharmacologists at Sandoz quickly lost interest in the new substance. For the next five years, nothing more was done with LSD-25.
Potency
However, LSD-25 didnt pass into oblivion; Albert Hofmann could not stop thinking about the substance. I had a strange premonition that this drug might have additional effects to those exhibited during the first trial. This led me to produce LSD-25 again five years after the first synthesis and pass it on to the pharmacological department for further trials. This was unusual, because test compounds were normally struck from the research program once declared to be of no pharmacological interest. Later, Hofmann could neither find a rational explanation for his hunch nor for the rest of his life reconstruct why it was that he chose to resurrect that particular compound out of the many he had created. It was more a feelingthe chemical structure appealed to methat prompted me to take that extraordinary step. (Bröckers, Liggenstorfer 2006) Most chemists would have rejected such a diffuse feeling as irrational fantasy and forgotten the matter, but Hofmann trusted and followed his intuition.
Albert Hofmann in lab, 1945
Hofmanns lab scheduled the second synthesis of this compound for April 16, 1943. It was a matter of producing a few tenths of a gram. Again, things were orderly and clean and all the safety measures required for work with poisons were followed. Nonetheless, during the final phase of the synthesis, it seemed that Hofmann unintentionally must have come into contact with the substance: While we were purifying and crystallizing the lysergic acid diethylamides, I began to feel unusual sensations. For the first time Hofmann became |
the making of China’s nuclear power plans,” Zhang Lijun, vice minister for environmental protection, said then. “But China will not change its determination and plan for developing nuclear power.”
He also said that China used a more modern design than those of Japan’s stricken reactors.A new survey of Connecticut by Public Policy Polling (D) provides a fascinating look into the possible future of independent Sen. Joe Lieberman. To be exact, the former Democrat is incredibly unpopular with most voters — and only marginally popular with Republicans — and would have a hard time avoiding a landslide defeat should he run again in 2012.
[TPM SLIDESHOW: Broken Promises: The Story Of Joe The Democrat]
Lieberman’s political journey over the last four years has sure alienated a lot of folks. After he lost the 2006 Democratic primary, he was then re-elected as an independent with unofficial Republican support. He then campaigned aggressively for John McCain for president in 2008, and spoke at the Republican National Convention — but after McCain lost, he settled back into place in the Democratic caucus. Then he helped to stop the public option during the health care debate, promising to support a Republican filibuster, but also voted for final passage of the eventual law sans public option.
Lieberman’s approval rating stands at only 31%, with 57% disapproval — even lower than the 36%-54% for Sen. Chris Dodd, who is retiring. Broken down by party, Lieberman’s rating is 20%-69% among Democrats, 46%-41% among Republicans, and 31%-56% among independents.
Respondents were also asked this question: “Generally speaking in 2012 will you vote to reelect Joe Lieberman or would you rather replace him with someone else?” The answer was only 24% to re-elect him, against 66% who would vote to replace him.PPP also tested three-way race for Lieberman, Rep. Chris Murphy as the Democratic nominee and Republican financial commentator and Ron Paul activist Peter Schiff (who recently came in third place in the Republican primary for Senate) as the Republican candidate. The result was Murphy 39%, Schiff 25%, and Lieberman 19%.
Another three-way race put in Gov. Jodi Rell, who is retiring this year with relatively decent approval ratings, as the Republican candidate. This time it’s Murphy 37%, Rell 29%, and Lieberman 17%.
In a direct two-way match, Murphy leads Lieberman by 47%-33%.
“Democrats, Republicans, and independents in Connecticut agree on one thing: they want Joe Lieberman replaced in the US Senate,” writes PPP president Dean Debnam. “His path to reelection, at least at this point a couple years away, looks extremely difficult.”Evangelicals Praise Pope Francis' Visit to Pentecostal Church, Apologize for Evangelical Discrimination Against Catholics
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Pope Francis' first official visit to a Pentecostal church in Italy was praised by some evangelical leaders, who thanked the pope for asking for forgiveness for Roman Catholic persecution of Pentecostals in the past. The Secretary General of the World Evangelical Alliance, Rev. Dr. Geoff Tunnicliffe, in turn apologized for evangelical discrimination against Catholics.
"It is biblical and it reflects the message of Jesus…..so my hope is that this act of Pope Francis will send a strong message around the world, particularly to those countries where there are significant tensions between Catholics and Evangelicals," Tunnicliffe said regarding the pontiff's plea for forgiveness, Vatican Radio reported on Wednesday.
"But I also need to say this: I recognize that in history there have been situations where Protestants, including Evangelicals, have discriminated against Catholic Christians and I am really sorry for these kinds of actions, because while we can disagree theologically, this should never lead to discrimination or persecution of the other.
"We all need to acknowledge all our failings and ask each other for forgiveness and I think Pope Francis set a great example."
On Monday, Francis became the first pope to make an official visit to a Pentecostal church, after he visited the Evangelical Church of Reconciliation in the southern city of Caserta, Italy. He spoke before 350 worshipers at the church, and met privately with the Pentecostal preacher Giovanni Traettino, an old friend.
"Among those who persecuted and denounced Pentecostals, almost as if they were crazy people trying to ruin the race, there were also Catholics," Francis said, referring to Italy's fascist regime when the Pentecostal practice was forbidden.
"I am the pastor of Catholics, and I ask your forgiveness for those Catholic brothers and sisters who didn't know and were tempted by the devil."
Francis acknowledged that some would be surprised at his visit to the Pentecostal church, but said that he considers evangelicals to be his "brothers."
"Someone will be surprised: 'The pope went to visit the evangelicals?' But he went to see his brothers," the pope said.
Tunnicliffe, who has served as WEA CEO/Secretary General since May 2005, representing close to 650 million Christians around the world, noted that the 'official conversations between Catholics and Evangelicals are an essential part of the ecumenical journey,' but building 'trust and friendship leads to a deepening of those theological dialogues.'
He added that building relationships in the Christian body is very important: "Jesus, in John 17, clearly calls us to be one and I think for those outside the Church, it's important for them to understand that while there are differences within the Christian denominations, at the core we have so many areas of communality…."
WEA global ambassador Brian Stiller revealed that Francis had shared of his planned visit to the Pentecostal church in late June following a private meeting with several evangelical leaders.
"He listened and then told a remarkable story," Stiller said. "In his years in and out of Rome, he became friends with an Italian pastor. In time, he came to learn that the church and pastor felt the power and presence of the Catholic Church, with its weighty presence, obstructing their desire to grow and be a witness. So he decided to visit the church and offer an apology for the difficulty brought to their congregation."
James Robison, a founding pastor and televangelist with his wife, Betty, of the LIFE Outreach International, who was also present in the June meeting, told the National Catholic Register that he believes the pope wanted to work on a path for healing for the wrongdoings of the past.
"He thinks there was reason to apologize to this group, and I clearly got the impression [he seeks to apologize] to evangelicals and Protestants in other parts of the world where Catholics had in any way been unkind [to them]," Robinson said.
Tunnicliffe also had the opportunity to spend some personal time with Pope Francis, and said:
"I have discovered through years of building relationships of trust and friendship that you can have a deeper and more authentic dialogue."
He added: "It really matters to us at this global level, to have understanding on what each of us can do when one group is harassed by the other. This we will seek to do in our growing working relationship with the Vatican."Donald Trump was born 70 years ago this month, at the very beginning of the baby boom. At that time, America was, in every sense, an unambiguously white country.
First, in demographic terms, nearly 90 percent of the population was categorized as white. Groups that in the not-too-distant past had been considered only partially or imperfectly or not really white – such as Irish and German Catholics, Italians, and Jews – had by now been largely granted white status, as part of a melting pot ideology which claimed to transform a multi-ethnic population into a society in which race and ethnicity were subsumed into a single American identity. (That this ideology could flourish in a culture that still featured massive legal discrimination against African Americans indicates the extent to which white America managed to avoid even thinking about the existence of black people.)
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Second, the political, economic, and cultural dominance of white America was so taken for granted by white Americans that it was, as a social matter, invisible to them. At that time, whiteness in America was what sociologists call an “unmarked category.” For example, if a white person had been shown a photograph of the Senate, it’s practically certain that he or she would simply not have noticed that it was made up exclusively of white people. (Nor would the observer have noticed that all these people happened to be men, but that’s a different topic.)
In other words, “white” and “American” were essentially synonyms. Hispanics made up less than two percent of the population, and they outnumbered Asian-Americans ten to one. Basically everyone in America was either white or black, and while in theory black people were full citizens too, in practice they weren’t, most obviously in the Jim Crow south, but in reality in the rest of the country as well.
That country no longer exists: or rather it only continues to exist in the increasingly panicked imaginations of the sorts of white people who have – it still seems incredible when one puts it into words – made Donald Trump the Republican party’s presidential candidate.
Today, barely three out of five Americans are non-Hispanic whites. In another two or three decades, “white” people, as traditionally defined, will make up less than half the population. White America is in the process of disappearing, and it’s no surprise that tens of millions of people who thought of this as their country are frightened by the thought that it isn’t any more.
All this helps explain incidents such as Trump’s claim this week that a federal judge who has ruled against him in a lawsuit is a “Mexican,” even though the judge was born in Indiana. Clueless journalists treated this as yet another example of Trump’s apparently bottomless ignorance, when in fact it’s obviously a strategic choice on his part.
To Trump’s supporters, a person of Mexican ancestry is Mexican, rather than American, because Americans are white, and “Mexicans” aren’t. To the overt racists who make up Trump’s – and to a significant extent, the contemporary Republican party’s – electoral base, non-whites are at best Americans by courtesy or sufferance, because America has always been a white country.
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A few years ago, Trump discovered that there was an enormous untapped market, as he would think of it, for overt racism in mainstream American politics. This is why he laid the groundwork for his presidential run by constantly repeating paranoid nonsense about Barack Obama not really being an American. He was, as they say in the business schools, establishing his “brand.”
It is very important to keep in mind that Donald Trump is now the leader of the Republican party, and that this means the Republican party is now the party of overt racism, in pretty much the same way the southern wing of the Democratic party was the party of overt, unreconstructed racism seventy years ago, when Trump first began to contaminate the planet.
Saying so isn’t considered polite, because that would imply that, as long as it’s the party of Trump, and, more important, Trumpism, being a Republican is no longer a respectable thing to be. It isn’t.On SiriusXM POTUS’s Michael Smerconish Show Thursday, Dr. Art Caplan of the NYU Langone Medical Center urged the Brazilian government and International Olympic Committee to delay the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, warning that tourists will not attend the events due to Latin America’s Zika virus pandemic.
“Are you really going to try to run the Olympics this August in the middle of a public health emergency when the country can’t afford to finish the buildings, and has got to take on the mosquitos?” Caplan asks, adding the question of what family will say, “Let’s round up the kids and go watch discus in the Zika epidemic?”
Such a proposition would be like a family saying, “Let’s visit Chernobyl to enjoy the Olympics!” he adds.
In a Forbes column co-authored with Lee H. Igel, Caplan calls hosting the games in Rio de Janeiro aware of the Zika risk “irresponsible,” noting that several athletes have already begun taking precautionary measures against the mosquitos. “The IOC needs to either move the Games, postpone them, or cancel them. Prevention is the best course in the face of a serious threat to humanity,” they write.
The Brazilian government has not made any indication it is considering postponing the games. Instead, officials have announced a number of precautionary measures to keep venues safe. Last week, over 3,000 health workers fumigated the Sambadrome, the venue that will host most of the Olympic Games’ major events, and officials have vowed to execute daily inspections for mosquito nests at all venues. The medical director of the event, Dr. Joao Grangeiro, urged nations not to keep their athletes from participating.
“The athletes are not at risk… We will not have an epidemic or pandemic situation. We can’t say we won’t have any cases (during the games) but we see this as a minimal risk,” he said.
“We remain confident that there will be a safe environment for successful and enjoyable Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro,” the International Olympic Committee said in a statement, echoing Brazilian officials.
Brazil has also not canceled other major tourist attractions, like this week’s Carnaval. Carnaval is a week of street festivals known for its extravagant outfits and loud music. While some have launched Zika awareness campaigns in the midst of Carnaval events, most major cities have not canceled their events.
The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak of Zika in the Western Hemisphere a “public health emergency.” Experts at the National Institutes of Health have deemed the virus outbreak a “pandemic.”
While 80 percent of Zika patients are asymptomatic, and adults with Zika often experience only mild symptoms, researchers have found the virus to have a devastating effect on fetuses when a pregnant mother contracts it. Brazilian Health Minister Marcelo Castro has said there is “no doubt” that Zika is tied to microcephaly, a condition in which an infant’s skull is too small for his or her brain, causing severe neurological defects. Brazil has recorded over 4,000 cases of microcephaly since medical experts confirmed the presence of the virus in April 2015.Over the past week, Jets general manager John Idzik has come under fire for perceived slights with his work building the 2014 team. A New York Daily News article by Jets beat writer Manish Mehta on Saturday was followed by an embarrassing 31-0 loss in San Diego. Quarterback Geno Smith, Idzik’s second-round pick from the 2013 draft, played dismally before being benched, with postgame reports revealing that Smith had missed a team meeting Saturday. All in all, it was a pretty rough weekend for Idzik.
While I won’t pretend the Jets looked remotely competent during their loss to the Chargers, I can’t agree that Idzik has made a mess of running his football team during his two-year tenure. There have been missteps, just as there are with any general manager, but Idzik has executed a clear plan that makes a lot of sense. Criticisms of his performance miss the logic behind a number of Idzik’s decisions.
Take, for example, the idea that Idzik is somehow frugally holding on to his cap space while Jets fans shell out for some of the most expensive tickets in the league. This isn’t late-’90s baseball. There’s absolutely no relationship between in-stadium ticket prices and team spending; every team in the NFL has more than enough money to spend beyond the salary cap, by virtue of the league’s massive national television contract. The economics of one simply have nothing to do with the other. The Jets charge a ton for tickets because they think the market will give them a ton for tickets.
Gang Green has just less than $24 million in cap space, the second-largest figure in football behind the Jaguars ($29 million). It’s natural to think in the short term that the Jets would be better if they had committed that $24 million to players in free agency this offseason, but that ignores two simple concepts.
One is the idea of cap rollover — namely, if the Jets don’t spend that $24 million this year, they can roll it over to create more space on next year’s cap. They weren’t able to do that this offseason, having carried over just $1.5 million in cap space from 2013, which was below the league median of $2.3 million. While the NFL salary cap next year is estimated to be about $140 million, the Jets will get to spend up to $164 million.
Second is the concept of opportunity cost. Spending that money on players now means you’re unable to carry that money over to the future, when you may very well have better (or more expensive) talent available to pursue. It also takes away roster spots from young players who come through the draft, which is where you’re always going to find the most surplus value to build the most sustainable, effective football team.
Look at Idzik’s past and you can see whom he’s emulating. Idzik came from Seattle, where the general manager is John Schneider, who comes from the Ted Thompson tree of managers. Thompson-style general managers hoard draft picks, maintain cap flexibility, and generally avoid the middle class of free agency, only occasionally jumping into the water for a big splash. In fact, the only real missteps Schneider has made during his time at the helm in Seattle have come in free agency, as big deals for players like Matt Flynn, Sidney Rice, and Zach Miller have produced disappointing results, while short-term deals for Michael Bennett and Cliff Avril were wildly successful.
With that surely in mind, Idzik’s philosophy in free agency has been mostly to stick with short-term, low-risk contracts. He went deep for wideout Eric Decker, filling what even Idzik critics would agree was a massive hole by getting the best free agent available at the position with a five-year, $36.25 million deal. Also, offensive lineman Breno Giacomini signed a four-year, $18 million contract. Otherwise, contracts for veterans like Chris Johnson, Jason Babin, and Michael Vick have all been relatively short, cheap, or both. That’s not Idzik trying to pinch pennies. It’s Idzik emulating the success of the Seahawks, the Packers, and (although Jets fans might not want to hear it) the Patriots. Bad teams spend to the cap for the sake of spending money.
Idzik had to operate in the low-cost free-agent market because there was very little left in the cupboard when he took over. This was the depth chart in January 2013, shortly before Idzik joined the Jets. It features, by my count, just 17 players who are still on the Jets roster, and most of the departed are veterans who are either done playing football or disappointing on somebody else’s roster. Should Idzik have used the cap space he had to re-sign the likes of Shonn Greene, Austin Howard, or LaRon Landry, who each got ponderously large deals elsewhere?
It’s fair to say many of the short-term stopgaps haven’t paid out, and some have embarrassed the team. Mehta cites the off-field issues of players like Kellen Winslow Jr. and Mike Goodson as evidence it was a mistake to sign them, while cornerback Dimitri Patterson bizarrely signed before the 2014 season and had to be released, leaving the Jets perilously thin. Mehta treats David Garrard as a “notable acquisition,” which is odd for a quarterback who was signed to a one-year deal for the league minimum. In virtually all these cases, Idzik was throwing a short-term solution at the wall and hoping it stuck. Better Vick at $2 million for one year than, say, Josh McCown at two years and $10 million.
Given where the Jets are, that’s not a stupid idea. As I wrote about in the team’s preseason preview, previous general manager Mike Tannenbaum frequently traded up in drafts and used draft picks to acquire veterans, leaving the Jets with virtually nothing on their current roster from their 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 drafts. Idzik surely wants to replace those absent holes with draftees, but it takes time to acquire those picks and develop those players.
And it’s hard to say that Idzik has been a subpar drafter. His first selection in 2013, cornerback Dee Milliner, struggled in much the same way most rookie cornerbacks do before suffering a high ankle sprain that has kept him out for virtually all of the 2014 campaign. Idzik’s other first-rounder, Sheldon Richardson, won defensive rookie of the year. Brian Winters, the team’s third-round pick, has been disappointing at guard. It seems insane to suggest it’s time to evaluate Idzik’s 12 picks from the 2014 draft beyond noting that it’s frustrating to see fourth-rounder Jalen Saunders already released. Idzik’s draft record may turn out to be unsatisfactory, but it’s far too soon to tell.
Look at the depth chart of the Seahawks from October 1 of Schneider’s second year with the team as a sign of how much work still had to be done. Schneider had already acquired Marshawn Lynch, but Lynch was a mess who didn’t break out until later in the 2011 season. Richard Sherman was just a fifth-round pick who hadn’t started an NFL game. The likes of Aaron Curry and Marcus Trufant were still hanging out in serious roles on the roster, while veteran fill-ins like Robert Gallery and Alan Branch would play meaningful roles that year.
Most notably, pay attention to the most important spot of all: quarterback. Schneider surely knew he wasn’t going to win a ton of football games with Tarvaris Jackson and Charlie Whitehurst at quarterback, even after making the mistake of trading a third-round pick and swapping second-round picks to acquire Whitehurst from the Chargers.
Instead of spending to the limit to try to squeeze a 9-7 season out of a football team with no prayer of going far in the playoffs, Schneider maintained flexibility, trusted his ability to draft and develop talent, and waited for the right quarterback opportunity to come. Eventually he found Russell Wilson, and the rest is history.
The truth for Idzik and the Jets right now is that it doesn’t matter what they do elsewhere in terms of winning now without a quarterback. They’re bad enough at that position that the other moves they make are just window dressing — a series of short-term decisions and drafted lottery tickets to set them up for that moment when they actually have the quarterback they need to succeed. That’s not what Rex Ryan or Jets fans want to hear, but it’s the reality of where they’re at in the NFL. Idzik still has to execute that plan, and it won’t matter until he finds that quarterback, but he’s on the right track.
As for Ryan and the Jets? Expectations were likely too high coming into the season. The Jets were 8-8 last year, but they were outscored by 97 points, which is the point differential of a 5.4-win team. That win-loss record included an unsustainable 5-1 performance in games decided by a touchdown or less, including two miraculous wins driven by unlikely late-game penalties on the Buccaneers and Patriots. The Jets already had two seven-point losses and an eight-point loss on their résumé this year before Sunday’s blowout. If they had enjoyed just an average amount of luck in close games last year and gone 5-11, Ryan probably would have been fired. Now, regardless of what Idzik does, Ryan will probably suffer that fate.
Back to Basics
Running back has been a tumultuous position in fantasy football this year. Among the players who rank in the top 10 for fantasy points at the position are a guy coming off a season-ending neck surgery who was supposed to be a backup (Ahmad Bradshaw), a third-stringer who was cut by the Jaguars in March (Justin Forsett), and a player almost nobody had heard of before the middle of September (Matt Asiata).
More significant is that, on the other side of the coin, many of the players who were expected to be every-week starters have been sorely disappointing. The Adrian Peterson saga is obviously a case unto itself, but even among the players who have stayed on the field, poor performances have popped up all around the league. That’s hardly a fantasy-only problem, either, as teams that were expecting steady production from well-known backs have instead received middling, frustrating performances. (Every LeSean McCoy owner nods.) (Chip Kelly nods, too.)
Now that we’re five weeks into the year, let’s run through some of these struggling running backs and try to figure out what’s up. Is there something flukish about their slow start? Have they been affected by something unexpected? And will they turn things around anytime soon?
LeSean McCoy, Eagles: Let’s start with Shady, who has been fantasy football’s most disappointing player this season. Through five weeks, the defending rushing champ has averaged just 2.9 yards per carry on his 94 attempts and, even more distressingly, just 4.9 yards on his 14 catches. The only player with 10 receptions or more who has averaged fewer yards per catch is Lamar Miller. Even worse, McCoy has just one touchdown all season, a one-yard plunge against the Colts in Week 2. After averaging 17.4 fantasy points per game last season, McCoy has averaged just 7.6 points through his first five games. What gives?
The obvious problem for McCoy has been his offensive line (or lack thereof). In 2013, with the same five linemen starting all 16 games, McCoy had fantastic blocking and often only had to make one guy miss to break a big gain. This year, the Eagles have already started nine offensive linemen, which has been a huge hindrance. Too often, we’ve seen McCoy run plays get bottled up in the backfield by teams attacking the inexperienced interior of Philadelphia’s offensive line, and while there might not be anybody better at shaking defenders with pure agility than McCoy, he can break only so many tackles before the cavalry comes in to finish the job.
That being said, there are some reasons to believe Shady will turn things around. There’s no rhyme or reason to think he’ll end up finishing the season with three touchdowns, as he’s on pace to do. The Eagles have given him just two carries inside the 5-yard line, both against the Colts, and one of which produced that score. McCoy’s not a classic goal-line back by any means, but he’s the best back the Eagles have in short yardage, and he should see more opportunities in the weeks to come.
McCoy’s receiving totals should also go up. He averaged about 7.8 yards per catch during his first five seasons, including 10.4 yards per catch in his lone season under Kelly. And while Darren Sproles has attracted plenty of attention for all the great work he’s done, he hasn’t dramatically affected McCoy’s usage rate. Of Philadelphia’s offensive plays this year, 32.7 percent have gone to McCoy, down from 35.9 percent in 2013. That amounts to about two fewer touches per game. As Evan Mathis and Jason Kelce return from injuries in the second half, McCoy could very well return to his otherworldly form of 2013.
Eddie Lacy, Packers: The world finally saw signs of life from Lacy this past Thursday, when he broke a number of big gains against the Vikings while personally embarrassing Minnesota safety Robert Blanton in front of a national television audience. The end result wasn’t quite as impressive as the early returns, as the Packers gave Lacy only 13 carries in the blowout win, but he produced 105 yards and two touchdowns, which should make both Packers fans and Lacy owners quite happy.
Is it a sign Lacy’s back on track? I think so. Lacy’s first four games were marred by a stretch of dominant run defenses. The Seahawks, Jets, and Lions each ranked among the top four in run defense DVOA heading into Week 5, while the Bears had been a league-average bunch. Minnesota was the first below-average run defense Lacy had faced all year, and it’s no surprise both he and his offensive line finally got things going.
After this week, it should be smoother sailing for Lacy. The Dolphins have delivered a quietly impressive year against the run and rank ninth in run defense DVOA, but Lacy follows that matchup with games against the Panthers and Saints, who have been among the league’s worst run defenses. That should help bring his season numbers back into line with expectations.
The one thing I’d worry about with Lacy during the second half is his schedule during the fantasy playoffs: While he gets the dismal Atlanta run defense in Week 14, Green Bay follows that up with games against the excellent rush defenses of the Bills and Buccaneers in Weeks 15 and 16. He should be almost entirely dependent upon touchdowns those weeks, which will be agonizing in the heat of a fantasy postseason. The Packers have had only four carries from inside the opposition’s 5-yard line, but three have gone to Lacy, which suggests he’ll be the goal-line back in those matchups to come.
Doug Martin, Buccaneers: No man in football is getting more out of one good game at the right time than Martin is from his stunning performance as a rookie against the Raiders. In that 2012 tilt, Martin ran the ball 25 times for an incredible 251 yards against an Oakland Raiders team that … offered only cursory defenses against runners that year, finishing 24th in run defense DVOA. This is always an unfair exercise, but take that one game off his record and his rushing average in 2012 falls from 4.6 yards per attempt all the way down to 4.1 yards per carry, while his career totals fall all the way to 3.8 yards per carry.
OK. One big game is one thing. But Martin really hasn’t looked good at any point during the past two years, either during his brief spell on the active roster in 2013 or in limited time this year. He’s averaged just 2.5 yards per carry on his 37 rushing attempts, which is the second-worst rate for running backs with 30 carries or more. Only Donald Brown, who ran wild for a mere 2.1 yards per carry before getting injured Sunday, has been worse than Martin.
At this point, I think it’s OK to jump off the Martin bandwagon. Bobby Rainey has averaged 4.7 yards per carry behind the same offensive line and in many of the same situations as Martin. Rainey is shiftier, but he catches passes well out of the backfield and just looks to be a smarter, more decisive runner than his predecessor. Martin, whose longest run of the year is just 16 yards, is a sunk cost drafted by the last Bucs administration. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him lose his regular job in the weeks to come.If I were in charge of promoting tourism in Yemen, I’d be using the native dragon tree, or Socotra tree, as my mascot. Native to the Socotra Island these unusual trees have evolved in isolation over millions of years.
The Latin name of the endangered Socotra dragon tree or dragon blood tree is Dracaena cinnabari and it is native to the Socotra archipelago of islands in Yemen in the Indian Ocean. It is called a dragon tree due to the red sap that the trees produce.
“If you prick us, will we not bleed?”
The sap is believed to have medicinal purposes.
The largest island of Yemen is also called Socotra and it comprises about 95% of the landmass of the archipelago.
Due to its isolation one third of its plant life is found nowhere else in the world. It has been described as “the most alien-looking place on Earth”.
This is what the dragon tree looks like when it is completely dried out.
If these dragon trees from Yemen don’t make you want to get out and do something to protect our earth, we don’t know what will.
Oleg Znamenskiy / Shutterstock.com; and images of dragon tree from Shutterstock
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commentsPolice are warning business owners on the city's Northwest Side after a string of recent robberies targeting convenience stores.
A convenience store in the 2900 block of North Pulaski Road was robbed about 9:40 a.m. Tuesday, as well as at 1:25 p.m. Jan. 7 and on Jan. 8, according to a Chicago Police alert.
Police said a man came into the store, started a conversation with an employee and then displayed a handgun and demanded money from the register.
The man was described as white, between 20 and 30 years old, with blond hair. The man was wearing a partial face mask, hooded green jacket and blue jeans and was about 5 feet 9 inches and 175 pounds.
In earlier robberies, two men entered convenience stores and began talking to employees before walking behind the store's counter to take cartons of cigarettes, police said. The men implied they had guns during the robberies, police said.
Those robberies occurred at 9:12 p.m. Jan. 3 in the 2700 block of West Harlem Avenue and about 3:20 a.m. on Dec. 7 in the 6800 block of West North Avenue, police said.
One offender was described as black, between 30 and 36 years old and weighing between 220 an 250 pounds. The man had a dark complexion and was wearing a black, fur-lined collar jacket and black jeans, according to the police statement. The second offender was described as white, between 28 and 35 years old and weighing about 180 pounds. He was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt during the robberies, police said.
Anyone with information on the robberies can call Area North Detectives at 312-744-8263.A little over a week ago, North Korea claimed to have successfully launched a ballistic missile from an undersea submarine. Such a launch would have been a major step forward for the hermit country, if it had actually happened. But according to German aerospace experts, the photos supposedly proving North Korea’s technological prowess only proved that, once again, North Korea is shit at Photoshop.
As Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker, of Schmucker Technologie, told Reuters, “Considering the track record of North Korean deceptions, it seems sensible to assume that any North Korean SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] capability is still a very long time in the future, if it will ever surface.”
That didn’t stop everyone’s favorite little warmongering-dictatorship-that-could from reaching for the stars in quite a few ways. For example: The images of the launch shown on state TV depicted a huge column of smoke:
But that same smoke column was notably absent from the photo distributed by North Korea’s state news network:
What the column-less photo lacked in smoke, it made up for with weird, poorly placed ocean smudges. That reddish patch of water you see to the left of the missile? That’s supposed to be the rocket’s reflection.
So while the addition of submarine-launched ballistics missile would certainly give North Korea some troubling leverage, perhaps they should focus on honing their ‘shop skills for the time being.
[Images via AP/ht The Telegraph]By By JohnThomas Didymus May 31, 2012 in Technology Sohag - A physics student from Egypt's Sohag University, Aisha Mustafa, 19, has patented a new type of propulsion system based on quantum theory that she says could propel space probes and artificial satellites without using any fuel. Mustafa believes it is possible to use According to The President of Sohag University, Dr. Nabil Nour Eldin Abdellah, said the university facilitates "science clubs" for creative students. He said: “Once we knew about her (Mustafa’s) invention, we encouraged her and provided her with the budget needed through the Science Club for innovative students in the university. This is the case with any other creative student." According to OnIslam.net, with the retirement of NASA's space shuttle program, the field of space vehicles propulsion is expanding and and growing in importance with ongoing search for new methods of space travel that are faster, safer, cheaper and easier. A rich variety of new ideas in propulsive systems are being proposed some of which are beyond current technological capabilities to implement. In a popular Egyptian morning program "Sabah El kheir Ya Masr"(Good Morning Egypt), Mustafa expressed her appreciation to her faculty and university staff for providing materials, resources and support. She, however, lamented that there is no funding for a department of space science in her university and in Egyptian universities in general. She said this prevents development and research in the field of space technology. She said: “Departments of astronomy and physics are only available. Although they are related to space sciences but unfortunately they aren’t into the specific field of my invention and they can’t practically test or implement it.” According Gizmodo, Aisha's new system exploits the quirky laws of quantum physics which state that in spite of appearances, space really is not vacuum but that it is a seething cauldron of fundamental particle interactions involving creation and destruction of "virtual particles." Mustafa believes it is possible to use vacuum energy fields to create propulsion and build spacecraft propulsion systems that need little or no fuel to travel in space. According to Fast Company, Mustafa is betting on exploiting quantum effects involved in dynamic Casimir effect and the Casimiri-Polder force. She uses two silicon metallic plates in a vacuum, "like capacitors placed a few micrometers apart." The plates interact with the virtual photons in the quantum field and generate a net force that is either an attraction or a repulsion depending on their arrangement.According to OnIslam.net, the invention is similar to a hypothetical concept of jet propulsion termed “Differential Sail," proposed by NASA’s Marc G. Millis. Fast Company reports that Aisha's university was so impressed with her new invention that it assisted her with a patent application. OnIslam.net reports that Mustafa's supervisor, Dr. Ahmed Fikry, who heads the physics department in Sohag University, said “I expect this invention to be highly beneficial in several fields and areas of industries."The President of Sohag University, Dr. Nabil Nour Eldin Abdellah, said the university facilitates "science clubs" for creative students. He said: “Once we knew about her (Mustafa’s) invention, we encouraged her and provided her with the budget needed through the Science Club for innovative students in the university. This is the case with any other creative student."According to OnIslam.net, with the retirement of NASA's space |
.component.spec.ts
│ ├── app.component.ts
│ ├── app.module.ts
│ ├── index.ts
│ └── shared
│ └── index.ts
├── assets
├── environments
│ ├── environment.prod.ts
│ └── environment.ts
├── favicon.ico
├── index.html
├── main.ts
├── polyfills.ts
├── styles.css
├── test.ts
├── tsconfig.json
└── typings.d.ts
To check that the project has been initiated correctly you can now start up the web server by using the ng command in the following way:
$ ng serve
The application should then be accessible at http://localhost:4200 in your browser.
Installing Firebare and AngularFire 2
Now we need to add the Firebase and the AngularFire 2 library as dependencies to our project:
$ npm install angularfire2 firebase --save
By using the --save flag both dependencies are automatically added to the project’s package.json file.
Preparing Your Application for Firebase
Firebase Configuration
The Firebase configuration consists for four key-value pairs. The following information needs to be provided:
apiKey
authDomain
databaseURL
storageBucket
The easiest way to get all four pieces of configuration information is to go to the Firebase console, open the project view and use the Link Add Firebase to your web app. From the pop up which is opened you can copy a code snipped containing the configuration settings for your specific Firebase project.
Take the settings and paste it into a new file environments/firebase.config.ts in the following form:
export const firebaseConfig = { apiKey: '<your-key>', authDomain: '<your-project-authdomain>', databaseURL: '<your-database-URL>', storageBucket: '<your-storage-bucket>' };
Also add the following two lines of code at the bottom of your typings.d.ts file in the root folder of the Angular 2 project:
declare var require: any;
declare var module: any;
and add the types property to the compilerOptions configuration object in tsconfig.json.
{ "compilerOptions": { [...], "types": [ "firebase" ] } }
Importing AngularFireModule
To make use of the Angular Fire 2 library we need to import AngularFireModule first. Add the following import statement to your app.module.ts:
import { AngularFireModule } from 'angularfire2';
Use the module factory method initializeApp from AngularFireModule to create a Angular Fire 2 module which is based on our specific Firebase configuration:
@NgModule({ imports: [ BrowserModule, AngularFireModule.initializeApp(firebaseConfig) ], declarations: [ AppComponent ], bootstrap: [ AppComponent ] })export class AppModule {}
Inject AngularFire in Your Component
The AngularFire service is part of the AngularFireModule and now can be injected into your components. Switch to app.component.ts and add the following import statement first:
import { AngularFire, FirebaseListObservable } from 'angularfire2';
Second, inject AngularFire into that component:
@Component({ selector: 'app-root', templateUrl: 'app.component.html', styleUrls: ['app.component.css'] }) export class AppComponent { constructor(af: AngularFire) { } }
Use AngularFire to Get Access To Firebase Data – Bind To A Firebase List
With the AngularFire service injected in our component we can now access Firebase data by using that service. First we need to declare an object of type FirebaseListObservable<any[]>. With this observable we’re able to bind to a Firebase list and receive an array of data, like you can see in the following example:
import { Component } from '@angular/core';import { AngularFire, FirebaseListObservable } from 'angularfire2'; @Component({ selector: 'app-root', templateUrl: 'app.component.html', styleUrls: ['app.component.css'] }) export class AppComponent { items: FirebaseListObservable<any[]>; constructor(af: AngularFire) { this.items = af.database.list('/items'); } }
To bind to a list we’re using the database.list() method from the AngularFire service. We need to pass the name of the list endpoint as a string to the method call. By using the string ‘/items’ we’re binding to the items list. The resulting FirebaseListObservable<any[]> object is stored in the items variable which is of the same type.
To print out the data received through the observable we can use the following template code:
<ul> <li class="text" *ngFor="let item of items | async"> {{item.$value}} </li> </ul>
Here we’re using the async pipe to subscribe to the Observable which is available in items. Using this pipe ensured that we’re getting the latest value which has been emitted. The result can be seen in the following:
To experience the realtime behavior of the database you can now go back to the Firebase console, open the Database view and add another data element:
The output of our sample application is updated immediately without the need to reload the page:The Denver Arrangement
Because there really are so many varieties, we’ve picked only the neighborhoods closest to the city center.
LoDo: Ah, the stately orchid. Lower Downtown (get it now, dontcha?) perches on the park-lined Platte River. Close to Union Station, Coors Field, MCAD (the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver), and the Auraria Campus (an educational facility housing three public universities), LoDo leaves little for want. Parking is crazy, and crazy expensive, so find a complex with a private garage if possible. Unsurprisingly, this zone has the highest rates in town. Don’t get your hopes up for anything less than $900/month for a studio, $1650/month for a two-bedroom unit. This is also a relatively pet-friendly area. Unless your beloved Fido is smaller than the average carry-on luggage item—and you don’t mind paying an extra fee—look elsewhere.
Uptown/Capitol Hill: Each portion of this neighborhood borders the central business district, making the iris a perfect example for it. Irises look a lot like orchids, but (due to being more common), they brag a slightly lower price tag. $800-$900/month for a spacious studio to enjoy the urban residential feel of Uptown. If you care to mix this sentiment with historic architecture; and higher population density, skip south to Capitol Hill. Cap Hill has a young, energetic, pedestrian-friendly feel—although if you’re not looking to extend your college years into professional adulthood, you may find the neighbors tiresome, despite their “eccentricity.” $700/month all-inclusive studio near Wax Trax Records is the low end. More pet friendly than LoDo.
Five Points: You’d do well to call this one the desert sage. Its close-in location makes this neighborhood prime fodder for urban renewal. Great access to downtown with a fraction of the action. (In other words: perfect for commuters!) Lots of stand-alone homes converted to duplexes and single-accommodation apartments, some of which go for as little as $825/month (for a whole house?!), but some as much as $1500/month (2nd floor converted executive condo). Expect the deposit to match the monthly rent.
East Denver: The multicolored gazania represents this strange conglomeration of communities. Park Hill is the first intentional interracial neighborhood, and Congress Park was gentrified long ago. The latter is jealously close to the Botanic Gardens and Cheesman Park. Both neighborhoods are vying to be considered part of the proper “midtown” section of Denver, and new apartment complexes will reflect this competitive stance in their rates. A two-bedroom townhouse in Park Hill ought to run you $1400-$1600/month, but that will likely include a pool and gym access. It’s easier to find single apartments in Congress Park, which should cost $600-$800/month and require a 12-month lease.
Washington Park and Baker: Washington Park is as all-American as the sunflower. Imagine “Life is Good”-clad parents training for marathons with their wee ones in the stroller, careening down a beautiful, tree-lined street. This perfect portrait is gonna cost, ya, though: expect around $800-1000/month for a single duplex apartment complete with washer and dryer and an assigned parking spot. The historic Baker neighborhood, on the other hand, sits west of Washington Park and boasts dive bars and dirty music venues. Here’s South Denver’s veritable cactus. It doesn’t get any edgier than setting off to thrift the S. Broadway strip. $650/month for a two bedroom apartment sets the bottom range; a single room in a renovated Victorian, however, can cost you that much alone.
Lincoln Park: The dahlia of Denver, Lincoln Park is awesome. Revitalization work is well underway which would turn this close-in neighborhood into a cultural hub. That said, it’s not there yet…So be wary and check the digs out thoroughly. Inexpensive rent here (some single units $500/month), but you’re usually looking at an older complex.
Highlands: At long last! The coveted rose. The Highlands enclave has become incredibly popular in recent years, as it combines the amenities of the other close-in neighborhoods without the parking problem of LoDo.. Sitting just across I-25 from downtown, Highlands consists of pockets of boutiques and pubs, solid restaurants with local flavor and heaps of diverse housing. $800/month for a one bedroom luxury apartment; $1400/month for a three-bedroom ranch house. And everyone has a dog or baby, according to his or her preference!
The best way to find an apartment in Denver is simply to go meandering in this sunny wonderland yourself. Just don’t get distracted and try to bed down in one of the many glorious parks—that’s still illegal, even in Denver. Good luck, dear hopeful Coloradoan. Recall the words of our patron saint: “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy…”
Now go getcha some!DALLAS, Texas - The number of people sickened by a food-borne illness linked to some Blue Bell ice cream products has grown to include three others in Texas, according to federal health authorities.
Dr. Brendan Jackson, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said tests confirmed that three people in Texas had a similar strain of listeria previously found in five others at a hospital in Wichita, Kansas.
Three of the five in Kansas have died and health officials there say listeriosis, also known as listeria, might have been a contributing factor in the deaths.
The three in Texas also were hospitalized at some point from 2011 to 2014 for unrelated problems when they developed listeria, the CDC said in a statement. They apparently became ill when they ate Blue Bell ice cream produced at the company's plant in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
The manufacturing plant, one of four operated by the company, has been temporarily closed.
The Texas Health Department issued a statement that read, "The Texas patients were infected with a Listeria monocytogenes strain that is highly related to chocolate ice cream cups made at the Oklahoma plant. That is not a common strain. The cases are related to products made at that plant."
Preliminary tests indicate another three people hospitalized at some point from 2010 to 2012 appear to have a similar strain of listeria as the others, according to the CDC, but further testing is necessary before confirming a connection. Jackson said one of those patients was hospitalized in Texas while the other two were admitted elsewhere.
"We're continuing to monitor for additional cases and ensuring we're taking all actions needed to protect public health," he said.
Baylor Dr. Peter Hotez says he worries about the potential ongoing effects of two major recalls associated with listeria.
"It can produce gastroenteritis, it can produce meningitis but often it can be non-specific and that's especially worrisome for pregnant women because even if they have a nonspecific illness they can pass it on to their babies and even a severe illness can cause miscarriage or still birth."
Blue Bell Creameries on Tuesday announced a third product recall as a result of the contamination. The company, based in Brenham, Texas, has recalled more than 25 of its products since last month.
"Our prayers and sympathies are with the families who have lost loved ones or who have suffered illnesses that may have been complicated by listeriosis," the company said in a statement Thursday. "The fact that our products may be linked to these events is very distressing to us. We are sorry for this news and we are doing everything possible to determine the cause of the outbreak."
Company officials said they're working with federal health inspectors to resolve the matter.
Listeria is a life-threatening infection caused by eating food contaminated with bacteria called Listeria monocytogenes, the CDC said. The disease primarily affects pregnant women and their newborns, older adults, and people with immune systems weakened by cancer, cancer treatments, or other serious conditions.
The Texas Rangers baseball club said Wednesday that they won't offer Blue Bell at their upcoming homestand against the Houston Astros. The Astros previously said Blue Bell wouldn't be offered on their opening day earlier this week. Large retailers such as Walmart have in recent weeks either pulled the items included in the recalls or removed all Blue Bell products from their shelves.
Copyright 2015 by Click2Houston.com. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Liverpool are preparing for life after Kenny Dalglish.
As the list of senior executives axed by the club’s American owners reaches six, with the imminent removal of legal adviser Nathalie Wignall, there is a growing belief inside Anfield that King Kenny’s days as manager are numbered.
John W Henry and Tom Werner, who head the Fenway Sports Group, will meet Dalglish once the final game of the season has been played at Swansea today.
Dalglish already knows that the owners are planning a change in direction regarding the club’s transfer policy.
They have spent £120million allowing Dalglish to recruit Andy Carroll, Stewart Downing, Jordan Henderson, Charlie Adam and Jose Enrique.
Now FSG want to target emerging talent. Although they are prepared to invest another £20million on new players this summer, they will want four young faces for that outlay.
On the brink
Kenny Dalglish has discovered over the past 16 months that even Liverpool legends can’t turn back the clock.
Fenway Sports Group’s decision to return King Kenny to the Anfield throne he had abdicated 20 years ago was hailed as a masterstroke by fans who needed new owners they could trust, after the ill-fated reign of Tom Hicks and George Gillett had torn the club apart.
Dalglish guided Liverpool to a first trophy in six years with a Carling Cup victory over Cardiff and led his team out for last week’s FA Cup final – but the most successful club in English football is now a mid-table side.
If the 18-times champions suffer a 14th defeat of the season at Swansea today, they will have lost as many Premier League games as they have won.
In the 50 years since Bill Shankly brought the club back to the top flight, they have never finished lower than the eighth position they currently occupy. And after backing Dalglish to the tune of £120 million in the transfer market, something is set to give.
Dalglish is less than 12 months into the three-year contract he signed last summer and there have been suggestions the owners will ask him to take on a new role as an Anfield figurehead.
(Image: John Powell / Getty)
FSG have already decided to cut the club’s budget for new recruits to around £20m this summer.
But whoever is in charge will be tasked with bringing in four players laced with potential.
The Americans believe it could take up to five years to build a team capable of closing the gap on the two Manchester clubs that currently stands at 34 points.
Director of football Damien Comolli has already paid the price in a cull that has claimed head of sports science Peter Bruckner, head of customer experience Jean Crisp and Steven Turner, the head of the club’s international soccer schools.
Last Friday, Ian Cotton, Liverpool’s respected head of communications for the past 16 years, was also removed from his post.
And Sunday Mirror Sport has learned that in-house legal counsel Nathalie Wignall is set to follow. John W Henry and Tom Werner, who head FSG, feel Dalglish must take some of the blame.
The 62-year-old Scot insisted when Comolli departed that the decisions to sign under-
performing players like Andy Carroll, Stewart Downing, Jordan Henderson, Charlie Adam and Jose Enrique were taken by him.
(Image: Reuters)
And recently he has admitted that giving Luis Suarez his unequivocal support during the Uruguayan striker’s race row with Patrice Evra was an error of judgment.
Dalglish, criticised for refusing to condemn his forward after the FA had handed down an eight-match ban for racially abusing Evra, was undermined completely when Suarez refused to shake the Manchester United captain’s hand at Old Trafford in February, despite assuring his manager he would.
Both Cotton and Wignall have paid for the Suarez debacle with their jobs.
Only last week, at the AGM of Liverpool’s shirt sponsors Standard Chartered, company chairman Sir John Peace was asked by shareholders to justify the £20million-a-year deal given Dalglish’s handling of the Suarez affair.
With Liverpool unable to cash in on Champions League qualification for a third successive year, the need for cash from commercial ventures is even more vital.
FSG fear that has been made harder by a manager who struggles with the demands of 24-hour-a-day media.
On Friday, Dalglish took part in a match between the club’s coaching staff and local journalists.
Even at 61, the man who graced Liverpool’s No.7 shirt cut an impressive figure on the pitch.
But time is ticking on how long Dalglish has left in the dug-out.Traditionally, a British ambassador needs royal documents of accreditation from the Court of St James’s in order to represent Her Majesty abroad. There’s none of that fuss for Nigel Farage: he has appointed himself ambassador to the United States – as a stepping stone to some higher office, such as Foreign Secretary Farage, Prime Minister Farage or perhaps, if The Donald should suggest it in a 3am tweet, King Nigel. Not on the basis of such fussy old paraphernalia as a great seal, a royal charter or (perish the thought) elected office of any kind, but simply by flashing a photograph at us.
In the age of the selfie and the celebrity presidency, Farage has invented a new source of political authority. It dazzles and blinds, more than 10 days after it was taken, as it shines its power-drunk bully-light into every corner of the news. It is the picture that defines 2016, drooled one befuddled commentator.
At this rate, it will define 2017 too, for the photograph that stirred the confusions of a stupefied Britain on the weekend after America’s psychotic meltdown of an election shows no sign of slipping away into memory. Usually photographs record history; this one is making it, for Farage is successfully using it as a badge and instrument of power, like a barbarian chief returning to his Thanet village with a tablet from the Roman emperor that appoints him ruler of the Britons.
The sheer freakishness of the image enhances its grip on us, for we can’t stop staring at this monstrously matey exchange of bonhomie in a lift lined with gold. Trump’s almost beatific post-electoral grin is matched by The Nigel’s starstruck guffaw. They’re high rollers headed for the penthouse, where the casino has provided them with entertainment for the night – or whatever other cinematic image comes to mind.
To me, this is somewhere between a Martin Scorsese film and a scene from the heyday of the Third Reich. Hermann Goring would have loved that gold elevator. But if this year has taught us anything, it is that you can’t assume your revulsion is universally shared. Maybe to many this is a gleeful, and even joyous, picture of two buddies having a well-earned celebration.
Love it or loathe it, Britain can’t stop looking at it. News sites whipped it out again this week like Farage’s personal Ultra Gold American Express Card (bonuses include lording it over HM government) after the president-elect attempted to appoint him by tweet as our man in Washington.
In dwelling on this potent picture, this virile vision, we are rushing after pied piper Farage, dancing gladly to his tune. For Mr Brexit loves this picture – and he understands it too. The gold is hilarious. It makes everyone look. What really matters, however, is the intimacy it parades: the proof that he and America’s scarily unpredictable new president are not just allies but real and close friends. This is what makes the picture so much more than just a nice souvenir of a visit to Trump Tower. It has become Farage’s Trump card, an actual instrument of political power that he has played with frightening brilliance.
When will we wake up to the fact that Nigel Farage is a political genius? He has used this photograph like a Machiavel of the digital age to ruthlessly undermine Britain’s prime minister and Cabinet just a few months after the entire government was turned upside down by the Brexit vote he claims credit for. What’s his game? Where does it lead?
The truly sinister thing about this photograph that is empowering Nigel Farage so much is that he personally produced it. He went to New York, got into Trump’s elevator, made sure they posed for a picture together – and released it on his Twitter account. It first appeared in a tweet by Farage at 3.38pm on 12 November in which he smugly goaded Britain’s elected politicians with his proximity to the most powerful man on Earth.
Farage is understandably delighted with the picture’s progress. Writing a fuming attack this week on the May government’s supposed folly in refusing to obey an order from Trump Tower – in the far-right website Breitbart, naturally – he boasts about it: “I have said since the now famous photograph with Donald Trump ten days ago that I would do anything to help our national interest and to help cement ties...”
Farage was first to release the photograph, and he’s still harping on it as incontrovertible evidence that he is the president-elect’s good friend while conventional politicians who have been shy of acclaiming a man who spewed out hatred and bigotry in his campaign look wrongfooted: look, the old parliamentary politics has failed – it’s time for the winners in the great gold elevator to have a go.
For Farage, this picture is gold. But what does it mean when the normal rules of power can be bypassed with a photograph of two guys in a lift? Is there anything inherently wrong with grounding a claim to political importance in a photograph of yourself next to Donald Trump?
The German social theorist Max Weber distinguished between “rational-legal” authority, which corresponds to Theresa May’s government in this extraordinary situation; “traditional” authority, which is embodied in Britain both by the monarchy and the venerable traditions of our parliamentary democracy; and the third kind, the wild card: the dangerous, unpredictable force that is “charismatic” authority.
Nigel Farage has already done a lot to destabilise rational-legal and traditional authority in Britain with the “revolution” he sees in Brexit. But it’s not enough. Now he is calling politics a “cesspit” and catastophically undermining what is supposed to be the Brexit government. What will be good enough? When will he stop?
Charismatic authority revels in the glamour and irrationality of visual images, just as it revels in emotion, stridency, fear and loathing. In a world cut free from conventional rules, the charismatic leader uses bizarre, unprecedented symbols of power to undermine the dullards who cling to outworn expectations. Farage waves his picture about from his balcony as he rants about patriotism and the “negative” politicians who don’t yet get it: there is a new dawn.
That “famous” photograph. Two men in a golden elevator. A lot of people are scared of Donald Trump, yet looking at the way he has used this photograph to humiliate British democracy, I am almost more scared of his laughing friend.Mahinder Singh Pujji, a 22-year-old Indian man, was queuing to see a film at his local cinema. The man in front of him saw his turban and uniform – Pujji was a member of the RAF – and said: “Sir, you don’t have to stand in the queue.” He ushered him to the front of the line. No one grumbled and the woman working in the ticket office, again seeing his turban and wings, refused to accept money for the ticket.
This incident would be surprising and heart-warming if it occurred today; in fact, the film that Pujji was queuing to see was Gone with the Wind, and the year was 1940. What makes this story so powerful is that it challenges established narratives about south Asian migration to Britain: it shows us that years before Commonwealth immigration there had been migrants from the subcontinent; it questions the assumption that migrants were always treated poorly, and it reminds us of the contribution many made.
South Asians and the Shaping of Britain excavates the archives for letters, diaries, books and articles relating to this subject. Taking the year 1870 – the zenith of empire – as the starting point and traversing 80 years to 1950 – a period that witnessed two world wars, the decline of empire, the fight for Indian independence and Partition – the book demonstrates that Britain has a more complex multicultural heritage than is usually acknowledged.
I knew about the role Indians played during the two world wars, for example, but I had no idea that in the period covered here, 80 different south Asian authors published 180-plus books in Britain.
This one builds on Rozina Visram’s landmark histories Ayahs, Lascars and Princes and Asians in Britain. But what makes reading it a more visceral experience is the first-hand accounts and documents: a book review by Oscar Wilde from 1890 of the Indian poet Manmohan Ghose, an extraordinary photograph of Sophia Duleep Singh – the mixed-race daughter of the deposed Maharajah of the Punjab – standing outside Hampton Court Palace in 1913 in a long dark coat and hat selling a copy of The Suffragette. Two years later Ludder Singh, an Indian soldier fighting in the trenches during the First World War, writes to his brother back home: “Bodies were lying on bodies like stones in heaps”; “When a man dies in the world I and you think it is a great event, but here in this war corpses are piled one upon another so that they cannot be counted.”
The book also confirms that many of the challenges facing multiculturalism have historical precedents. There is a chilling account from a report by Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police in 1938, when a Muslim organisation “ceremoniously committed to the flames” a book by H G Wells that was deemed offensive to the Prophet Mohammed. This was followed by a march and a demand that the author retract his comments and apologise – and that the book be banned.
It would have been an easy trap for the book to have focused only on the lives of elites who would inevitably leave a more substantial record. But there are tantalising glimpses into what it must have been like to have been an ordinary Indian in Britain in the days before that was a more common sight.
Hindustan Community House was formed in 1940 to meet the needs of Indians in east London. The first report from the house revealed that 50 men lived in it and 50 more had eaten there. “The house has been able to accommodate shipwrecked sailors and Indians stranded in London,” it states. Indian and English food was provided and there were two classes in English held every week night – a class in English and Urdu for Indian children was discontinued owing to the evacuation of the children. The house also had a gramophone with Indian records and Indian newspapers for the men to read.
The names of the men are long forgotten but reading that report one can almost imagine the scene: the men, far from home, debating and gossiping, while the sound of old Bollywood floats through the air.
For descendants of south Asian immigrants it is not always easy to find a secure footing in Britain. The idea of home is necessarily complex and that may be why I found reading the book to be such an emotional experience.
The argument made in this book is that the story of south Asians in Britons is part of a larger story about the making of modern Britain. In a time when questions of Britishness and belonging have arguably never been so contested, in an environment when both sides seem happy to make their arguments unburdened by evidence South Asians and the Shaping of Britain is essential reading for anyone interested in Britishness and for anyone who wants to learn some surprising and hopeful answers to the vexed question of who we are.
South Asians and the Shaping of Britain: 1870-1950
ed by Ruvani Ranasinha et al
407pp, Manchester University Press, t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515
Sarfraz Manzoor is speaking at the Telegraph Hay Festival on Sunday, May 26
Follow Telegraph Books on TwitterIn anticipation for the imminent sign off of Windows 8 to RTM, stuff continues to leak out about the changes we can expect to see but aren't yet available in the Release Preview. Today, it's a Start screen tweak that appears to allow pictures instead of just colors.
Thanks to a posting over at Win8China, who has already leaked a ton of Windows 8 news in recent months, we can see a poorly taken screenshot of the Start screen settings which appears to allow more complex patterns as well as flat colors for the background of the Start screen. It doesn't look like an actual image can be selected from another source, but that will all become clearer once we're able to review the final build for ourselves.
For comparison, below is the current Start screen settings in the Release Preview.
As you can see, this really only allowed for a few patterns and colors.
So, it looks like we'll be in for more than a few surprises when Windows 8 becomes available, all we can say is that the "Release Preview" is looking more and more like a true Beta, rather than a Release Preview, what with all the changes and all.
Thanks Faikee for the tip in our forums; click through for another few screenshots.
Source: Win8ChinaTaoiseach Enda Kenny’s decision to increase the number of junior ministers from 15 to 18 has been strongly criticised by outgoing Labour leader Joan Burton.
She said it was remarkable the number of junior ministers had been increased by three, and was fast approaching the record of 20 set by former taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
Ms Burton said it was particularly disappointing that despite the fact that there were 18 Ministers of State there was no room for an arts minister.
Announcing the appointments in the Dáil, Mr Kenny said four of the 18 posts were attached to the Department of Health indicating the Government’s priority in that area.
Of the 18 appointees, four are women, with Catherine Byrne, Marcella Corcoran Kennedy and Helen McEntee joining chief whip Regina Doherty in the junior ministerial ranks.
A popular promotion was that of long-serving Cork East TD David Stanton, who was given special responsibility for Equality, Immigration, and Integration at the Department of Justice.
He was chairman of the justice committee in the last Dáil which was widely regarded as one of the most effective Oireachtas committees.
One the surprise appointments was that of Limerick County TD Patrick O’Donovan as junior minister for Tourism and Sport. Another surprise was Wicklow TD Andrew Doyle who has been given responsibility for Food, Forestry and Horticulture.
Outgoing junior minister Damien English from Meath West returns as Minister of State for Housing and Urban Renewal.
The two members of the Independent Alliance appointed Ministers of State were Waterford TD John Halligan who was given responsibility for Training and Skills and Galway East TD Sean Canney who got the Office of Public Works and Flood Relief.
Mr Canney will share the post with fellow Independent Kevin “Boxer” Moran who will take over as Minister of State after a year.
The 15 appointments came on top of the three Ministers of State who were appointed when the Government was formed.
Mr Kenny’s appointments did not include Martin Heydon, John Deasy and John Paul Phelan, who had been tipped for a position.
The full list is as follows:
Paul Kehoe: Minister of State for Defence
Regina Doherty: Government Chief Whip (Department of the Taoiseach)
Finian McGrath: Minister of State for Disability
Dara Murphy: Minister of State for European Affairs, Data Protection and EU Single Digital Market
Eoghan Murphy: Minister of State for Financial Services, eGovernment and Public Procurement
Patrick O’Donovan: Minister of State for Tourism and Sport
Damien English: Minister of State for Housing and Urban Renewal
Séan Kyne: Minister of State for Gaeltacht Affairs and Natural Resources
Andrew Doyle: Minister of State for Food, Forestry and Horticulture
Pat Breen: Minister of State for Employment and Small Business
John Halligan: Minister of State for Training and Skills
Helen McEntee: Minister of State for Mental Health and Older People
Marcella Corcoran Kennedy: Minister of State for Health Promotion
Sean Canney: Minister of State for the Office of Public Works and Flood Relief
Joe McHugh: Minister of State for the Diaspora and Overseas Development Aid
Michael Ring: Minister of State for Regional Economic Development
Catherine Byrne: Minister of State for Communities and National Drugs Strategy
David Stanton: Minister of State for Justice with special responsibility for Equality, Immigration and IntegrationDota 2 Delayed To 2012 By Pete Haas Random Article Blend Dota 2 will not arrive by the end of the year. Fortunately, though, the beta isn't too far away.
Valve boss Gabe Newell told Dota 2 is now expected in early 2012. The word "expected" leaves some wiggle room. Best not to get your hopes up for a 2011 release, though.
Nonetheless, the public will get to try out the game soon thanks to the beta. GameSpot reports that a closed beta for DOTA 2 will begin shortly after the end of Dota 2 tournament currently underway at GamesCom 2011. Valve is also planning to hold an open beta at a later date.
Valve opened up DOTA 2's beta earlier this week. There's not much to the sign-up process; you just need to get a Steam account and visit the
Dota 2 is a team-based strategy game based on the Warcraft III custom scenario Defense of the Ancients. Players control powerful Hero units and work together to destroy a special structure in their enemy's base while preventing their opponents from doing the same to them. There are also role-playing game elements mixed in, with the Hero units growing more powerful over time as they defeat enemies.
This game will be the first strategy Valve has ever developed. To make sure their first foray into that genre is solid, they've enlisted the services of IceFrog. IceFrog is one of the developers of the original WC3 scenario. Oh, Valve, you've done it again. It seems their strategy gamewill not arrive by the end of the year. Fortunately, though, the beta isn't too far away.Valve boss Gabe Newell told GameSpot in a soon-to-be-published interview thatis now expected in early 2012. The word "expected" leaves some wiggle room. Best not to get your hopes up for a 2011 release, though.Nonetheless, the public will get to try out the game soon thanks to the beta. GameSpot reports that a closed beta forwill begin shortly after the end of the International. The International is a $1 milliontournament currently underway at GamesCom 2011. Valve is also planning to hold an open beta at a later date.Valve opened up sign-ups for's beta earlier this week. There's not much to the sign-up process; you just need to get a Steam account and visit the official website is a team-based strategy game based on thecustom scenario. Players control powerful Hero units and work together to destroy a special structure in their enemy's base while preventing their opponents from doing the same to them. There are also role-playing game elements mixed in, with the Hero units growing more powerful over time as they defeat enemies.This game will be the first strategy Valve has ever developed. To make sure their first foray into that genre is solid, they've enlisted the services of IceFrog. IceFrog is one of the developers of the originalscenario. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topDavid Cameron has said that he still “very much supports” Turkey joining the European Union, despite his Government's inability to control numbers of EU migrants coming to the UK.
The Prime Minister was quizzed about his support for Turkey’s accession to the EU during a visit to Turkey to meet the country’s Prime Minister and President.
Mr Cameron said he had discussed Turkey’s accession to the EU during talks in Ankara on Tuesday afternoon with Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish Prime Minister.
The visit was his first since 2010 when he told the Turks the backed the country’s goal of joining the EU. He said then that he wanted to “make the case” for Turkey’s EU membership.
Asked if he still felt that way despite his Government’s inability to control inward migration from EU countries and bring net migration down to the tens of thousands of people, he said that he had discussed it again with Turkish Prime Minister.
He said: “In terms of Turkish membership of the EU, I very much support that.
“That’s a longstanding position of British foreign policy which I support. We discussed that again in our talks today”.
In a speech at the Turkish parliament in Ankara in July 2010, Mr Cameron said: “I’m here to make the case for Turkey's membership of the EU. And to fight for it.”
He added that he wanted to "pave the road" for Turkey to join the EU, saying the country was "vital for our economy, vital for our security and vital for our diplomacy".
A European Union without Turkey at its heart was “not stronger but weaker... not more secure but less... not richer but poorer”.
Mr Cameron was in talks with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, at the Ak Saray presidential palace on Tuesday night.
Earlier Mr Cameron and Mr Davutoglu had agreed further and deeper intelligence between Ankara and London about British Jihadis who had travelled to fight for the Islamic State in neighbouring Syria.
Speaking at the press conference, Mr Cameron said that both Turkey and the UK were “taking the steps that we believe we should” to deal |
, think that “Wizards” is pretty silly moniker for a collection of world class athletes. But I figure that if we’re not going to change the name back to the Bullets, then we might as well take ownership of the name that we do have. That’s why my friend and I went to last season’s home opener on Halloween dressed as Wizards. As in actual wizards; with hats and beards and a staff that got confiscated by security. It was incredibly silly, but it was one of the best times I’ve had at a game. I think the team should encourage more things like that. We have a weird mascot, so let’s have fun with it.
For starts, every year the game that falls on or closest to Halloween has to be costume night, where everyone comes dressed up as their favorite Wizards. This past year I was Gandalf, but let’s fill the stands with some Harry Potters and Hermione Grangers and Merlins, etc. Bonus points for wearing a jersey over your costume. Next, we should build out G-Wiz’s backstory. He must be some sort of wizard, but what kind of powers does he have, what kind of quests has he been on, what the hell species is he? Someone needs to answer these questions. And one more suggestion: Since the NBA is making new alternate jerseys each year, can we get something wizard inspired? Like maybe the team can warm up in hooded cloaks for a couple games.
Bandwagon Shaming: Among the worse symptoms of the Wizard’s underachievement this past decade is that we have a lot of bandwagon fans in DC. It’s easy enough to understand where they’re coming from: they haven’t had a home team to root for in the NBA playoffs so they pick another team to support. Still, it’s pretty lame when they just pick the best team to root for, and even more shameful when they’re rooting for those teams against the home squad. We need to call these fugazi’s out. We need to remind everyone that the only fans that get respect are loyal fans. We need to shame the bandwagon fans clogging up the Verizon Center.
The Wizards were one of the first teams to get into bandwagon shaming, with the Bandwagon Cam on the jumbotron a few years ago. I say let’s take this a step farther. Let’s rig the nightly seat upgrade promotion so that a Warriors groupie wins, but then let’s upgrade them to the last row in the 400 section. Let’s raise the stake on the Bandwagon Cam and show losers in Cavs jerseys on the jumbotron with the nerdy Snapchat filter. Let’s send G-Wiz out into the stands to prank clowns wearing LA Clippers gear. Or we can give a kid in a KD jersey a chance to play someone 1-on-1 for a prize, but then have him faceoff against one of our D-League players. This may sound like a harsh way to treat these confused fans, but the truth is that we’ll be doing it for their own good.
Bonus Thoughts:
-A Wizards branded sports bar near the Verizon Center that fans have a place to come for road games or before and after home games to kick it with other fans. Maybe they can set it up so that every now and then players will roll through after the game to interact with fans.
-Let people send SnapChats to the team and pick a few of the best ones to display on the jumbotron or the CSN broadcast.
–Bring back G-Man.
-Fire Ernie Grunfeld!Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption David Cameron: ''The buck stops right here''
David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg have called for the Press Complaints Commission to be scrapped following its handling of the News of the World (NoW) phone hacking scandal.
The prime minister called the watchdog "ineffective and lacking in rigour" and demanded "a new system entirely".
The Labour leader said the organisation was a "toothless poodle".
But public members of the PCC said the government could not simply order its replacement as it was independent.
Former NoW editor Andy Coulson has been arrested by police investigating corruption and phone hacking claims.
Mr Coulson worked as Mr Cameron's communications chief after resigning from the NoW in 2007, following the jailing of the paper's royal editor and a private investigator over phone hacking.
Mr Miliband said the prime minister had "serious questions" to answer about this decision, which he called an "appalling error of judgement".
Tony Blair, who was prime minister at the time of the alleged phone hacking, described the scandal as "beyond disgusting" and called for a major public debate about the media's role in society.
'Institutionally conflicted'
Mr Cameron said he took "full responsibility" for hiring Mr Coulson, who quit his government job earlier this year, saying he had decided to "give him a second chance".
"People will be able to judge whether that was the right or the wrong thing to do," he said.
It was established to be a watchdog. But it has been exposed as a toothless poodle. It is time to put it out of its misery Ed Miliband on the PCC
Speaking in Downing Street, he added that he had sought assurances from Mr Coulson about his past activities before recruiting him but the "second chance had not worked out".
Asked about the future of former NoW editor Rebekah Brooks, who is now chief executive of the paper's parent company News International, Mr Cameron said it was not his job to "pick and choose" who ran newspapers.
But he said he understood that she had offered her resignation and "I would have accepted it".
Mr Cameron said any new press regulatory body should be "truly independent", unlike the PCC, which is part-run by newspaper editors.
In a 2009 report the PCC concluded there was no evidence it had been misled over phone hacking by the NoW, which is closing down this weekend.
The prime minister said: "Let's be honest. The Press Complaints Commission has failed. In this case, the hacking case, frankly it was pretty much absent.
"Therefore we have to conclude that it's ineffective and lacking in rigour.
"There is a strong case for saying it's institutionally conflicted because competing newspapers judge each other. As a result it lacks public confidence.
"I believe we need a new system entirely. It will be for the inquiry to recommend what the system should look like."
'Fearful'
In a speech in London, Mr Miliband said the impending closure of the NoW, following allegations that crime victims and bereaved families may have had their mobile phones hacked into, was "not the answer" to restoring trust and senior executives must "take responsibility".
He added: "For too long, the political class have been too concerned about what people in the press would think and too fearful of speaking out. We must all bear responsibility for that, my party has not been immune from it, nor has the current government."
While defending the right to a "free and buccaneering press", he said newspapers "must reform in order to protect and restore their reputation".
Mr Miliband has called for Mrs Brooks - who was editor of the NoW at the time it is alleged murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone was hacked into - to resign as chief executive of News International.
But he said in his speech that "wholesale reform of our system of regulation" was also now needed.
'Beyond disgusting'
He added: "The Press Complaints Commission has totally failed. It failed to get to the bottom of the allegations about what happened at News International in 2009.
"Its chair admits she was lied to but could do nothing about it. It was established to be a watchdog. But it has been exposed as a toothless poodle. It is time to put it out of its misery.
"The PCC has not worked. We need a new watchdog. There needs to be fundamental change."
Former Prime Minister Mr Blair said: "Anyone who has been a political leader in the last four decades knows really that there is this huge debate that should take place about the interaction between the media and politics and the media and public life."
Speaking at an event in Westminster, he said he was "vilified" for describing the press as "feral beasts" in a speech four years ago, but said the debate could now happen.
He added: "Both Ed Miliband and David Cameron are right to say this is not just about News International. It is not just about phone hacking."
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said the PCC was a "busted flush" and needed to be replaced as part of a review of the "whole architecture of the way the press operates". No newspaper could act "with complete impunity, as if there is one law for them and one law for everyone else", the Lib Dem leader added.
But independent, public members of the PCC said those calling for its demise had undervalued and underestimated its day-to-day work.
'Political scapegoat'
In a statement they said: "The government cannot simply order the replacement of the PCC, because it is an independent organisation.
"While we publicly accept the need for reform and improvement, and welcome the inquiries, our highly important work must still go on."
They said the "vital" work of staff must be "built upon, not jettisoned".
Julie Spence, a former chief constable and now a lead on the PCC panel investigating phone hacking, insisted the commission must not become "the sole political scapegoat for systemic failings across the board".
"The commission will take its share of responsibility but that is not the lion's share."
She defended the current Lay commissioners, among whom are a solicitor, a retired judge and an ex-BBC chairman.
"All are independent thinkers, none are shrinking violets and all want and are capable of being part of the solution.
"We are also advocates of a free but responsible press and are committed to achieving this," she added.
Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, said the idea that the NoW scandal had shown up a failure of ethics across the industry was "total nonsense".
The PCC, set up in 1991, includes the editors of the Mail on Sunday, Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Mirror among its 17 members.The benefits of rain on fire seem obvious. But firefighting officials were concerned Saturday about erosion and flooding threats in the Columbia River Gorge posed by several days of anticipated precipitation.
Given two weeks of steady burn activity in the Gorge, those officials believe some damage is inevitable. But it was impossible to forecast the extent Saturday, they said, in part because the Eagle Creek fire is still burning.
"Usually it takes years - four to five - for vegetation to grow back and the ground to stabilize," said Steven Sobieszczyk, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist in Portland.
Even before the Eagle Creek fire, the Gorge presented great potential for landslide, experts say. With steep hillsides denuded of ground cover and a tree crown canopy, precipitation will have an unimpeded pounding into the surface. Determing how to deal with its damaging effects, they say, will depend on figuring out first where the worst damage has occurred.
This much was clear on Saturday:
Rain could arrive in Portland and the rest of the Pacific Northwest late Sunday morning and continue through much of the week. Snow levels will be around 9,000 feet Sunday then drop to 5,000 to 6,000 feet by Monday and remain near that level through the week. For comparison: Timberline Lodge is located at 6,000 feet; Government Camp is at 4,416 feet; and Mount Defiance, the tallest point in the Columbia River Gorge, is 4,960 feet.
"We're going to have a major shift in the weather pattern," National Weather Service meteorologist Laurel McCoy said. "We've been so dry and hot these past few months."
The Eagle Creek fire, which started at about 4 p.m. Sept. 2, has burned 45,579 acres and, as of Saturday afternoon, was 32 percent contained. Dry and windy conditions were expected to grow the fire on the southern and western edges.
The rain is "going to dampen the fire," fire spokesman Dave Schmitt said, "and in many cases it's going to go a long ways to putting it out, especially along with edges in the high country where we've been reluctant to put people."
Schmitt said fire crews spent part of Saturday removing equipment from fire lines, in part because of the anticipated fire-extinguishing benefits of rain, in part because of the anticipated difficulty of moving tools and equipment on rain-slickened terrain.
Sobieszczyk, the USGS hydrologist, said the conditions in much of the Gorge are treacherous.
"There's nothing to stabilize the ground," he said. "You have water falling directly on the ground, with ash and debris. The cover is gone, the understory is burned off."
Sobieszczyk pointed to a home in Dodson, demolished in February 1996, as an example of the destructive power of a Gorge landslide. The home, 10 miles west of Cascade Locks, still stands but is uninhabitable.
The U.S. Forest Service is expected to dispatch a Burned Area Emergency Response team to map the fire's severity in all portions of the Gorge once the Eagle Creek fire is extinguished, Sobieszczyk said.
"Once you do that," he said. "You can learn where the most severe burns are."
In the meantime, the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries expects to release an updated landslide hazards map next week, said Bill Burns, geology engineer and landslide specialist.
The map, envisioned and prepared long before the Eagle Creek fire, would be valuable to land managers because it will show them up-to-date data on the most vulnerable parts of the Gorge.
The Forest Service "can bring that data into their own system," Burns said, "and see where they burn overlaps with landslides."
The Oregon Department of Transportation, meanwhile, is looking a long-term closure of a 12-mile portion of the Historic Columbia River Highway -- Larch Mountain to Ainsworth State Park -- and an uncertain timeline for reopening the eastbound lanes of Interstate 84 between Troutdale and Hood River. The interstate's westbound lanes were opened Thursday evening, though they were closed briefly Saturday morning for tree removal.
"We have the rock scalers out there. They're been out there all week," dislodging rocks in obvious need of removal, ODOT spokesman Don Hamilton said. "There are dangers and we're going to find out how the rain is going to affect them...by next week we should know more."
--Allan Brettman
503-294-5900
@allanbrettmanIt’s difficult to get a real sense of Crescent Bay, Oculus’ latest Rift prototype, because outsiders are only ever in the headset for a few minutes at a time. Having now logged a number of sessions, I’m starting to get a solid feel for the headset and have collected some of my thoughts on its subtleties.
Lenses
In my latest session with the headset, I triple checked that it uses Fresnel lenses. I was 99% sure I’d seen this when I used the headset a few weeks ago at GDC 2015, but after double-checking some photos which didn’t appear to reveal the characteristic Fresnel ridges, I was a little worried that I might have mixed memories from my time with the HTC Vive and Sony Morpheus. After my triple-check though, I’m sure. The ridges are much more fine than those on the HTC Vive, and they appear to be ‘inside’ of the lens (which could hint at a multi-element lens)—probably why no one seems to have noticed, even though Crescent Bay has been floating about since September.
In the early days of the Rift, creator Palmer Luckey didn’t think Fresnel lenses would be a good fit for the headset, as he shared on the Oculus section of Reddit:
Because they kill contrast, add a variety of annoying artifacts, and don’t actually save all that much weight. They don’t help with form factor, either; Fresnels cannot come close to matching the focal length/magnification of other optics tech.
I asked Luckey about his latest thoughts on Fresnels but he opted not to comment.
Light Rays
I’ve also reaffirmed the existence of a new visual artifact that I’ve noticed on Crescent Bay which the DK2 lacks; I believe it may due to the Fresnel lenses, as I’ve noticed the same artifact on the HTC Vive. The best words I can use to describe it are ‘light rays’. They seem to be present on high contrast scenes (especially white on black), and appear to change direction as the image moves about the scene. For the most part, the light rays seem not to be very noticeable during an average scene, but they stand out in those with high contrast.
See Also: First Hands-on – Oculus Rift Crescent Bay is Incredible
Black Smear
On a positive note, black smear, one of the DK2’s biggest display issues, has nearly been eliminated. Black smearing is the result of the display’s pixel switching time being slow when switching between true black and other colors. I’m not sure if this is a hardware fix or possibly a software approach (which could be achieved by using a 99% dark grey instead of true black), but it’s a huge improvement, especially in dark scenes. I believe I still see a faint ghosting effect, but it isn’t clear if this is related to black smear.
Display
Since the reveal of Crescent Bay at Oculus Connect in September 2014, the company has been extremely tight-lipped about the display. They still haven’t released hard details on the display tech or resolution.
I previously speculated that it was using a 2560×1440 display, as I’ve found the image quality to be comparable between Gear VR and Crescent Bay. But after seeing the HTC Vive (which has a known resolution), and the recent revelation that there are actually two displays inside the headset, my guess is that it uses the same 1200×1080 (per-eye) displays as the HTC Vive, providing a total effective resolution of 2160×1200.
Although at this resolution it has become hard to tell, I’m fairly certain that the display uses the PenTile subpixel structure, just like the DK2 and Note 4 (which powers Gear VR).
It seems to me that Crescent Bay’s saturation is lacking compared to the DK2, but it’s tough to say without a side by side comparison.
See Also: HTC Vive and SteamVR Hands-on – A Stage of Constant Presence
Ergonomics and Field of View
The improvements to Crescent Bay’s ergonomics are not quite appreciable if you’re only spending 5 minutes in the headset at a time. It’s the long-term comfort that’s important.
Crescent Bay is better fitting and much lighter than the DK2, I would guess by at least 15%. Inside the headset, there seems to be more space around your eyes, making the whole thing feel more roomy and breathable, though this comes at the cost of a larger opening around the nose which can let light into the headset, whereas the DK2 is nearly completely enclosed from the outside.
The headband seems to dodge the ears much more effectively, eliminating the irritating feeling of the DK2’s straps trying their hardest to slice off your ear during a long session.
There’s not much to say about the field of view other than that it’s noticeably larger, by about 10%. I’ll take all I can get!Unite’s members gather in beautiful Aviemore while turbulent times grip the UK.
Theresa May told us that we needed a “strong and stable government”.
But with each day that passes, this sorry shower of a government looks more and more likely to get a real P45 from the electorate.
Make no mistake, the Tories are in disarray over Brexit, heading for a no deal exit.
Unite’s position is that we will fight to save every single job put in jeopardy by a Tory Brexit, something we’re making crystal clear to every Scottish MP and MSP.
We will fight to protect jobs, pay and conditions no matter what the final Brexit deal looks like.
Irrespective of Brexit, the battles to protect working people face us every day. But we face them head on, and we win.
On Shell’s offshore platforms Unite members successfully achieved an agreement with the Wood Group. It took the first North Sea strike in a generation to make it happen but we stood firm and saw off cuts to pay and allowances of up to 30 per cent.
On Shell offshore rigs we won recognition for the medics employed by the United Health Group and won them their first pay rise for five years.
At Chivas, we stopped workers on two separate sites from being paid different rates.
In the Babcock Clyde dispute at Faslane and Coulport, our convenor and our union came under attack. We fought back and we won.
The small village of Banton certainly knows all about Unite. Our community members helped save their vital bus service from the axe by a transport company that put its profits ahead of public need.
And we can now also lay claim to the most northerly office in the whole of the trade union movement up in the Shetland Islands.
In Scotland, more than 25 per cent of companies in the hospitality sector employ workers on zero hours contracts with a significant number of workers earning below the minimum wage.
Their fight is Unite’s fight – and with our lively campaigning and our hospitality charter pushing for fundamental and decent terms, we will be their voice.
Our union supports more than 140,000 members and their families in Scotland. No other trade union embraces so many areas of the Scottish economy.
Look at the possible return of the Super Puma helicopters to the North Sea. If you are an oil worker and you want to stop a Super Puma comeback in the North Sea, join Unite – because only Unite, the biggest union offshore, can take on the companies that want to put profits before safety.
And I am proud that it was following political pressure from Unite – work done in the Scottish parliament by Neil Findlay MSP and Monica Lennon MSP – that the Scottish government introduced a pilot scheme in Aberdeenshire to provide free sanitary products in all schools.
Now, Labour-led council in North Ayrshire has also agreed to do the same in every secondary school in the area.
This is a fantastic result which will take us somewhere towards ending this unfair tax on women – and it stems from a motion carried at our previous (first ever) policy conference.
We are determined to keep on winning for working people. This weekend we are launching the Save our Scotch campaign as part of our wider manufacturing strategy.
At the heart of our campaign is the case that all Scottish Whisky should be distilled – blended – packaged – bottled – and labelled here in Scotland – ending the offshoring of whisky industry jobs.
Working people have grown weary of the calamitous government with their never-ending austerity and appalling social policies.
But I can sense that Unite’s members believe that, at long last, a change is coming.
I can see it too in the shifting attitude to the Labour party. Thanks to Jeremy’s leadership, the Scottish Labour Party is now winning seats, recovering in the polls – and growing stronger. We are looking forward to hearing from the party leader later today, as well as from the candidate Unite has backed as the next leader of the Scottish Labour party, Richard Leonard.
Unite’s affiliated and registered supporters now have a great opportunity to build on this agenda by electing a strong trade unionist – Richard – as the next leader of the Scottish Labour Party.
So while we face tremendous change on the political and industrial fronts, our focus for this conference is a clear one: to ensure that we leave the Highlands with a clear sense of what now needs doing to keep on improving the lives of our members, to keep improving the lives of people in Scotland.
Rest assured, this weekend our activists and stewards – the people who collectively make our union tick – will do what they do best. The will join together in solidarity to ensure that Unite stays the strongest, most effective voice for working people in this country.
Pat Rafferty is Unite’s Scottish secretary.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland.com's Mary Kay Cabot wrote a very interesting column about the Cleveland Browns needing to hire an experienced NFL football executive.
It was the kind of story I wrote not long after Sashi Brown was promoted to vice president in charge of football operations. At that point, the Browns were looking for a general manager type, although he would probably not have that title.
That guy was hired. It's Andrew Berry, who basically is the player personnel director. The Browns also added veteran baseball executive Paul DePodesta as chief strategy officer.
My guess is most fans would have felt better about the new front office had there been a veteran football man in charge. But the Browns went in a different direction, with Brown/DePodesta/Berry.
The strongest football voice belongs to Hue Jackson. Part of the reason Jackson took the job was he knew he'd have influence with the front office. He also believed he could work for Brown & Company.
That's how owner Jimmy Haslam set it up:
1. Brown in charge, with DePodesta and Berry combining traditional football scouting with an analytics approach.
2. Jackson would be the main voice as the leader of the football team.
3. Brown's job is the make sure everyone works together.
Remember, the last two front offices splintered. There was a break between CEO Joe Banner and GM Mike Lombardi late in the 2013 season. In 2015, the split was between GM Ray Farmer and coach Mike Pettine.
I would have kept Banner as CEO and fired Lombardi. Farmer would have been Banner's assistant as the team headed into the 2014 draft. But that's me, and that's ancient history.
Instead, Farmer and Pettine were thrown together, both rookies in their jobs. They had no prior relationship with each other. Making that work was a long shot.
WHO IS IN CHARGE?
Here is the main issue with Cabot's idea: To bring in a strong executive, he will want (and need) real power. Basically, he would be taking Brown's job, even if Brown remained in some capacity.
The new football executive would then inherit Jackson, DePodesta, Berry, etc. So if he keeps Jackson, then it's another shotgun marriage -- much like Farmer and Pettine.
It wasn't Farmer who hired Pettine. After Pettine was hired to coach, Farmer was promoted to general manager. Talk about a way to instantly create trust issues, that was it.
I don't want a repeat of something like that.
Can the team add an older executive as a consultant -- of course. Cabot claims you can add this type of football executive without blowing up the structure. But the type of person she is looking for having "final say over all personnel decisions" also should want to bring in his own scouts and probably his own coach.
I've always preferred a strong general manager who hires the coach -- and they are in it together. When a general manager inherits a coach, they can say all the right things. But it's so easy for that relationship to fall apart under strain. If you bring in a strong football guy, then he has to be given permission to hire his own scouts, coach, etc.
It can't be a halfway move.
Cabot and I have disagreed before. The biggest was the 2012 when I loved Trent Richardson in the draft. Cabot thought it was an awful idea to pick the Alabama running back, and she turned out to be right.
So I know not everything I write deserves to be inscribed on a stone tablet for posterity.
As Cabot pointed out, there are reasons for doubt about the current football setup. But after one draft and 12 games, I'm not ready to make any major change of direction with the Browns.
ABOUT THE BROWNS
1. The real front office test is coming. Adding picks, cutting players and socking away salary cap room comes under the business heading of "asset acquisition." That's a challenge, but not the hard part.
2. The Browns have an NFL-high $50 million of room on their salary cap right now. It can go higher. As I wrote last weekend, picking up Terrelle Pryor and Jamie Collins is like adding two first-round draft picks. They probably would be among the top 10 players selected if they were eligible for the 2017 college draft. Now, the mission is to sign them.
3. The Browns appear to have 13 picks in 2017. Some of these are compensatory picks, that's why I'm a bit unclear. But this much is obvious: They have two picks in each of the first two rounds.
4. If the draft were held today, the Browns would be picking 1, 12, 33 and 47. That sets them up for a franchise-changing draft if they do it right. Somewhere in this draft is a good quarterback. Can they find him?
5. The Browns also need to add to the offensive line. I think they need a big-time center, be it a free agent or draft pick. The next Alex Mack is probably in this draft.
6. So it's time for the Browns to be very serious about picking players, not simply adding picks through trades. They did both last season, trading down twice to add picks and still select their top-rated wide receiver -- Corey Coleman.
7. The last four games are important because it will help give us a better idea of how the front office performed. Coleman is over his broken hand. He has 20 catches (three TDs) in six games. Let's see what he does in the cold of December on a losing team with an uncertain quarterback situation. That's a tough assignment for any rookie, but that's also life in the NFL.
8. Then there's Robert Griffin III... we'll see.
9. The Browns are giving Jonathan Cooper a chance at guard. He was the No. 7 pick in the 2013 draft by Arizona. He had injuries and has been a big disappointment. He was waived by New England and picked up by the Browns. It's a long shot, but sometimes a player in this situation pulls himself together and has a decent career.
10. The Browns are going to look at Rashard Higgins, occasionally as a slot receiver. He caught two passes for 34 yards in the loss to the Giants. I think the rookie can be an effective receiver. The Browns need to find out.Over the past few decades, streetwear has been defined by a variety of trends. Some were fleeting in nature, others were, and have been, more prolonged in duration. In the latest episode of Highsnobiety TV, we take a look at the streetwear fads that have come, gone and persisted.
Directed by Ben Sandall and Redd Hutchinson, the video examines a few of the most decisive looks from over the years, while, concurrently, illustrating how streetwear fashion has changed course so many times since first attaching itself to punk culture.
Presented as a “day in the life,” throughout the clip you’ll find bits and pieces of Vision Street Wear, West Coast hip-hop, ’80s Stussy, maharishi, the rainbow-colored BAPE explosion, Stone Island, golden age of Supreme (2010-2012), Carhartt APC, Rick Owens-esque looks, street goth Givenchy, and even present-day normcore.
To see just how far streetwear has come, be sure to check out our London and New York December street style reports.
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Directed by: Ben Sandall & Redd Hutchinson
Director of Photography: Ben Sandall
Stylist: Atip W
Styling Assistant: Seth Footring
Casting: Ian K Bird
Models: James & Koen @ Select Models & Corbyn
1232 Shares Share Tweet Email WhatsApp* Mayer’s biggest overhaul to Yahoo’s Internet shop window
* Will import data on Facebook users, such as shared content
* Changes to be rolled out over coming days
* Can this makeover can win back Web audience?
By Nicola Leske
Feb 20 (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc is overhauling its website to incorporate features familiar to Facebook users such as a newsfeed and people’s “likes,” in CEO Marissa Mayer’s biggest product revamp since taking the helm of the ailing company last year.
Mayer, who took over in July after a procession of CEOs was shown the door, said in a blog post on Wednesday that Yahoo’s redesigned website will let users log in with their Facebook IDs to gain access to content and information shared by friends - from articles and videos to birthdays.
Yahoo is one of the world’s most-visited online properties, but revenue has declined in recent years amid competition from Google Inc and Facebook Inc.
The changes to Yahoo’s Internet shop window, which include a more streamlined mobile application for smartphones and tablets, will be rolled out over coming days. The makeover follows a new version of Yahoo mail, one of its most popular applications, introduced in December.
Analysts say the move marks a strengthening of Yahoo’s ties with Facebook, employing some of the social network’s growing data on its billion-plus users to battle Google for Web users’ attention. It remains to be seen whether the initial makeover and tweaks expected over time will win back its Internet audience.
“This is definitely an important step. The Yahoo home page is one of the most important things because it is the first interface,” said B. Riley Caris analyst Sameet Sinha. “It’s familiar in terms of layout, the newsfeed is interesting, and it will be interesting to see how it develops over time.
“The key will be how data is aggregated within Yahoo and Facebook.”
TUMULT, TRANSITION
Seven months into her tenure, former Google executive Mayer has arrested the decline of the Internet portal and won favor on Wall Street with stock buybacks among other things. But Yahoo’s forecast of a modest revenue uptick this year still pales in comparison with the growth of rivals like Google and Facebook, which are eating into its advertising market share.
“We wanted it to be familiar but also wanted it to embrace some of the modern paradigms of the Web,” Mayer said of the product revamp on NBC’s “Today” show on Wednesday.
“One thing that I really like is this very personalized newsfeed; it’s infinite and you can go on scrolling forever,” she said.
Among other problems, Yahoo has been plagued by internal turmoil that has resulted in a revolving door of CEOs. Mayer, 37, took over after a tumultuous period during which former CEO Scott Thompson resigned after less than six months on the job over a controversy about his academic credentials. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang then resigned from the board and cut ties with the company.
Thompson’s predecessor, the controversial and outspoken Carol Bartz, was fired over the phone for failing to deliver on growth. Yahoo’s 2012 revenue was $5 billion. It has been flat year over year, off from some $6.3 billion in 2010.
Yahoo shares were down 0.3 percent at $21.22 at midday on Wednesday on the Nasdaq.On Miami’s game-winning drive against Georgia Tech Saturday, coach Paul Johnson acknowledged that the play calling by defensive coordinator Ted Roof could have been better. The Hurricanes drove 85 yards in 15 plays for the go-ahead field goal in their 25-24 win, including a series of bubble screens that the Jackets couldn’t stop.
“Certainly as coaches, we need to take some of the responsibility, and some of it is execution, as well,” Johnson said Monday following the team’s first practice of the week. “The killer was missing tackles. Could we have been in something better to help us against certain plays? Probably yes. It’s something that we’ve got to look at and get better at.”
Johnson again expressed his disappointment with the defensive play in one- and two-minute situations. Miami drove 77 yards for a touchdown on its final possession of the first half and then 85 yards for the game-winning field goal at the end of the game. It has been a recurring problem through five games.
“We’ve got to do better,” Johnson said. “If you take away the last drive of the first half and the last drive of the game, we played good enough on defense to win, probably, but you can’t take those away. They’re momentum killers, and it’s not like they’re taking it over on their 30. They’re going a long way. So we worked on it, and we’ve got to continue to work on it. I’ve got to do a better job helping with it, too.”
On his radio show on 680 the Fan Monday evening, Johnson also pointed the finger at himself, saying that there are times when his play calling on offense can be better.
Johnson also noted, though, that had Tech been able to stop Miami on its fourth-and-10 play that went for a 28-yard completion after the ball bounced off cornerback Lamont Simmons’ wrist and then receiver Darrell Langham’s helmet, the Jackets would have won.
“I mean, sometimes it just happens,” he said.LONG BEACH, Calif.
“LIKE riding a horse,” said Dominique Menoud, the director general of Aviointeriors, the Italian aircraft seat manufacturer, after I had slid into the company’s new “stand-up” airplane seat on display last week at the Aircraft Interiors Expo Americas trade show. As television cameras poked around the display seats for angles, Mr. Menoud asked me, “It is very comfortable, no?”
“No,” I replied, though Mr. Menoud, beaming, seemed to take that as an assent.
I didn’t argue, but it was definitely not comfortable, although the seat, under the name SkyRider, is being promoted as resembling a horse saddle. I wasn’t buying that either. I have ridden many a horse, and the SkyRider seat is nothing like being in the saddle, whether Western or English. Sitting in one was more like being wedged, legs braced, on a stationary bicycle.
Still, I give the folks at Aviointeriors credit for finally bringing this thing out. Long rumored and joked about, the so-called stand-up airplane seat has now emerged from the imagination, the drawing board and the factory and into the bright lights. The SkyRider introduction was easily the most talked about event of the trade show.
The seat is being marketed mostly for shorter haul flights of two hours or so. But Mr. Menoud said that the seats could also be used on flights up to four hours.
Photo
Aviointeriors said the seat allowed for a new basic class of seating with a “much reduced seat pitch.” Most coach seats have 31 or 32 inches of pitch, the industry definition of the distance between one point in a seat and the same point in the seat ahead. A few discount airlines have seats with 28 inches of pitch, but the SkyRider is intended to have 23 inches or less, depending on how an airline installs it.
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Now, before a seat like the SkyRider would actually turn up on airplanes, there |
daughters also participate in the group, and her husband has always supported her, she says proudly.
Since 2000, the Quebrada Grande de Pital Women’s Association, made up of 14 women and presided over by Vargas, has reforested the land granted to them, organised environmental protection courses, set up breeding tanks for the sustainable fishing of tilapia, and engaged in initiatives in rural tourism and organic agriculture.
But the top priority has been planting trees.
A group of local men who opposed the granting of the land to the women from the start demanded that the installations and business endeavours be taken over by the community.
The women were given another piece of land, smaller than one hectare in size, but which is in the name of the Association, and their previous installations were virtually abandoned.
“I learned about the importance of forest management in a meeting I attended in Guatemala. After that, several of us travelled to Panama, El Salvador and Argentina, to find out about similar initiatives and exchange experiences,” said Vargas, who used to work as an accountant in Pital, 135 km north of San José.
The most the Association has earned in a year was 14,000 dollars. “Maybe 50,000 colones [100 dollars] sounds like very little. But for us, rural women who used to depend on our husband’s income to buy household items or go to the doctor, it’s a lot,” Vargas said.
The Association, whose members range in age from 18 to 67, is not on its own. Over the last decade, groups of Costa Rican women coming up with solutions against deforestation have emerged in rural communities around the country.
These groups took up the challenge and started to plant trees and to set up greenhouses, in response to the local authorities’ failure to take action in the face of deforestation and land use changes.
“Climate change has had a huge effect on agricultural production,” Vargas said. “You should see how hot it’s been, and the rivers are just pitiful. Around three or four years ago the rivers flowed really strong, but now there’s only one-third or one-fourth as much water.”
In San Ramón de Turrialba, 65 km east of San José, six women manage a greenhouse where they produce seedlings to plant 20,000 trees a year.
Since 2007, the six women in the Group of Agribusiness Women of San Ramón have had a contract with Costa Rica’s electric company, ICE, to provide it with acacia, Mexican cedar, and eucalyptus seedlings.
The group’s coordinator, Nuria Céspedes, explained to IPS that the initiative emerged when she asked her husband for a piece of the family farm to set up a greenhouse.
“Seven years ago, I went to a few meetings on biological corridors and I was struck by the problem of deforestation, because they explain climate change has been aggravated by deforestation,” said Céspedes, who added that the group has the active support of her husband, and has managed to expand its list of customers.
Costa Rica, which is famous for its forests, is one of the few countries in the world that has managed to turn around a previously high rate of deforestation.
In 1987, the low point for this Central American country’s jungles, only 21 percent of the national territory was covered by forest, compared to 75 percent in 1940.
That marked the start of an aggressive reforestation programme, thanks to which forests covered 52 percent of the territory by 2012.
Costa Rica has set itself the goal of becoming the first country in the world to achieve carbon neutrality by 2021. And in the fight against climate change, it projects that carbon sequestration by its forests will contribute 75 percent of the emissions reduction needed to achieve that goal.
In this country of 4.4 million people, these groups of women have found a niche in forest conservation that also helps them combat sexist cultural norms and the heavy concentration of land in the hands of men.
“One of the strong points [of women’s participation] is having access to education – they have been given the possibility of taking part in workshops and trainings,” Arturo Ureña, the technical head of the Coordinating Association of Indigenous and Community Agroforestry in Central America (ACICAFOC), told IPS.
That was true for the Pital Association. When they started their project, the women received courses from the Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje (national training institute), which made it possible for two illiterate members of the group to take their final exams orally.
Added to these community initiatives are government strategies. More and more women are being included in state programmes that foment agroforestry production, such as the EcoMercado (ecomarket) of the National Forest Finance Fund (Fonafifo).
EcoMercado is part of the Environmental Services Programme of Fonafifo, one of the pillars of carbon sequestration in Costa Rica.
Since Fonafifo was created in the mid-1990s, 770,000 hectares, out of the country’s total of 5.1 million, have been included in the forestry strategy, with initiatives ranging from reforestation to agroforestry projects.
Lucrecia Guillén, who keeps Fonafifo’s statistics and is head of its environmental services management department, confirmed to IPS that the participation of women in reforestation projects is growing.
She stressed that in the case of the EcoMercado, women’s participation increased 185 percent between 2009 and 2013, which translated into a growth in the number of women farmers from 474 to 877. She clarified, however, that land ownership and the agroforestry industry were still dominated by men.
Statistics from Fonafifo indicate that in the EcoMercado project, only 16 percent of the farms are owned by women, while 37 are owned by individual men and 47 percent are in the hands of corporations, which are mainly headed by men.
But Guillén sees no reason to feel discouraged. “Women are better informed now, and that has boosted participation” and will continue to do so, she said.This article was originally published in the May 2012 issue of Cottage Life magazine.
Growing up, my brothers and I spent a bit of our summer vacation time at camps, and a bit travelling—but mainly we were at cottages. And those cottages had canoes. Together they defined our summers.
The first cottage I remember was the prime minister’s official summer residence, at Harrington Lake in the Gatineau Hills. Maybe my most indelible canoe memory from that cottage was one of the rites of passage for the Trudeau boys: When we hit five or six years old, our dad would put us into the canoe and we’d shoot the rapids on the stream that went down into Meech Lake. There’s a little dam there, and in the spring they’d open the dam, and there would be a huge V and a standing wave. With much trepidation, we’d sit in the front and go down the drop. I look back on it now and laugh, because my father was sterning, and there was nothing I could do from the bow to aim it right—but it was very, very important for us to do it. To get into the bow of a canoe with my father for the first time, to be the bowman for the first time, and to go down this big, scary rapid.
When my father really wanted to get away from the security guards and the trappings of political life, we’d go to our family cottage in the Laurentians, near Morin-Heights, where we still go now. My father found the land a long time ago, when, as a young man, he was riding around the Laurentian Hills on a motorcycle. He built a little Pan-Abode cottage there, a simple log cabin with a trap door in the floor that led down to the basement space and cold storage. We called it “the house with the hole in the floor,” to distinguish it from Harrington Lake. The lake itself is small, and has never ever had motorboats on it. We had a sailboat and windsurfers at various times, but the hills around the lake create shifting winds. Canoe was the only way to get around.
What kinds of canoes did we have? My dad had a little cedarstrip-and-canvas canoe that he’d owned for years. It was the same one that he used, when he was much younger, to paddle from Montreal to James Bay. We had a Prospector as well, which we used on some little rapids. We even had a birchbark canoe, which we’ve since donated to the Canadian Canoe Museum. When my brother, Alexandre, got married, the ceremony was at our cottage. My wife, Sophie, and I gave him a beautiful cedarstrip canoe without the canvas, with the natural wood showing.
We still go to my dad’s land regularly; when we moved to Montreal in ’84 and my father retired, we replaced the Pan-Abode with a slightly larger cottage. And every year I still try to get out for at least a few days or so in the summer and take a canoe trip. Recently Alexandre and I have been doing trips on rivers in Quebec: the Ignace, the Noire, and a few others.
One of the few pieces of art that I have on Parliament Hill is a painting in my office that Sophie commissioned from an artist friend of hers, based on a photo of a canoe sitting beside a cottage dock. The canoe in the painting isn’t my father’s original cedarstrip, though. That one is still up at our cottage in the Laurentians. My dad named it Ça ira. Which means, in this case, “It’ll get there.”You are in: Future Technologies : Helium-3 Power Generation Helium-3 Power Generation Helium-3 (He3) is gas that has the potential to be used as a fuel in future nuclear fusion power plants. There is very little helium-3 available on the Earth. However, there are thought to be significant supplies on the Moon. Several governments have subsequently signalled their intention to go to the Moon to mine helium-3 as a fuel supply. Such plans may come to fruition within the next two to three decades and trigger a new Space Race. In addition to the information below, you can also find out more about this topic in my Mining the Moon video or in my BBC interview here. There is also a good article by Fabrizio Bozzato in this June 2014 article for The Diplomat, which in turn is based on his extensive and excellent paper here. There is also a very good recent article here. You may also want to checkout my broader page on resources from space. Helium-3 and Nuclear Fusion To provide a little background -- and without getting deeply into the science -- all nuclear power plants use a nuclear reaction to produce heat. This is used to turn water into steam that then drives a turbine to produce electricity. Current nuclear power plants have nuclear fission reactors in which uranium nuclei are split part. This releases energy, but also radioactivity and spent nuclear fuel that is reprocessed into uranium, plutonium and radioactive waste which has to be safety stored, effectively indefinitely. An overview of this nuclear fuel cycle can be found here. For over 40 years scientists have been working to create nuclear power from nuclear fusion rather than nuclear fission. In current nuclear fusion reactors, the hydrogen isotopes tritium and deuterium are used as the fuel, with atomic energy released when their nuclei fuse to create helium and a neutron. Nuclear fusion effectively makes use of the same energy source that fuels the Sun and other stars, and does not produce the radioactivity and nuclear waste that is the by-product of current nuclear fission power generation. However, the so-termed "fast" neutrons released by nuclear fusion reactors fuelled by tritium and deuterium lead to significant energy loss and are extremely difficult to contain. One potential solution may be to use helium-3 and deuterium as the fuels in "aneutronic" (power without neutrons) fusion reactors. The involved nuclear reaction here when helium-3 and deuterium fuse creates normal helium and a proton, which wastes less energy and is easier to contain. Nuclear fusion reactors using helium-3 could therefore provide a highly efficient form of nuclear power with virtually no waste and no radiation. A short wall chart explaining this in more detail can be found here. The aforementioned fission and fusion nuclear reactions are also illustrated in animations in my Mining the Moon video. Mining Helium-3 on the Moon One of many problems associated with using helium-3 to create energy via nuclear fusion is that, at least on the Earth, helium-3 is very, very rare indeed. Helium-3 is produced as a by-product of the maintenance of nuclear weapons, which could net a supply of around 15Kg a year. Helium-3 is, however, emitted by the Sun within its solar winds. Our atmosphere prevents any of this helium-3 arriving on the Earth. However, as it does not have an atmosphere, there is nothing to stop helium-3 arriving on the surface of the Moon and being absorbed by the lunar soil. As a result, it has been estimated that there are around 1,100,000 metric tonnes of helium-3 on the surface of the Moon down to a depth of a few metres. This helium-3 could potentially be extracted by heating the lunar dust to around 600 degrees C, before bringing it back to the Earth to fuel a new generation of nuclear fusion power plants. As reported in an Artemis Project paper, about 25 tonnes of helium-3 -- or a fully-loaded Space Shuttle cargo bay's worth -- could power the United States for a year. This means that helium-3 has a potential economic value in the order of $3bn a tonne -- making it the only thing remotely economically viable to consider mining from the Moon given current and likely-near-future space travel technologies and capabilities. Due to the above it is perhaps hardly surprising that a serious interest is being taken in lunar helium-3. In 2006 Nikolai Sevastyanov, head of the Russian space corporation Energia, was reported to have said that Russia is planning to mine lunar helium-3, with a permanent Moon base to be established by 2015 and industrial-scale helium-3 production to commence by 2020. This clearly is not going to happen! American plans from the early noughties to "establish a permanent base on one of the Moon's poles by 2024", with helium-3 signalled as one of the reasons behind this mission, are also sadly likely to come to nothing. The above noted, China's Lunar Exploration Programme is proceeding apace, and is being led by a scientist with a strong belied in potential helium-3 lunar mining. In December 2013, China managed to land a robot lander on the Moon, so successfully completing stage 3 of its Lunar Exploration Programme. By the end of 2017, the fifth and final stage of the current programme has the intention of sending a robotic craft to the Moon that will return lunar rocks to the Earth. If all goes well, a manned programme may follow in the 2020s, so laying the potential foundation for China to mine for helium-3 on the Moon in the 2030s or beyond... A Flower in the Darkness? The subject of mining helium-3 on the Moon as a fuel for future clean, safe nuclear power plants is a fascinating one that raises many questions. Some of these questions are highly technical, and relate to the feasibility of the involved nuclear physics. Other questions concern the not inconsiderable practicalities associated with getting to the Moon, mining and super-heating large quantities of lunar rock (Space.com have reported a suggestion of roughly one million tons of lunar soil being needed to be mined and processed for every 70 tonnes of helium-3 yield), and then getting the precious cargo back to the Earth. However, the far more interesting questions arguably relate to why this is a topic that is receiving so little media and public attention. As noted above, several of the largest governments on the planet have on various occasions made announcements that they are either actively considering or would like to go to the Moon to mine helium-3. Whether or not the science will actually work, this is surely major news. Given that public debates concerning the construction of future nuclear fission power plants and even wind farms now rage with great vigour and a high media profile, why helium-3 power plants as part of a potential future energy strategy are rarely if ever even mentioned is exceptionally hard to fathom. Nobody is trying to hide the potential of future lunar helium-3 power generation. However, like a rose in a dark room, there is a potential danger that something of beauty will fail to gain the light it requires if more attention does not start to be languished on what could end up as a very big part of the solution to Peak Oil and other fossil fuel resource depletion, not to mention climate change. You may also now want to read and view my broader and more recent content on Resources from Space.
Return to Return to Future TechnologiesBig business groups oppose Crawford Falconer’s approach and emphasise the importance of preserving close links with the EU Ross Setford/Getty Images
Britain’s new chief trade negotiator has backed scrapping domestic regulations to get a trade deal in defiance of business leaders and ministers who vowed not to allow a “regulatory race to the bottom”.
Crawford Falconer, 63, a British-born New Zealander, took up his job last month after a million-pound search for the right candidate to negotiate trade deals after Brexit.
His enthusiasm for leaving the European Union became clear through his role as a member of a “special trade commission” set up by Legatum Institute, an influential think tank that has espoused a hard Brexit.
A paper in April by that commission urged Britain to leave the customs union and the single market and allow the country to “put our domestic regulations on the table…An employee stands at the control station as robotic arms spray lacquer onto mud guards for the Royal Enfield Motors Ltd. Classic 350 motorcycle at the company’s factory in southern India. - Photo by Bloomberg / Dhiraj Singh
In a sweltering factory in southern India, Royal Enfield motorcycles are being painted and lacquered by giant robotic arms that move at twice the maximum speed of a human limb, day in, day out, never making a mistake.
Photo by Dhiraj Singh / Bloomberg
An employee attaches a headlight to a Royal Enfield Motors Ltd. Classic 350 motorcycle moving on a production line at the company’s plant in Chennai, India, in July.
Only a few workers are still needed on the paint line at Royal Enfield Motors Ltd.'s plant in Oragadam, doing touch-ups on the motorcycles coveted for their classic design. Four robots can do the work of 15 human painters toiling across three shifts.
Robots and automation are invigorating once-sleepy Indian factories, boosting productivity by carrying out low-skill tasks more efficiently.
While in theory, improved output is good for economic growth, the trend is creating a headache for Prime Minister Narendra Modi: Robots are diminishing roles for unskilled laborers that he wants to put to work as part of his Make in India campaign aimed at creating jobs for the poor.
India's largely uneducated labor force and broken educational system aren't ready for the more complex jobs that workers need when their low-skilled roles are taken over by machines. Meanwhile, nations employing robots more quickly, such as China, are becoming even more competitive.
"The need for unskilled labor is beginning to diminish," Akhilesh Tilotia, head of thematic research at Kotak Institutional Equities in Mumbai and author of a book on India's demographic impact. "Whatever education we're putting in and whatever skill development we're potentially trying to put out -- does it match where the industry will potentially be five to 10 years hence? That linkage is reasonably broken in India."
Improving automation will "likely compete with some low-skill tasks," Standard Chartered Plc economists in London and Toronto wrote in a May report.
Royal Enfield Motors' plant, near Chennai, is an example. Spray painting is a repetitive and hazardous job, perfect for a machine. Done manually, it exposes laborers to noxious, dizzying paint fumes that can impair memory and cognitive function.
Humans are imperfect: They miss spots, which can corrode the bike. They waste more because they go over the same place twice. No human can paint exactly the same way each time.
Robots installed by Zurich-based ABB Ltd. at Royal Enfield's newest plant in southern Tamil Nadu state have 7-foot mechanical arms that reduce paint wastage by half. At maximum speed, they paint four times faster. They never miss a spot, never take a break, never go on strike.
Robots also mean more nimble production in an era of frequent product launches and shorter manufacturing cycles: while a human needs to be retrained, a robot can switch at a touch of a button.
"Large manufacturing plants can really struggle to find enough stable, skilled blue-collar workers that can do repetitive tasks day in, day out," said Per Vegard Nerseth, ABB's global head of robotics. "Turnover is very high, so you have a huge task training people, which incurs costs. That makes the payback for robots more favorable for a company."
The Oragadam plant started with four painting robots in 2013 and plans to add 14 more as it expands. Both Royal Enfield and ABB declined to disclose the cost of the machines but said the investment will pay for itself in about two years.
Royal Enfield's motorcycles, ridden by British troops in World War II, have cult appeal among enthusiasts, and the waiting list to buy one has been as long as a year. Fans who have owned one include Brad Pitt and Billy Joel.
Its older plant further north has also recently added four welding robots, which do in 20 seconds what takes two minutes for a human. The company declined to say how many workers were displaced or whether it has further automation plans for the facility, at Tiruvottiyur.
While displacing some types of jobs, robots also create new ones, like engineers to maintain and program them. A study by industrial analysis firm Metra Martech Ltd. shows they help create more jobs than they eliminate from the assembly line.
India can use the help. Labor productivity in Indian factories is the worst among major economies, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group and the Confederation of Indian Industry. Brazilians, who ranked second to last, are still three times more productive than Indian workers.
Robot installations in India grew 23 percent in 2013 from the previous year, with annual sales hitting a record 1,900, the latest figures available from the International Federation of Robotics. That's just a fraction of China. About 56,000 units were sold last year alone in the world's biggest robot market, where factories including iPhone producer Foxconn Technology Group are helping China keep its manufacturing edge against lower-wage rivals.
It's not just factory jobs, either. In Meerut, about 50 miles northeast of the capital Delhi, local police are considering using robots to help guide traffic at busy intersections, Ramit Sharma, the city's deputy inspector general, said by phone. Information technology companies and banks are also looking to automation to eliminate lower-end jobs and clerical staff, according to a June report by Kotak.
Still, robots have barely penetrated India and China relative to the size of their labor forces. Rather, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia lead developing Asian nations in robot density -- the number of industrial robots for every 10,000 manufacturing workers, according to IFR data.
"There's the threat of India losing out," said Madhur Jha, senior economist at Standard Chartered in London. "Other countries are slightly more developed, have a stronger manufacturing base, and are moving toward automation more quickly to keep themselves competitive."
When Modi announced his Make in India campaign in September, he cited India's "greatest strength" as having 65 percent of the population under 35.
That demographic dividend may not pay out as expected.
For one, India's working-age population is increasing far faster than the number of jobs in the formal sector: roughly 1 million a month versus 1 million a year, according to a report by JustJobs Network, a labor research institute.
It's also not clear if factories planned today will create the number and type of jobs that Modi is expecting.
"If you build a factory today assuming that it will create 100 jobs, in the course of 10 years as new technologies are adopted, it may create only 10 or 20 percent of the jobs you expected," said Makoto Yokoyama, the head of Mitsubishi Electric Corp.'s factory automation division in India, who has witnessed Japan's car plants employ fewer and fewer workers.
"It'd be a lie to say that robots won't steal jobs," said Sonali Kulkarni, who heads the India unit of Fanuc Corp., one of the world's biggest robot makers. "They will, but not the jobs that people should be aspiring to. People are capable of really a lot more than mindlessly loading or unloading from a machine or welding."
Yet India is failing to educate its illiterate 287 million -- greater than the population of every other country except China and the U.S. -- to do much more than that.
The average Indian adult has been schooled for only 4.4 years, the worst among Asia's major developing economies, according to United Nations data. Worse, half of the 5 million graduating annually with bachelor's degrees are unemployable because of poor cognitive and language skills, according to a study by Aspiring Minds, a skills-assessment company. Larsen & Toubro Ltd., India's biggest engineering firm, is forced to train new hires from scratch.
In the race to create factory jobs, Modi isn't just competing against Asian rivals. Robots are increasingly helping developed economies. In Switzerland, robots make toothbrushes for export; in Spain, they cut and pack lettuce heads -- a job previously done by migrants; in Germany, they fill tubs of ice cream, and in the U.K. they assemble yogurt into multipacks at a rate of 80 a minute.
Tharman Shanmugaratnam, chairman of the International Monetary Fund's policy advisory committee until March and Singapore's finance minister, gives India -- and rivals such as Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia -- a fast-closing window to catch up with rich countries or miss the boat.
"Time is not on India's side," he told Indian policymakers at a government conference in December. "I give 10 years for labor-intensive manufacturing to survive in its present form before machines take over."
Sandrine Rastello and Siddharth Philip of Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
SundayMonday Business on 08/17/2015Some of you may have noticed things have been a little quiet when it comes to SEASONS. I haven’t posted any new pages for the past 4-5 weeks and for that I sincerely apologize. There are a couple of reasons why SEASONS has been moving slower than usual, and one of those reasons is because, as I’ve hinted at in a previous blog post, I’ve been at work on an entirely new book. However, this isn’t just a regular graphic novel project, working with one new artist on one new story. Instead, I’m working with seven new artists on one new story.
It’s called “Lifeline” and I’m launching the Kickstarter campaign for it on December 1st. Here’s the synopsis:
“One heart. One life.
Told from the perspective of those around him, enter the story of a man as he struggles through the decades to do what all of us must – simply live. Nandor Fox Shaffer (SEASONS) presents Lifeline, a collaborative graphic novel project with seven uniquely skillful artists with ranging styles from around the world to tell a captivating tale of family, legacy, and reflection.
We only have one life. How will you live it?”
Lifeline came about after realizing how much comics, especially in the indie scene, is about community. We’re all artists striving for that same goal: to reach people with our art. Because making comics is such a collaborative process in its most basic form, I had a strong desire to bring together talented indie comic book artists from all over the planet to tell a special story of mine. Fortunately, seven of my favorite artists in the business agreed to be a part of this experiment and every single one of them is bringing their A-game to this book. Throughout November, I’m going to be revealing each artist who has contributed to Lifeline and sharing some of their art from the book, leading up to the Kickstarter campaign. First up is Patrick Buermeyer, who is the cover artist of Lifeline and will be drawing pages set in the present day.
I hope you’ll join all of us December 1st when the campaign launches. We need projects like these to be made.
Thanks for all your support!
– Nandor Fox ShafferUpdate 7:30pm: Donald Trump has since deleted the follow-up tweet, possibly breaking the rules regarding archiving official records a second time. As of now, there’s no proof on his Twitter account of it ever existing. Of course, that’s what archived images are for.
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We’re officially through the looking glass, and it’s time to find out what powers our country’s legal system has over the president. One day after his inauguration, Donald Trump has already fucked up a tweet and deleted it. The problem is that he very likely isn’t allowed to do that anymore.
Since his nomination, Trump has acted as a sort of hacker in our system— identifying vulnerabilities in which common decency has restricted previous presidents, but the law did not. Most glaringly, Trump has not divested from his global business interests, and he has not released his tax returns. But one area in which the president is bound by law is that his or her administration is required to archive all official records. Trump may have violated that requirement this morning when he tweeted and then deleted this gem from his personal account:
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Yes, go ahead and get the facepalm out of the way before you continue reading. Not long after tweeting that he was “honered,” Trump deleted the entire post. It was replaced by the same tweet with the correct spelling. Note: It has also been deleted.
This is not “unpresidented.” Trump is known to be a bad speller and an erratic tweeter who thinks with his thumbs. But the problem is his right to delete stupidity may have ended yesterday.
Both the Freedom of Information Act and Presidential Records Act require the commander in chief to painstakingly preserve all records of federal government actions and communications. That’s why the official @POTUS account was migrated to @POTUS44 yesterday, and Trump now has a clean slate to use for his SNL rants. The official account of the president as well as many other social media records have also been archived at a special website in case of future technical changes that could render the content unavailable to the public.
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It will be up to the legal experts in the White House to figure out whether or not Trump’s personal account has the same requirements for preservation as his official one does. Considering that Trump has said he intends to keep his personal account going, it would seem that it should be considered public record.
While it may feel like no big deal for Trump to delete a typo, history might tell a different story. If this man is so careless with his official communication less than 24 hours after becoming president, we’ll need the documentation to show that.
[The Hill]The Killing$ of Tony Blair film review 3 The Killing$ of Tony Blair film review Matthew Robinson
starts promisingly. Footage of Blair assuring us of a peaceful resolution to the invasion of Iraq is intercut with footage of the actual less-than-peaceful non-resolution. The atmospheric electronic music is subtle and the irony doesn’t need to be. It’s all very Adam Curtis. ‘Oh God,’ you think, as the wobbly synths raise hairs on the back of your neck. ‘The military-industrial complex has been in control all this time. I’ve been duped by Tony Blair and democracy is a lie.’
But then it cuts to the interior of a concrete warehouse. George Galloway is standing in font of some graffiti wearing a black waistcoat, a fedora cocked rakishly over one eye. He looks like an extra from Boardwalk Empire, as if that might make us forget we once saw him pretend to be a cat on Celebrity Big Brother. We’ll never forget, George. Never.
Galloway ‘presents’ The Killing$. This means that he’s shown listening to interviewees – in a variety of waistcoats, sometimes holding a fancy teapot, like an unusually threatening Harrods waiter – and trying out a half-hearted attempt at Michael Moore-style hectoring. He’s also there to explain things. ‘Blair soon earned the nickname Teflon Tony,’ Galloway reveals, ‘…because dirt never stuck to him.’ Cut to a shot of eggs being broken into a pan. Are they dirty eggs? Galloway doesn't say.
Courtesy of The Guardian
But even Galloway’s ripe ‘r’-rolling (‘…the Irrrron Lady’) can’t really diminish the wealth of material that speaks for itself: Blair on the public-speaking circuit, offering banalities for stupid money; Blair in a propaganda video for the oppressive Kazakhstani government; Blair claiming never to have traded policy for cash. ‘I would never do anything to harm the country!’ he says. With his big wet earnest eyes and quivering lip, he looks exactly like he would if he'd just cheated on you.
As The Killing$ jumps back and forth between footage of Blair at different stages of his life and career, you start to feel a little queasy. Here’s young Tony, thickly mulleted and clean of conscience. Here’s old Tony, the skin stretched too tight over his skull, his eyes manically beady. It’s an unpleasantly effective demonstration of how one’s face starts to reflect one’s character.
The nausea only grows as the evidence piles in. Presented with such avarice and duplicity, the stomach churns and the mind recoils. And when The Killing$ ends, not with the black waistcoat and fedora of George Galloway but the black balaclavas and flags of ISIS, the true legacy of Blair’s war, it gives you the chills. No atmospheric music necessary.Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the schedule for the on-time opening of the new Second Avenue Subway. Keeping his promise to modernize the MTA and open the subway line on time, the inaugural ride will take place on December 31st and revenue service will begin at noon on January 1 and start at 6 a.m. each day for the rest of the first week.
"New Yorkers have waited nearly a century to see the promise of the Second Avenue Subway realized, and after unrelenting dedication from thousands of hardworking men and women, the wait is over and the subway will open on December 31," Governor Cuomo said. "The on-time completion of this major, transformative project reaffirms confidence in government competence, increasing capacity on the nation’s busiest subway system, and delivering a new, vital transportation artery to millions of New Yorkers."
Phase 1 of Second Avenue Subway marks the most significant changes to New York City subway service in recent decades, and will be built in four phases. Phase I will provide service from 96th Street to 63rd Street and will serve more than 200,000 people per day, reducing overcrowding on the Lexington Avenue Line and restoring a transit link to a neighborhood that lost the Second Avenue Elevated in 1940.
Revenue service will begin at noon on January 1, when the first uptown Q train to Second Avenue departs from the 57th-7th Avenue station. Trains will run every six minutes during peak hours and will run from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. for the rest of the first week. Overnight service will begin on Monday, January 9.
MTA Chairman and CEO Thomas F. Prendergast said, “The Second Avenue Subway is the most significant addition to our system in 50 years and will serve more riders on opening day than Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston transit systems combined and will significantly reduce crowding on the Lexington Avenue line. Opening the line on time could not happened without the support of Governor Cuomo and the round-the-clock hard work and dedication of the thousands of men and women on this project who made this opening possible.”Bree Olson joined the adult entertainment industry when she was just 19 years old as a way to make money while she was in school.
After spending several years working in porn — and becoming a major name within the industry — the now-retired star is speaking out about the abuses she's endured since leaving the business, in the hopes of deterring other women from following her path.
In a powerful video created for the “Real Women, Real Stories” film project, which aims to give a voice to women who otherwise feel voiceless, Olson explains,
People treat me as if I am a pedophile, they don't treat me like an ex-sex worker, they treat me like I would somehow be damaging to children.
It's hard to acclimate to regular life, she says, because people only see her for what she did, not who she is. She says,
When I go out, I feel as if I'm wearing [the word]'slut' across my forehead.
The abuse has gotten so bad, she says, she sometimes doesn't leave her house for days or weeks at a time. Olson hopes her story will force other women to think hard before joining the adult entertainment industry -- because in her mind, it's just not worth it.
You can watch her powerful video up top and see more from the “Real Women, Real Stories” series here.
Citations: Former porn star warns women against joining industry in emotional video (ntr/sctn)SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and billionaire co-founder Larry Page have teamed up with "Avatar" director James Cameron and other investors to back an ambitious space exploration and natural resources venture, details of which will be unveiled next week.
The fledgling company, called Planetary Resources, will be unveiled at a Tuesday news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, according to a press release issued this week.
Aside from naming some of the company's high-profile backers, the press release disclosed tantalizingly few details, saying only that the company will combine the sectors of "space exploration and natural resources" in a venture that could add "trillions of dollars to the global GDP." The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Planetary Resources will explore the feasibility of mining natural resources from asteroids, a decades-old concept.
"This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of 'natural resources,'" according to the press release.
Planetary Resource was co-founded by Eric Anderson, a former NASA |
State's outlook for the season ahead. Heck, that's even without mentioning the likes of All-Stars Draymond Green and Klay Thompson!
The Dubs have accomplished quite a lot in the three years since Kerr took over as Head Coach, but they won't be satisfied to rest on their laurels now. How the 2017-18 NBA season shakes out remains to be seen, but we at least now have a better understanding of the group that will take the floor for the squad come Opening Night.The Pistons did what they needed to do as November turned to December, winning four straight home games against teams at the time out of the playoff picture. Those games not only sparked their offense, it launched them into a 10-game stretch Stan Van Gundy had bracketed for the challenge it presented.
Over those 10 games, the Pistons were facing nine teams with records better than theirs when it began with a Dec. 7 game at Charlotte. They lost that night in perhaps their most lethargic game of the season, their seventh back-to-back set among the season’s first 22 games. And they lost two nights later at home when Matt Barnes fired a half-court dagger to snatch away a certain win.
But they’ve recovered admirably, winning four of the last five, wins over division rivals Indiana and Chicago – the latter in four overtimes, no less – among them. The only loss: another heartbreaker, in overtime, to the Los Angeles Clippers.
Now comes the finishing kick: a back to back at Miami and Atlanta to wrap up the pre-Christmas schedule, then a home date with Boston on Saturday to complete it.
“When we went into that 10-game stretch, everybody except (Philadelphia) had a better record than we did,” Van Gundy said after Monday’s practice. “We knew this was going to really be a challenging 10-game stretch and now we’re at the end of it with three straight road games and then back to Boston at home. It’s a hard stretch and we’ve got to play really well.”
The Pistons are 16-12 through 28 games, which puts them on pace for 47 wins. But that won’t guarantee them a playoff berth in an Eastern Conference race that keeps getting more competitive. Going into Monday night’s games, the Pistons and Orlando are in the 8-9 spots with identical records, each just one game out of second place. Miami and Indiana, each 16-10, are in the 2-3 spots.
The Pistons have seen their offense spike dramatically over the past three weeks, averaging 108 points a game even before the 147-point barrage produced in the 68-minute win at Chicago. Van Gundy wants to maintain the recent efficiency at that end while getting back to the stinginess at the other end that carried the Pistons through the season’s first month.
“We’ve slipped,” he said. “We haven’t slipped real badly, but we’ve slipped. So we’ve talked about that – trying to get back to where we were earlier in the year defensively.”
“We’re starting to lose it a little bit,” Reggie Jackson agreed. “We’re starting to score more, but we’ve just got to be heady about getting back and getting set. Guys are attacking us. We’ve got two, three guys with their backs to the ball. We don’t see what’s happening. We’ve got to get back to being who we are – get back defensively, make sure everybody sees the numbers on the front of our jersey and everybody try to protect each other.”
The Pistons remain a top-10 defense in efficiency while creeping into the top 20 in offensive efficiency. Van Gundy is gradually diversifying the offense, finding more ways to give Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Marcus Morris scoring chances around the Jackson-Andre Drummond pick and roll.
“I like when our offense is running smoothly and we’re finding ways to get easy baskets,” Jackson said. “I think we’ve been hitting our stride. We’re a heavy pick-and-roll team, but Coach is finding ways to get guys involved in other ways and can probably get a little more attention off me. Then I can get the ball back on the back side and attack.”
Jackson said he’s still feeling the effects of the four-overtime win at Chicago.
“I was wide awake until we got on the plane and I think everybody just crashed there,” he said. “We were excited and finally it just hit us. Adrenaline shut down. I’m still feeling it, but we’ve got another day (before the Miami game). I think everybody is still a little bit tired.”The question of whether or not J.T. Barrett got the first down will forever live in Ohio State-Michigan lore.
Until time ends, Buckeyes fans will insist that referees were correct to award Barrett the first down on his 4th-and-1 QB sneak in double overtime Saturday, while Wolverines fans will say he was short of the first-down marker.
And the reason this question is destined to endure is that we just don’t really know. Despite the fact that this was the biggest game of the day, if not the season; despite the fact that the play in question followed a timeout, giving ABC/ESPN cameras ample time to get in position; despite the fact that ESPN literally bragged before the game about having “every angle covered” thanks to 50 cameras in the stadium, the network provided no decisive angle on Barrett’s sneak.
Because as much as Ohio State fans want these sorts of memes to end the conversation, the tilt of shot, particularly on the right, make the call inconclusive.
Retweet if you know a #Michigan fan who needs help with straight lines. pic.twitter.com/Q35m3CMqKH — Bucknuts (@Bucknuts247) November 27, 2016
Basically Wolverines fans are watching this video…
The worst call ever https://t.co/fQD8C3kRrb — Wolverine Nation24/7 (@247Wolverines) November 27, 2016
Buckeyes fans are watching this video…
… and no one can possibly know which one better represents reality because neither shot comes from a dead-on angle.
SI.com’s Richard Deitsch asked ABC/ESPN producer Bill Bonnell about the lack of a definitive angle and got a pretty unsatisfactory answer.
“It’s a difficult situation because on a fourth down situation things can get packed up in the middle,” said Bonnell. “The closest definitive replay was the one we showed. That’s was from our ‘blue machine’ or the game camera which is shooting where the yellow line is. That mixed with the other angles, that was as definitive as we could get.” Bonnell said that remote productions in college football always opt to keep additional cameras deployed on the goal line given the importance of that line. There would not be similar coverage, say, on the 16-yard line. “Sometimes it’s just the way it happens; it’s a tough situation to cover,” Bonnell said.
Sure the goal line is important, but in that situation the 15-yard-line was equally important. Not having cameras in position because they were at the goal line is like a baseball manager waiting to use his closer in a save situation while lesser relievers blow the game. Given the importance of that 4-and-1 play and given the time ESPN/ABC had to prepare for it, you’d think they could have shuffled someone into position to get a dead-on shot from the sideline or overhead.
So now, because there’s no perfect shot, Michigan fans believe the results of the game are illegitimate, Jason Whitlock is calling for an investigation of paid-off refs and one AP Top 25 has put Michigan ahead of Ohio State because in his view the Wolverines won.
You’d think 50 cameras would be enough. Apparently not.Amid the handful of trades and dozens of free-agent signings that marked the beginning of the 2015 NFL league year yesterday, the three unexpected retirements of players in the primes of their careers seemed to fly underneath the radar. Patrick Willis was entrenched as the heart of San Francisco’s defense, while Jake Locker and Jason Worilds would have attracted interest from a number of teams. They chose to leave the game for different reasons, but the question will now naturally become whether their justifications will become a more frequent trend among professional football players who know the risks of their profession.
Each of the retirements was shocking in its own right, but it’s fair to start with Willis, the biggest name of the three. Physically, Willis had the most obvious link toward an uncertain future. He was ailing with foot pain, thanks to a toe injury that had been bothering him since college. Willis reaggravated the problem when he sprained the big toe on his left foot against the Rams in Week 6, an injury that seemed week-to-week before Willis chose to undergo corrective surgery. He suggested he was having the surgery to extend his football career, but months later, he appears to have had a change of heart.
He leaves the game as one of the most accomplished players of his generation, part of a 2007 draft class that includes Adrian Peterson, Calvin Johnson, and Darrelle Revis. The only player from that year to make as many Pro Bowls or be a first-team All-Pro as frequently as Willis through the end of the 2014 season was Browns tackle Joe Thomas. The Pro-Football-Reference.com statistic Approximate Value rates Willis as the best player of that draft class and as the second-best non-quarterback since he entered the league, behind only Saints guard Jahri Evans.
Arguments that Willis didn’t last long enough to be considered as a possible Hall of Fame candidate are bizarre and misguided. Willis’s only season outside of the Pro Bowl during his eight years in the league was in 2014, when he missed 10 games. The first half of his career came on a 49ers team that wasn’t very good, so it’s hardly as if he was making it to the Pro Bowl on scholarship or because of his team’s record.
Willis finishes with five first-team All-Pro nods. Of the 16 other linebackers who accomplished that feat, 12 made it to the Hall of Fame, and when Ray Lewis is eligible, he’ll make it 13. The only recent exception is Zach Thomas, and I suspect he’ll also make it someday. This isn’t creating an arbitrary, obtuse distinction and then lumping Willis in with a bunch of Hall of Famers he otherwise doesn’t match; All-Pro appearances are one of the best ways of judging what onlookers actually thought about a player at the end of a season, and just about everybody who was as good as Willis that frequently was a Hall of Famer.
Put it this way: Pretend Willis returned from his toe injury and wasn’t 100 percent. Maybe the 49ers see that in camp and rotate him with their three other inside linebackers before moving on after the season. Willis goes to Cleveland and spends three years as a competent inside linebacker there, he finishes up with a year under Bill Belichick in London, and then he retires with the same seven Pro Bowl appearances and five All-Pro berths. Is anyone really suggesting he’s not a Hall of Famer with that résumé? We’re saying that injuries sapped him, but the cumulative impact still points to Canton. Nobody doubted Barry Sanders’s Hall of Fame candidacy when he retired at 30. This is a player who was just as accomplished at a less visible position.
Furthermore, Willis made the players around him great. Some of that credit belongs to Justin Smith, who also appears to be heading toward retirement at the age of 35. First it was Takeo Spikes, who had been a 4-3 outside linebacker for nearly a decade before moving to San Francisco during Willis’s second year. Spikes played at a Pro Bowl–caliber level during his three seasons by the Bay before leaving for San Diego, where he was nondescript.
The 49ers replaced Spikes with NaVorro Bowman, a third-round pick out of Penn State who looked lost during an uneven rookie season. Once thrust into the starting lineup next to Willis, Bowman became a three-time All-Pro before suffering a serious knee injury in the 2013 NFC Championship Game and missing the entire 2014 campaign.
Willis and Bowman were at the core of that dominant 49ers defense in 2011 and 2012, the first two years of the Jim Harbaugh era. You would have forgiven 49ers fans for thinking it was the beginning of a dynasty, given the staggering amount of young talent they had on both sides of the ball and the incredible head coach they had taken from the college ranks. Most of that core, especially on defense, is already gone. Harbaugh left for Michigan. Vic Fangio, his defensive coordinator, was passed over as Harbaugh’s replacement and left for Chicago. And when you consider the guys who started the majority of games for those defenses, the drop-off has been stunningly quick. The only player who hasn’t retired, left the team, suffered a serious injury, or seen his star fall dramatically thanks to off-field incidents is Ahmad Brooks, who may be a cap casualty in the weeks to come:
Pos Player Since 2011-2012 DL Isaac Sopoaga Left as FA for Philadelphia, out of football DL Justin Smith Retired? DL Ray McDonald Released after multiple off-field incidents LB NaVorro Bowman Missed entire 2014 season after serious knee injury LB Patrick Willis Retired LB Aldon Smith Went to rehab in 2013, suspended for half of 2014 season LB Ahmad Brooks Still on team CB Carlos Rogers Released, spent 2014 with Raiders, currently free agent CB Tarell Brown Spent 2014 with Raiders, currently free agent S Dashon Goldson Enormous free-agent bust after leaving for Buccaneers S Donte Whitner Signed with Browns in free agency
The 49ers have major holes elsewhere on the roster, but they’re about as well equipped as any team could be for losing a Hall of Famer in the prime of his career. They should be able to bring back Bowman, who turns 27 this month, and even if he isn’t the same player he was next to Willis before the knee injury, he should still be an effective starter. He’ll be joined by Chris Borland, a Thomas clone who came into the lineup for Willis and exhibited preternatural instincts as a run-stopper before going down with an ankle injury in December.
They even have a solid backup in Michael Wilhoite, who started all 16 games in Bowman’s place last year and was on the trade block before Willis’s retirement. San Francisco will also save nearly $7.5 million on its 2015 cap as a result of the decision, although I’m sure it would much prefer to pay the money and have its defensive leader back for another season.
Clean Out the Locker
Former Titans quarterback Jake Locker was in an entirely different position when he announced his retirement later Tuesday afternoon. Locker was a free agent after playing out his four-year rookie deal with Tennessee, and while he had failed to live up to the expectations Titans fans had after he was selected in the first round of the 2010 draft, there was little doubt that a 26-year-old quarterback with Locker’s athletic ability would find a backup job somewhere around the league.
Instead, Locker decided to bring a career riddled with injuries to its end. Locker came out of college as a classic tools-over-skills prospect, a quarterback with ridiculous arm strength, athleticism, and intangibles who struggled to read defenses and had major accuracy issues during his time at Washington. His 54.0 percent completion percentage in college pointed to a passer who would need to take major steps forward to succeed as a professional quarterback, and whether it was something innate, the injuries, or a lack of effective coaching, Locker managed to complete only 57.5 percent of his NFL throws.
Locker flips the typical narrative in other ways. Bleacher Report’s Matt Miller noted after the news that his pre-draft scouting on Locker included a quote from a Washington coach doubting Locker’s love of the sport, which seems odd for a player who was otherwise regarded as a passionate leader. Locker’s abilities as a high school baseball player led the Angels to draft him in the 10th round of the 2009 amateur draft, which has led to speculation that he might pursue a career in baseball, but the Angels reportedly aren’t interested in developing the 26-year-old despite originally giving him a $300,000 bonus. After missing nearly half of his professional career with injuries, Locker might just prefer to go home and move on.
Out of This Worilds
The third retirement might have been the strangest of all. Steelers outside linebacker Jason Worilds had no history of serious injuries — his wrist and hamstring problems from several years ago were considered relatively light issues by NFL standards. He was an ascending player, having accrued 15.5 sacks over the last two seasons as one of the few bright spots in a decaying Pittsburgh defense. Having just turned 27 last week, Worilds was hitting free agency as one of the league’s most valuable commodities, a young pass-rusher. Given interest from desperate teams like Tennessee and Philadelphia, it’s not out of the question to imagine Worilds making $20 million in guaranteed money on his next deal.
Instead, Worilds decided he wanted to move on from football. There was no “spiritual awakening” in the same way that Willis’s retirement has been linked to an increased focus on religion. Worilds wasn’t beaten down or beaten up. He’s not leaving for another sport, at least to the best of my knowledge. He’s leaving, presumably, because he can.
That’s the part that stands out to me. When we ask why Worilds is retiring, isn’t the opposing question — why stick around — just as relevant? Most people assume that players are going to play for as long as possible to try to earn as much as they can, but Worilds made $13.6 million from his four-year rookie contract and his season as Pittsburgh’s transition player. Locker finished his NFL career with $12.6 million in earnings. Willis, a superstar who made it to a lucrative contract extension, leaves having earned $42.6 million. They’re each vested in the NFL’s pension plan. It’s not obvious that these guys need more money.
And then there’s the elephant in the room. Players are more aware of the physical damage that comes with playing football than ever before. They still make shortsighted, self-endangering decisions like Julian Edelman did in the Super Bowl, but it would be impossible to imagine that players aren’t at least thinking about retiring earlier than they have in the past, or that their logic might be shifting from getting as much as possible for as long as possible to getting enough before getting out.
While I don’t pretend to believe for a second that the NFL truly cares about player safety, the idea of a league in which players are retiring younger would also appeal to the shield. It would replace veterans with younger players, driving down salaries under the league’s CBA. It would also replace experienced players with years of injuries from playing at the highest level with rookies who haven’t had the same wear and tear, reducing medical costs. I doubt the league will actually incentivize early retirements, but it could be best for all parties involved.
This could just be a blip. Jim Brown was followed by Sanders, who was followed by Robert Smith, but that’s only three running backs retiring relatively young across 35 years of players suiting up until the league didn’t want them anymore. Willis is the most recent player of that caliber to leave this early in his career. The vast majority of players aren’t going to leave $20 million on the table like Worilds probably did. Players like Tom Brady are lionized when they want to play until they’re 45. Jake Locker gets yelled at by idiots on Twitter.
I don’t think you’re going to see a dozen more players unexpectedly retire over the next two months. But viewed over a longer time span? It would hardly be a surprise to see players begin to retire earlier than they have in years past. The players of 2030 will probably have shorter careers than the guys who were drafted in 2010. It remains to be seen, though, whether those careers will be shorter by choice.There is one clip from one game during one season that always infuriated me like no other. It happened early in Florida’s 2007 loss to Georgia. Running back Knowshon Moreno breaks the plane to score, and then the whole team comes out to celebrate. Seriously — the entire Georgia team.
The rivalry had a certain truism at this point: Florida was probably going to beat Georgia in the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. This wasn’t the 1980s-era Cocktail Party, when Georgia would routinely break orange and blue hearts. Steve Spurrier began a run of dominance that even Ron Zook couldn’t screw up. From 1990 to 2006, Florida went 15-2 against the Dawgs, including a 52-17 romp in Athens while the Gator Bowl was undergoing renovations in Jacksonville. Georgia rode that wave of emotion as a 7.5-point underdog (per Odds Shark) to a 42-30 win. Moreno went wild, to the tune of 188 yards and three touchdowns. It was the first score that ignited things, but it almost backfired because the play was reviewed to make sure Moreno scored. Typically stoic Georgia head coach Mark Richt, of all people, had ordered the celebration to rev his team up. "On the day of the game I re-emphasized to the team that this was not going to be an individual celebration, but a team celebration," Richt wrote. "Again, I was expecting the 11 players on the field to be doing the celebrating, not for the bench to clear as it did." Richt would apologize and acknowledge that everyone involved avoided a big altercation. But either way, it is still an incredible visual.
The box score annotation is also hilarious.
As is the ensuing kickoff, backed up by penalties.
But there was to be retaliation, because Meyer does not play around when it comes to rivalry. Meyer’s yet to lose to Michigan since he’s arrived at Ohio State, and was 4-0 against Utah State and BYU while at Utah. Going back to the start of his head coaching career, at Bowling Green, Meyer was 6-2 against schools in Ohio. When it was over in Gainesville, he finished 16-2 against Florida’s main foes (Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida State). At the time of The Celebration, he was undefeated against Florida’s rivals and had only lost one other time in the state of Florida. You’ve got to understand how truly petty Meyer’s rivalries get. This is the guy who, while coach of the Utes, reportedly put BYU urinal cakes in his team’s bathroom. This is the guy who refused to use the names of his rivals even before getting to Columbus. Embracing the Falcons' in-town rivalry with Toledo, Meyer made the most of the battle for the Peace Pipe Trophy, referring to the Rockets as "That (Other) School Up North." Meyer brought that same attitude to Utah's rivalry with Utah State ("That Team Down South"), and to Gainesville, where Florida lays claim to three primary foes. And this is the guy who publicly apologizes when he actually does say a rival’s name. "Did I really?" Meyer said, looking stricken, after being told of his faux pas. "Wow. I apologize." The man is passionately petty, and it’s an admirable trait. So when Florida lambasted Georgia, 49-10, in 2008, it had to go deeper than the score.
With less than a minute to go and the result purely academic, CBS’ Gary Danielson said the obvious as Florida came up with a modest gain and the clock kept ticking. "Well, last play of the game coming up." A natural reaction with 44 seconds left. But then Florida called a timeout. The broadcast cut to commercial and returned. The Gators ran another clock-bleeding play with Emmanuel Moody, and then Meyer called another timeout. Danielson wised up to what was going on. "Here’s the response from Urban Meyer to last year. Taking another timeout to get as much as he can out of this football game. He said, ‘I’ll have a response.’ His response: 49-10, and I’m calling every timeout I got, and I’m gonna finish the game the way I want to." "It definitely motivated us," UF QB Tim Tebow tells SB Nation, years later. "[2007] was a difficult night, not being able to pull out that win, the Florida-Georgia game being so big for me and my family. In my hometown -- that was my parents' first date, was that game -- having an injured shoulder and making it worse in that game was disappointing. That ride back to Gainesville was a tough one, and in 2008, we came ready to change things." Immediately after the game, Meyer played coy, but wasn’t asked directly about the timeouts.Dieselgate: Why VW Will Come Out Smelling Like Roses
Details have been emerging this week of a clever trick pulled by Volkswagen in North America. The German-based automaker is alleged to have been using software to cheat EPA emissions tests for millions of its turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engine Volkswagen and Audi cars dating back to 2009.
New vehicles pretty much the world over are required by law to be controlled by a computer featuring a standardized on-board diagnostic (OBD) system, which is used in many countries for periodic compulsory emissions tests. Someone at VW figured out how to get the engine management firmware to sense when an emissions test was being performed and to deliver the desired output signals contrary to what was really happening.
The revelations may seem like a blow to Volkswagen. But closer analysis of the situation through the lens of anarchist political economy reveals how the scandal could end up benefiting the established motor industry, including Volkswagen.
In a way some of the earlier TDIs were the last of the open engines. It’s obvious why they’ve dominated the performance-diesel market despite some very impressive offerings from competitors. They were basically derivatives of the old EA827 diesel engine of the 1970s with combustion-chamber improvements, a turbocharger, and a thin veneer of purely supplementary electronic control. The result was a package which outperformed many comparable spark-ignition engines right out of the box, but which could be made to do some truly silly things by fiddling with the mechanical diesel injector pump and the turbocharger. If one is lucky enough to be clear of emissions-inspection requirements the ultimate home-brew high-performance development is what is called an M-TDI (M for mechanical) wherein the electronic controls are summarily deleted. And, being an extremely compact engine, the 1.9TDI has been a popular candidate for engine swaps: Small 4×4 Suzukis are common recipients. The engines affected by the current scandal have a later, cheaper common-rail injection system, because VW doesn’t want to make the mechanical-pump TDI engine.
Volkswagen has a nasty habit of making things with a huge following but which it doesn’t particularly want to make. Part of the reason VW continues to do so is because repeat business is a huge asset to it. But it is based on the expectation that the TDI engine will lose VW money. Consequently, a paradoxical component of VW’s marketing culture has comprised figuring out how to stop making air-cooled Beetles in South America and Mexico, Golf Mk1s and T3 Transporters in South Africa, and TDIs with their expensive mechanical pumps everywhere, without alienating a market which remains ready to buy them as fast as they’re made.
The last thing VW wants is their customers getting their hands dirty. A clue into VW’s real aspirations is given by the 1999 Audi A2 with its “service panel” in lieu of a conventional hood. Though this was part of a larger panel which could be unbolted to gain access to the engine, the message was clear: The mechanism is none of your business.
But the primary motivation for all this is not so much the savings in manufacturing cost. More important is the industry-wide desire to increase the value of the car’s software/firmware relative to its hard parts. Thanks to legal precedents which have proved extremely robust, hard parts are almost impossible to copyright. As we know, this is not the case with software. Hence the drive to make as great a part of the overall product dependent on copyrightable electronic control. And from there, it is not difficult to figure out where OBD really came from.
If Dieselgate achieves anything for the established motor industry, it will provoke the state into bulletproofing OBD. That would be yet another means by which the unassailable position of the established motor industry is maintained and expanded. And it would be another erosion of your and my control of our living environments.
Keep in mind the nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions which were the subject of the TDI-OBD trick are readily absorbed into the natural nitrogen cycle as long as overall emissions are low. At levels corresponding to the amount of vehicle traffic the established motor industry needs to stay in business, however, the NOx would cause photochemical smog and precipitate as acid rain, but for cumbersome gadgetry which serves no purpose except to make gridlock vaguely viable. The problem isn’t NOx. The problem isn’t even emissions. The problem is too much vehicle traffic. The problem is dependence on vehicular mobility.
And dependence on vehicular mobility is something the established motor industry has cultivated for a very long time by exercising the oligopoly power which it receives from the state through regulation which effectively outlaws competition from outside. Thus, by enabling ever-increasing vehicle traffic, regulation has managed to make environmental problems a lot worse.
A “duly chastened” VW will be back with a vengeance, making the wholly opaque disposable vehicles it really wants to make, just like the rest of the industry.
Citations to this article:The 27-year-old spent the 2014 and 2015 seasons with M-Sport in WRC, scoring two podiums and taking a best finish of seventh in the standings.
While he stayed within the British team's ranks this year, M-Sport signed Mads Ostberg and Eric Camilli for the main class and Evans was demoted to WRC2 to develop the brand new Ford Fiesta R5.
After kicking off the year with two victories, Evans had to wait until Rally Corsica last weekend to finish first again, and now leads Teemu Suninen by 37 points - albeit now having contested all seven of his allotted events.
In addition, this year Evans has also contested the revived British Rally Championship, in which became champion in dominant fashion.
Despite the success, Evans reckons his 2016 season has not been a positive one for his career.
"Ultimately, I don't think this year was a positive step in my career in a way," admitted Evans. "We've done what we were asked to do this.
"We've had a limited opportunity to compete at world level with minimal testing. We've delivered as much as we can.
"Obviously I'm still as hungry as ever and, of course, I continue to learn different techniques and other skills, but I would have preferred to be in a World Rally Car still at this point, that's for sure."
Regarding his chances of rejoining WRC, Evans is unsure whether he can secure a seat in 2017.
He said: "I know I'm a lot faster than a good handful of guys – more than a handful of guys – that are already in WRC seats, but it's a waiting game.
"There are some options, but I've been in this situation a few times before and I know how quickly things change.
"I take nothing for granted until there's an offer and it's signed and sealed."
Evans' best opportunity to get back to WRC in 2017 appears to lie with M-Sport, which has only so far confirmed Eric Camilli for another season.
He had also reportedly been in talks with Toyota, which is expected to announced Finnish duo Juho Hanninen and Esapekka Lappi as its primary line-up for next year.On 24 June 2016 Christy Sheats, 42, was killed by police in in Fulshear, Texas, after fatally shooting her daughters and then refusing to drop her weapon. The Houston Chronicle identified the victims as 22-year-old Taylor Sheats and 17-year-old Madison Sheats. The younger girl was transported to a hospital after the shooting but later succumbed to her injuries.
The Washington Post reported that Sheats’ husband Jason survived the incident, although he was so distraught that he was transported to a local hospital for evaluation.
Subsequent reports provided more detail about the shootings:
Authorities said Christy Sheats, 42, convened a “family meeting” inside her Katy home Friday evening before opening fire on her two daughters, 22-year-old Taylor Sheats and 17-year-old Madison Sheats. Christy Sheats’ husband Jason Sheats was also present in the living room but was not injured. All three managed to scramble out of the house through the front door, but the younger daughter collapsed and died, the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office said. Christy Sheats shot her older daughter again as she ran into the street and then went back inside their home to reload her five-shot,.38 caliber handgun, according to authorities. The mother returned to shoot Taylor Sheats once more [in the back]. A police officer killed Christy Sheats with one shot about 5 p.m. after she refused to drop her weapon. Her husband had managed to safely run all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac on the street.
Police had been dispatched to the Sheats’ home fourteen times since January 2012. Fort Bend County Sheriff spokespeople said that one of the incidents was over a “previous altercation” involving a “mental crisis,” and some of the calls were due to alarm issues.
Houston television station KTRK reported that the older daughter, Taylor, had been scheduled to get married the Monday following the Friday afternoon shooting:
Eyewitness News has confirmed that [June 27] was going to be Taylor Sheats’ wedding day. On Facebook, her fiance’s family member posted, “Y’all were a part of our family and that will never change. The greatest in-laws anyone could ever have, and the sweetest, most wholesome and caring girls in my life. I look up to ya’ll so much. Y’all were a light in the midst of this crazy world. We will all love you two until the end of time.”
Images and posts from Christy Sheats’ Facebook page (since converted to a memorial page by the social network) were circulated online, and in one instance of such Sheats wished her daughters a happy Daughters’ Day:
In another, Sheats shared a Snapchat photograph of herself and her elder daughter:
A number of web sites described Christy Sheats as an “gun enthusiast” who was “outspoken,” but we could find only one public post of hers in the last year pertaining to gun rights:
Friends of the Sheats family told media outlets that the incident was a shock and that Sheats was known as a devoted parent. An investigation into the incident remains open.After pretty thoroughly showing off its new ZenWatch 2 at Computex, ASUS is finalizing the launch with pricing, availability and complete specs at IFA 2015. As we saw at its initial unveiling the ZenWatch 2 isn't a dramatic change from the original in terms of design, but there are now two different sizes on offer, better internals and tons of customization options.
We now know complete details for the watches, including a 400 mAh battery for the larger model and 300 mAh on the smaller, as well as proper screen specs — a 1.63-inch 320x320 or 1.45-inch 280x280 AMOLED display. We also now know the watches support Wifi, faster charging (a claim of 50 percent battery in just over 30 minutes) and IP67 water resistance.
More: ASUS ZenWatch 2 hands-on
ASUS is also giving our first pricing and availability information at IFA. You'll be able to pick one up starting in October, with prices starting at €149. Specific countries and retailers aren't yet provided, but we can make a pretty safe bet the ZenWatch 2 will arrive in places where the current ZenWatch is already on sale.The Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger admits he is facing a potential injury crisis ahead of the New Year's Day encounter against Cardiff City, which striker Olivier Giroud will definitely miss because of an ankle problem.
Midfielders Tomas Rosicky (calf) and Jack Wilshere (ankle) both face fitness tests later on Tuesday, as does England forward Theo Walcott, who picked up a shoulder problem in the 1-0 win at Newcastle.
The full-back Kieran Gibbs definitely misses out because of a calf strain, while fellow defenders Nacho Monreal and Thomas Vermaelen have both been laid low by illness.
The midfielder Aaron Ramsey is expected to be unavailable for around three weeks with the thigh problem suffered in the win at West Ham on Boxing Day, while the German playmaker Mesut Özil is also sidelined, with the club awaiting results of a visit to a shoulder specialist.
"You need a good memory because we have plenty of problems," said Wenger, whose side head into 2014 top of the table by a point from Manchester City. Ramsey and Özil are out. Ramsey (for) three weeks and Özil has seen a specialist last night, I haven't got a report yet.
"We lost Gibbs at Newcastle with a calf strain. We have as well Monreal and Vermaelen, who are not sure to be ready because they come just back from illness, then we have uncertainty about Rosicky, Wilshere and Walcott.
"We lost Giroud with an ankle problem at Newcastle, so this morning will be more a medical check to see who will be available for tomorrow's game."
Wenger, though, moved to allay any worries that Giroud's injury could be a long-term concern. "Olivier is a strong structure and he recovers quite quickly," said Wenger of the France striker, whose second-half header secured victory at Newcastle to end his mini-goal drought. "He thinks he will be all right for Saturday, but the medical people think he will be a bit short. He is quite optimistic about it."
Wenger must decide whether to start Lukas Podolski, who scored on his return from a four-month injury lay-off at Upton Park, or Nicklas Bendtner in attack against the Bluebirds. "I have to see how I can balance the team because I have to consider as well who else is out and how can I get a balanced team out there," he said.
Wenger will measure up Arsenal's options ahead of the transfer window opening again on New Year's Day. "We are like many clubs, we are certainly on alert if something special turns up we will not turn it down, but we are not as well desperate because we have a big depth in our squad," the Frenchman said.
"We have shown that because our midfield |
investigating a quadruple shooting Thursday night in West Philadelphia’s Haddington neighborhood.
It happened shortly after 6 p.m. in the 1400 block of N. 60th Street.
A 24-year-old man was shot once in both feet. He was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. His condition is unknown at this time.
Another 24-year-old man was shot once in the lower right thigh. He was taken to Lakenau Hospital where he is listed in critical but stable condition.
Two men, ages 26 and 27, were shot once in the right foot. They were also taken to Lankenau Hospital and placed in stable condition.
No arrests have been made.
The motive is unclear at this time.
The incident remains under investigation.
Stay with CBSPhilly.com for the latest on this developing story.INDIANAPOLIS – Roughly three hours before the biggest moment of their lives is set to unfold on the podium at the MLS SuperDraft, more than a dozen of the top collegiate prospects are gathered in a hotel meeting room to hear about all the things that could, in fact, go terribly wrong.
This is the routine every year in the early hours of draft day, thanks to a handful of pragmatic MLS officials who love this stuff. Reality-check time. Remember to shake hands with the commissioner, don’t flub the name of the team that drafted you, and please, whatever you do, don’t be in the men’s room when your name gets called.
There are other warnings too, but here’s the advice that really sticks: These young men are no longer in control. The players assembled last Thursday morning were made up of college kids who’ve been largely dictating their own fates as athletic stars for years, thanks to a mix of talent and work ethic that pushed them ahead of the pack, behind the velvet rope and into this room. This is the gilded future of Major League Soccer.
“You will get drafted when you get drafted,” says one league official. “And if you get drafted at No. 1 or No. 38, that doesn’t matter. That will not determine where your career stands. What determines where your career stands is what you do after that.”
But after one league official gently wishes them luck should they ever get traded (“and some of you will”), a player personnel consultant brings up the previously unthinkable. There is certainly a chance they will spend the entire length of the televised draft without moving an inch. There is a possibility, in other words, that no one will want them today.
Dig in on those scrambled eggs boys, because you might be sitting out there for a while. You’ll be absolutely starving.
“I like guys to know what they’re going into,” the consultant says, “because sitting out there by yourself for a long period of time is not an enjoyable experience.”
But that’s not going to happen to Mikey Lopez. There are nearly a dozen Lopez family members and friends up from a border town in Texas all certain of that. After all, at just 19 years old, Lopez is a player with seemingly endless potential, and that means just about as much as anything to MLS coaches and club executives on draft day. On this day, it’s easy to believe that the next MLS superstar really is sitting right in front of you, if you just know which one to pick.
Lopez is as good a bet as anyone. If you believe some of the scouts outside this room, it’s not a case of if this kid makes it, but when.
“It’s crazy, knowing that I’m there,” Lopez says. “Well, I’m not really there, but I’m a pro. Stuff is starting to happen now. It’s like the first day of actually starting my pro career. That’s crazy.”
Although born in Dallas, Lopez (right) was raised primarily in Mission, Texas, a town of nearly 80,000 people roughly five miles north of the Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley. More than 85 percent of the population there is Hispanic, and it’s where Mikey’s father Miguel, a Mexican immigrant, has raised two sons and made a living as a professional events photographer with his wife, Martha.
It’s also an area of Texas with a surprisingly strong reputation of producing solid young soccer players, and Lopez is one of the crown jewels of his generation. Shipped by his parents to the private St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Lopez was a regular in the US Soccer youth ranks even before he signed his letter of intent to attend North Carolina, where he promptly became the ACC Freshman of the Year in 2011 and returned as a sophomore as one of the best midfielders in the nation.
Schellas Hyndman’s been on the Texas soccer scene since 1984, for 24 years as the head coach at Southern Methodist and the past five as the head coach of FC Dallas. He knows all about Lopez and the Rio Grande Valley. He remembers groups of eight passionate kids like Lopez from the area piled into a van driving nine hours north to Dallas, attending Hyndman’s two-day clinic, and driving nine hours right back home. Then some coach always tugs Hyndman on the arm and insists he start scouting down there if he wants to find the real undiscovered talent of Texas.
“Lopez is a very, very good player, and we’ve had him on our radar,” Hyndman says. “And I tell you what: If I was still coaching at SMU, I would have never let that boy go to Chapel Hill.”
Dallas is one of a number of teams with Lopez in their sights, but there’s no shortage of interest today. During the short walk from the players’ conference room to his mother’s hotel room (he’s on his way to pick up his new suit), he recites the six teams who expressed interest when they spoke with him at the MLS combine the previous week: Real Salt Lake, Colorado, Seattle, New England, Chicago and Sporting Kansas City. All five are picking in the first round today, with New England holding the top overall pick in the draft.
The one team not on that list, however, is the one he’s been linked to most closely in the past week. As a Mexican-American he’s on the short list for players in the scope for brand new Chivas USA head coach José “El Chelís” Sánchez Solá who, since being hired in December, has hardly wavered from his stance that the Goats will much more closely resemble their sister club from Guadalajara under his watch, and lean heavily on players with Mexican ties in 2013.
Lopez appears to be the perfect fit. He’s still slight for the pro ranks at just 5-foot-8 and 160 pounds, but he proved at the Combine that he possesses a work ethic perhaps second to none among players in the draft, and scouts love his fitness. That’s what they fawn over, and that’s what they can’t teach. Every team would be thrilled to have a Mikey Lopez playing the role of terrier in the midfield.
Except, it seems, Chivas USA. Maybe the one certainty of the day for Lopez is that “El Chelís” will not come calling, because just days before Indianapolis he made it clear that the other prominent Mexican-American in the draft, Connecticut midfielder Carlos Alvarez, is the Goats’ top choice, and that he’ll go at No. 2.
“I felt nervous before games, especially way back in the day when he was a little kid and I was on the coaching staff,” says Miguel Lopez, who embraces his son from a Starbucks coffee line in the hotel lobby. “I know what nervous feels like. I’m not nervous, I’m just anxious. You just don’t know where he’s going.”
After Lopez grabs his suit from his mother’s room – “She’s more nervous than I am,” he insists – he loads up his rental car for the short drive to a different hotel, where his girlfriend and high school sweetheart is staying. In the car he admits that while he’s certainly considered playing for Chivas USA – his mother is a fan of the Guadalajara club – he has no real preference.
“Chivas USA, Real Salt Lake, Sporting Kansas City or really any team that wants me, and where I will play,” Lopez says. “But I don’t really have a preference if I go to [Chivas] or not.”
Here’s the problem if Alvarez does indeed go to Chivas USA at No. 2, and Lopez is left there hungry: Lopez isn’t a starter on opening day. That’s what the scouts seem to think, anyway, after he left North Carolina following his sophomore year. Perhaps another year or two in the ACC would have seasoned him a bit more, but he’s always told himself that he would leave after his sophomore year, and when his father heard positive rumblings from the agents, it seemed to both of them that it was time to go.
But at 19 years old he’s one of the younger players in the draft this year, and he leans on potential as much as anyone on the board. Other players in the conference room on Thursday morning – Louisville defender Andrew Farrell, Furman defender Walker Zimmerman, Notre Dame midfielder Dillon Powers – are either more experienced or more physically prepared for the jump from the NCAAs to MLS, and are therefore more valuable to the teams picking in the top 10. These are the teams in need now, not the ones who can afford to pay a player to sit the bench because their starting lineup is already set for 2013.
Those teams – Sporting Kansas City, San Jose, D.C. United or LA, for example – pick later, which means Lopez could be in for a longer afternoon than expected if the Goats go ahead with Alvarez.
At 11:30 am ET, MLS officials usher Lopez and the select players into a special roped-off section to the right of the stage at the Indiana Convention Center. It's tough to tell exactly, but it looks like there are a dozen members of the Lopez party, seemingly larger than any other group supporting the players, and the group is so big is that it spills from the third row to the fourth, all furiously snapping photographs on their phones and shipping off emails to friends.
Lopez holds the aisle seat, directly across from Virginia Commonwealth forward Jason Johnson and diagonal from Farrell, the Louisville star who is widely expected to be the No. 1 pick. Lopez is pounding away on his cell phone and gazing up at a gigantic video board with a list of each team and their corresponding picks. The Lopez crew – most of them all the way up from Mission – is pulsating.
“We’ll go wherever he ends up,” his father Miguel says, in between posed pictures with his sons and his wife. “We’ve been traveling for years already. Mikey’s teams would travel 12-hour round-trips every week. We’ll go wherever he goes.
“I just want him to go to someone who believes in him, and to someone with a winning mentality, because we like winning,” he adds. “Who doesn’t?”
Compared to some of its previous incarnations, the SuperDraft is a breeze these days. Whittled down over time from six rounds in its inaugural run back in 2000 to just two rounds and 38 total picks today, the entire event moves along at a relatively decent clip.
But despite its trimmer, more streamlined presentation, there are certainly times during the first 15 picks when it can feel like a slog. Each team has five minutes to make a pick and most sides use close to all of that to make a selection, and trades or team timeouts for further deliberation can make an anxious player feel like he’s languishing in a dentist’s waiting room rather than sitting on the cusp of a new career.
At 12:19 pm, Farrell goes first to New England. No real drama there, considering the Revs wanted him so badly they traded up to land the top pick the night before the draft. He nails the thank-yous – parents, coaches, New England Revolution. Exit, stage left.
Then comes Chivas USA at No. 2, the one real shot Lopez has of being of a top-three pick. But they stick to their word and take Alvarez, who gets up from his seat in the front row, throws on a Chivas scarf and tells reporters that wearing these colors is a dream come true.
The words of the league official keep coming back: You will get drafted when you get drafted.
The Alvarez pick comes down at 12:23 pm, and Lopez will spend roughly the next hour stuck in the last place he wants to be: the aisle seat in row three. Players are springing up all around him at five-minute intervals. Kyle Bekker goes third to Toronto, the Vancouver Whitecaps snap up two forwards at picks Nos. 4 and 5, and another forward, Deshorn Brown, surprisingly goes to Colorado at No. 6, all to the squealing delight of their families and the firm congratulatory handshake of an agent.
Dallas comes and goes at No. 7, opting for the Furman defender Zimmerman instead of taking a shot at a local talent the team’s staff been familiar with for years. More often than not any regional connections don’t pan out with such a valuable pick, however, and all Lopez can do is offer Zimmerman a high-five when he passes by on his way to the podium.
“We had Lopez on our list to draft, but so much of the draft is your needs,” Hyndman says later. “What did we need? Well, we didn’t think we needed a central midfielder, even though he may be one of the most technical players coming out of the draft. It just doesn’t do well to bring Lopez in, because he’s not going to get the playing time he needs.”
New Mexico midfielder Blake Smith follows to Montreal at No. 8, and then two forwards – Notre Dame’s Ryan Finley and Indiana’s Eriq Zavaleta – round out the top 10. When Colorado claim the Notre Dame workhorse Powers at No. 11 he becomes the fourth midfielder taken ahead of Lopez, and when Real Salt Lake grab Maryland’s John Stertzer at No. 12, he’s the fifth.
Lopez, meanwhile, is doing one of two things during all of this. He’s either texting as compulsively as any teenager on the planet – “these are my true friends that are going to be there for me no matter what” – or he’s glancing up at the big board. There’s chatter among the family but not a great deal to Lopez himself, who now finds himself in the aisle seat in the second row. In the hour since Farrell was taken first, event organizers have straightened up a bit and taken away most of the vacant chairs left by the players now backstage mingling with family and friends.
What if Houston were to come to the rescue at No. 13? At roughly 355 miles it’s the shortest drive the Lopez crew can ask for from Mission, and the Dynamo are, as Miguel Lopez would agree, winners. Two straight MLS Cup appearances and one of the best coaches in the league in Dominic Kinnear, but zero need for a box-to-box midfielder like Lopez. The Dynamo opt for Johnson, who bounds out of his seat and tells reporters he’ll be there for whenever his new team needs him.
You will get drafted when you get drafted.
Sporting Kansas City are on the clock at No. 14, and they’re stocked. Their midfield, in particular, seems jammed, with offseason pickup Benny Feilhaber pulling the offensive strings and either the veteran Paulo Nagamura or Spanish youngster Oriol Rosell manning the defensive end of things. If anything, Lopez is a complete luxury here, and he won’t see much playing time in Year 1 while playing behind the starters on the best team in the Eastern Conference.
But SKC head coach Peter Vermes sees two things when he looks at Lopez: time and tenacity. The first is a direct result of the Generation adidas contract Lopez signed before the combine that likely won’t hit SKC’s salary cap for at least two seasons, or at least until Lopez establishes himself as a regular contributor and graduates from the Generation adidas program. It won’t cost Sporting a single cent against the salary cap to groom Lopez behind Nagamura or have him absorb the habits of Feilhaber and Graham Zusi, two guys playing with the US national team in California right now.
And then there’s the Lopez work ethic, which plays about as well in Kansas City as any other market in the league. SKC are arguably the hardest working box-to-box team in the league under Vermes, and it’s a style that only suits a select group of players who can adjust quickly and keep up.
Mikey Lopez is their man. At 1:28 p.m., the club snaps him up with the 14th pick, and the Lopez family erupts. It’s a blur from there as he’s swallowed up in leather jackets and suit coats, hugs and wet cheek kisses, and then a rushed walk to the podium. He thanks them all – God, mother, father, brother, girlfriend, coaches, agent, Sporting Kansas City. He tells the crowd to “have a great day,” and he’s officially been drafted.
“He’s a lot more mature than 19 years old. He really wants to do this, this is his passion,” Vermes tells reporters. “And that fits into the way we play, because I think our team is very passionate on the field, and I think we have a lot of guys who love the game. He kinds of fits into that world.”
Lopez, for his part, runs the gauntlet of post-draft interviews and the obligatory photo ops, which on this day include a shot hoisting the new jersey, complete with a new corporate sponsor in Kansas City. There’s Vermes, there’s SKC president Robb Heineman, and there’s All-Star defender Aurelien Collin, invited specially to Indianapolis to show off the new kits.
It lasts roughly 15 minutes from the second Lopez steps off the stage to when he finally drifts back into the players’ hospitality room, where his family is waiting. Here Miguel admits that while waiting for his son to get drafted was frustrating – and unexpected – it wasn’t for naught.
“Based on Mikey’s history, he always comes into a new team and earns his respect,” Miguel says. “He always works his way up. The same thing happened throughout his youth career and in high school and in college. I don’t think it’ll be any different here.”
Mikey Lopez wisely fires off a tweet to the Kansas City Cauldron supporters and tells them he “can't wait to get to the season started,” and flashes a wide grin worth an hour’s wait on the draft floor. He reaches down to his pocket. His phone won’t stop buzzing.
“I was picked by a great team and I’m glad to be going to Sporting Kansas City,” he says with both excitement and sense of exhaustion. “It’s a match made in heaven.”As Christmas fast approaches, I expect that loads of Santa wishlists', from writers big and small, now include a drone. The U.S. alone is expecting sales of over 1 million over the holidays - and the trend will likely be similar here in the UK.
So now is probably the perfect time to explain the rules, regulations and guidelines surrounding drones, and how to fly them legally and safely in the UK.
Here's what you can and can't, and should and shouldn't do when flying your <7kg drone (quadcopter, RPAS, UAV, SUSA etc.) in the UK - and why.
The Don'ts
Don't fly within 50m of any person, vehicle, or building not under your control.
Don't fly too close to property or people that don't know what you're doing. This is much more for safety than privacy. If suddenly a rotor fails, or battery dies, you want to make sure you don't crash into someone or something that you can do serious damage to. This rule is reduced to 30m when taking off and landing. Don't fly over or within 150m of any crowd of 1000+ people.
As soon as that crowd ticks over from 999 people, it is now deemed impossible to 'control' that many people. Again, if you're out of control, you want to make sure you only hit the ground when you come down. Don't fly over or within 150m of any congested area.
A 'congested area' is any residential, commercial, recreational or industrial location - including roads and your quiet neighbourhood. Pretty much any area that makes it difficult to avoid breaking rule 1, and dangerous to make an emergency landing, is a no fly zone. Don't take off or land anywhere you don't have the landowners permission.
Not only is this rude, it's simply against the law. Don't lose sight of the drone, or fly more than 500m laterally away from you.
Just don't do this. If a malfunction occurs, or you lose connection without a return-to-home failsafe, or even enough battery to get back, you're in trouble. Good luck flying a drone safely back to you when its too small or difficult to see. This should be unaided too, so no binoculars! Don't fly higher than 400ft (122m).
This is where Class G airspace, our playground, ends - and where manned aircraft soon starts. You don't want to be the first jackass to impact a helicopter or plane, do you? Rule 5 applies here too - any higher and it gets harder to see your drone. And don't just watch your drone, keep an eye out for anything that may fly into it. It's almost impossible for a pilot to see your small drone in time to evade it - it's your job to be out of harms way. Don't fly within 5 miles of an airport, without permission from the ATC tower.
Seriously, don't be that guy. You'd just be fuelling the media firestorm by risking a collision. I guarantee your shots won't look that cool, compared to the risk involved. Don't be a nuisance.
You may think you're helping emergency services or the local news by filming a fire, but you could just be really irritating or actually doing harm by getting in the way - as some Californian operators found earlier this year. Simply, just don't fly close to anyone or anything you don't have the active cooperation of. Don't get distracted.
This is the quickest way to lose sight of your drone, and possibly crash it. A spotter is advisable, especially on flights where you're concentrating on framing your shot. They can watch the drone, and handle any distracting guests until you're in control or back on the ground. Don't fly for money or 'valuable consideration'.
At least not without Permission for Aerial Work (PfAW) from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).. You shouldn't be accepting 'work' with your drone, where you or somebody gains something from your flight, without appropriate training. This is to make sure everyone is safe, and that you are insured!
Okay, that's a lot of don'ts. I bet you're thinking there's absolutely nothing you can do now right? I remember thinking the exact same way. All that changed once I realised that its all just about managing risk, getting the right permissions, and is all for safety anyway - for people and your drone!
Most of these rules aren't absolute either. You can apply to the CAA for exemption if you can explain why you need to break a rule, and how you plan to mitigate any risks. You'll probably need a PfAW at the very least.
That's the hard part done! Just keep them all in mind and have fun. Now enjoy the do's...
The Do's
Do have fun!
Let's face it, drones are awesome and heaps of fun to fly. Do a flight plan, and check the weather & NOTAMs!
Before you fly, have a decent idea about what you plan to achieve, and how to mitigate any risks. It doesn't have to be anything formal. It just helps you be prepared, and maximises your productive battery time. You should at least check the weather forecast, so you don't get caught in strong winds or rain while flying. And please check for NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) in the area you plan to fly, so you don't interfere with someone's reserved airspace! You can check here. Do get some training!
Even if you don't plan on making money from your drone, I recommend the training. The 3 day course opened my eyes immensely, and completely cleared up my understanding of the regulations and how to fly safely. I think if you can afford it, do it. Too much knowledge is never a bad thing. Do solve problems and create new markets!
Get your Permission for Aerial Work and carve out a niche! It's so exciting seeing the development and power of drones in new industries. As well as take pretty pictures, drones can now 3D map disaster zones, stadiums or neighbourhoods in a matter of minutes, pinpoint crop disease, or deliver medication to hard-to-reach places. Do help emergency services, with their permission!
An aerial perspective can be a tremendous help in search-and-rescue missions for example. If you have permission, I encourage you to use your drone for good! Just remember to watch out for police helicopters etc. Do fly safe!
Sorry to sneak this one in again. Just remember it's probably at least a kilogram of solid plastic, metal and spinning blades, just hanging in the air at the mercy of gravity. Use your common sense, follow the rules above, and enjoy your drone! Do take some amazing pictures!
You have the power to see the world from perspectives that have probably never before been seen by humans. That's awesome! So record it and show the rest of us. Do explore!
Take the opportunity to visit places and meet people that you never would have done otherwise. A new community and world of possibilities await you and your drone!
I told you it wasn't all bad!
If this summary wasn't enough, you can read the CAP722 "Unmanned Aircraft System Operations in the UK", in all its glorious detail by clicking here.
I personally take pride in operating safely and legally- and that requires knowing and practising all of the above, on every flight.
If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below and I'll do my best to answer them. Happy flying!Stanford was found guilty of a multi-billion dollar investment fraud
Jailed fraudster Allen Stanford says the embarrassment he caused English cricket chiefs "breaks my heart".
In his first interview since being indicted in 2009 for carrying out the second largest investment scam in US history - a crime for which he is serving a 110-year prison term - the Texan told BBC Sport he is "very sad" about the damage his conviction did to the sport.
Media playback is not supported on this device I did exploit cricket - Stanford
In 2008 the former billionaire signed a controversial agreement with the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) for a multi-million pound series of matches.
In a notorious publicity stunt, Stanford flew into Lord's aboard a private helicopter laden with a treasure chest filled with fake dollar notes.
But the following year the ECB was left humiliated when Stanford was charged with fraud worth $8bn. Convicted in 2012, Stanford denies any wrongdoing and has vowed to clear his name.
When asked how he felt about the humiliation the ECB had suffered as a result of its association with him, Stanford said: "It makes me very, very sad. I'm very sorry".
Speaking from the maximum-security Coleman II federal prison in Sumterville, Florida, he admitted: "It breaks my heart and there's nothing I can say other than that was not caused by Allen Stanford.
"That was caused by the wrongful prosecution... an over zealous and a wrongful prosecution."
Stanford signed a deal with the ECB for a series of five Twenty20 games between England and a Caribbean side nicknamed the 'Stanford All-Stars'. The winners of each of the five games would collect a prize-fund of $20m (£13.75m), the largest ever for a team sporting event. The losers would get nothing.
The exuberant tycoon promoted the series by flying into Lord's, where he was greeted by the ECB's then chairman Giles Clarke and chief executive David Collier.
The long-term deal collapsed the following year when the US Securities and Exchange Commission charged Stanford, and the ECB cut all ties. But many felt the the governing body had been blinded by Stanford's wealth and should have seen the warning signs. Both Clarke's and Collier's reputations were damaged by the ill-fated partnership.
Stanford touched down at Lord's to promote his $20m tournament
"I'm not sure if Giles Clarke is still the head person now, but he and I got along well," said Stanford.
"And I think the world of David Collier.
"My dealing with the ECB was one of professionalism and one of mutual respect and I love cricket."
Ultimately, only one match took place between England and the All Stars, England suffering a humiliating 10-wicket defeat in Antigua in November 2008. Stanford also ended up having to apologise to the losing team for cavorting with some of their wives and girlfriends during their warm-up victory over Middlesex, at one point bouncing the pregnant wife of wicketkeeper Matt Prior on his knee.
"To tell you the truth I don't remember doing that," he said.
"It's one of those blurry blank spots. What I remember is going down there, I didn't know who they were. I just saw a group of young gals sitting there and they were waving at me and the camera was following me around and they said 'come over here and take your picture with us' so I did.
"There was one chair shy of having us all sitting there, so I said 'here come sit on my knee', and we were going to take a picture and that was the end of it.
"I had no idea those were the English players' wives and that created quite a bit of an uproar. But I apologised for it. I went over to the English locker room and I apologised to the guys. I said 'look I was just over there having fun with the crowd like I always do, I was just horsing around, I didn't mean anything by it', and they accepted my apology."
Stanford with then England captain Kevin Pietersen at the $20m event in the Caribbean in 2008
Stanford's involvement in cricket began in 2006, when the Antigua-based banker created and funded the first Stanford 20/20 tournament. By the time a second tournament took place in 2008, watched by a reported global audience of 300 million, he was considered the world's leading promoter of the sport, and a cricket innovator.
When asked what he thought of those who said he had exploited cricket, Stanford said: "I would say they are absolutely correct.
"I was trying to grow the Stanford brand globally. I mean anybody would be foolish not to spend the money, and I spent about $30-odd million on cricket in the West Indies in addition to what I spent on the 20/20 for 20 tournament.
"But I certainly did want a return on that investment in terms of a business sense.
"But what nobody understood is that I anticipated this new generation of players that we were going to uncover.
"When we had our first cricket tournament we broadcast that and I gave the TV rights away globally. We had over a billion people watch our matches and that was the island versus island competition.
Stanford presents the Stanford Super Series trophy to winning skipper Chris Gayle
"My goal was to have a vehicle where I could uncover new talent, take the money that this tournament generated, and pile it back into the island so that they could develop their own programmes, home-grow these young athletes and bring them to the Stanford 20/20. We would pick the best players out of the tournament. These would not be the superstars that currently play for the West Indies, these would be unknown young guys.
"In the West Indies we have the greatest physical athletic talent for cricket anywhere in the world. They were just being diverted into other sports, whether it's basketball or soccer. There just wasn't that real incentive for them to stay and play in a sport that had not kept track with the 21st Century and the modernisation of the sport."
Stanford says he never watches cricket now he is behind bars.
"Cricket is not a very big sport in prison. In fact, I've had to educate some of the guys what cricket is all about. Occasionally I run into a guy from the West Indies - it filters through the system here, and of course they know who I am and we immediately have a talk.
"But cricket is not shown on any of the few televisions that are available here.
"I try to keep up with it best I can, but my focus right now is to get out of prison and to see these wrongs made right and to see that I get back with my family."
Listen again to the BBC Radio 5 live special on the Allen Stanford interview broadcast on 21:00 on Monday, 11 January.When This is Spinal Tap came out over 30 years ago, it went over a lot of people’s heads. "Everybody thought it was a real band,” recalled director Rob Reiner. “Everyone said, 'Why would you make a movie about a band that no one has heard of?’”
It’s hard to believe that lines like “You can’t dust for vomit” failed to come off as anything but a joke. But, to be fair, Hollywood comedies were generally straight-forward affairs in the ‘80s. Think Blues Brothers or Fletch. Fake documentaries weren’t a thing. And This is Spinal Tap looks and feels exactly like a rock documentary– the hagiographic voiceover, the shaky camera, the awkward interviews. The movie was just as unscripted as rock docs like Don’t Look Back, The Song Remains the Same and The Kids Are All Right. The film is not only a parody of the generally overblown silliness of rock and roll, it is also, as Newsweek’s David Ansen notes, “a satire of the documentary form itself, complete with perfectly faded clips from old TV shows of the band in its mod and flower-child incarnations.”
And then there’s the fact that, for a fake band, Spinal Tap knew how to rock -- albeit to completely idiotic lyrics. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, the actors who make up the core of the band, actually played all the music in the movie. And after the cult success of the film, they went on to play concerts. Can you really call Spinal Tap a fake band if they wowed audiences in Wembley Stadium?
But the genius stroke of the movie was to mix in pain and dread with the humor. As we’re laughing at David St. Hubbins and company fretting over an 18-inch Stonehenge prop, we also wince in sympathy. Sting reportedly told Rob Reiner that he watches the movie every time he is about to go on tour. “Every time I watch it, I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry.”
Spinal Tap made its first appearance in 1979, five years before the movie premiered. It was on a short-lived ABC SCTV-like comedy series called The T.V. Show that starred Reiner. You can see Guest, McKean and Shearer and company rocking out to the tune “Rock n Roll Nightmare” right above. Though the performance is not nearly as tight or funny as their subsequent appearances, all of the ideas are there. The bloated pretentiousness. The silly lyrics. The sillier outfits. By the way, that bottle-wielding keyboardist in the clip is Loudon Wainwright III.
A couple years later, Reiner and company decided to revisit Spinal Tap with the idea of making a mockumentary. As Reiner recounted in an interview with Sound Opinions:
They gave us the money and we realized that there was no way in screenplay form that we could capture what this would be. Because it was going to be a documentary. So I said to the guy, give us the money you were going to give us to write the screenplay and I’ll make you a little bit of the film. And we made like 20 minutes of this film. We had backstage footage. We had concert footage. Interview stuff.
You can watch the whole demo film (Spinal Tap: The Final Tour) up top in two parts. The hair might be different and some of the gags might not land with the same punch, but the chemistry, the concept and the comedy are all there. In fact, some clips from the demo, particularly the interviews, made their way into the final cut of the movie.
Sadly, the demo failed to impress the production company. “The guy [at the production company] said, ‘I don’t like this.’ So we went around for years to get it made. And finally, we were able to put it together for a couple of million bucks.”
You can watch Reiner recount the making and legacy of This is Spinal Tap below. Spinal Tap: The Final Tour will be added to our collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..
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Ian Rubbish (aka Fred Armisen) Interviews the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mockumentary
Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel Promotes World’s Largest Online Guitar Lesson
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.Tyler Clippard had two questions asked of him after the game, and he spoke for more than four minutes.
He spoke with tears in his eyes and his voice breaking a bit at times, and he delivered some forthright and critical comments about the Nationals’ decision to option Drew Storen to Triple-A Syracuse and the way that they have managed Storen’s role on this team dating back to the offseason.
Clippard never once said Rafael Soriano’s name, but it’s clear that he thinks the Nationals made a mistake signing the 33-year-old right-hander to a two-year, $28 million deal this offseason, a move that he feels was punishment to Storen for a blown save in Game 5 of the National League Division Series last October that led to the Nats getting knocked out of the playoffs.
“It’s tough,” Clippard said. “I mean, he’s done a lot this year as far as, he’s worked hard tried to get out of this funk. It kind of snowballed on him there to get to this point. It’s just unfortunate. I think there’s a lot of things that led to this that could’ve been prevented. You know, you basically send a guy a message this offseason for having one bad game that he’s not the guy for the job. He’s only human. I mean, it |
the resulting tower would also block views from both buildings, cast a shadow across the area, and bring an influx of residents to an area that has an overcrowded school and recently lost its hospital, claimed critics.
The 75 Henry Streetians have until Jan. 15 to cast their votes, and a majority of owners will have to vote “yes” for the co-op’s board to pursue the deal.
The opponents say they know they’re asking the residents to turn down a big windfall, but hope they’ll consider the impact their decision will have on the whole neighborhood.
“We’re asking them to give up significant financial security that this offer would bring to them, to their children, to their family, and to their future,” said Peter Bray, who is the executive director of influential local civic group the Brooklyn Heights Association.
At least two 75 Henry St. residents pledged to vote “no” at a previous meeting, but one brave resident told Wednesday’s crowd he intended to say “yes” — stressing that it was just a vote for the board to explore the offer, not a final handshake.
“I would be in favor of it,” said a man who identified himself as Gil and said he has lived in neighborhood for 60 years. “But all we’re doing is looking at the possibilities — we’re not making a commitment.”
Both co-op complexes were built in the late ’60s as part of the Mitchell-Lama housing subsidy program, which created below-market-rate housing aimed at middle-class families. Cadman Towers remains in the program, which means units there are relatively cheap — a WNYC reporter claimed she scored a one-bedroom for $38,000 in 2010 — and are only available to people earning below a certain amount (currently around $97,000 for three-person household).
Shareholders at 75 Henry St. opted out of the program years ago, so it now functions as a standard co-op — a one-bedroom there was recently on the market for $750,000 — and the owners are now able to cash in on the developers’ offer.
Reach reporter Lauren Gill at lgill @cngl ocal.com or by calling (718) 260–2511.
Updated 10:17 pm, July 9, 2018
©2016Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) has generated controversy for himself, yet again, by proposing that the U.S. government reform immigration laws to actively exclude Muslims who might potentially “want to come and try to impose some variant of Sharia law.” On Wednesday evening, Fox’s Megyn Kelly pressed the governor a bit on whether such ideas violate fundamental American principles.
In recent months, Jindal has described Muslim immigration as an “invasion” of sorts. His recent suggestion on federal policy, however, has drawn the ire of Muslim-American advocacy groups alleging that he is attempting to “pander to society’s margins” to regain points in GOP primary polling.
“America’s built on religious liberty,” the governor told Kelly tonight. “We don’t discriminate against anybody of any religion and certainly there are many Muslims that are proud patriotic Americans. That’s great. It’s also true there are radical Muslims — Muslims that want to treat women as second-class citizens, those who want to use our freedoms to manager others.”
Kelly pushed back on the governor a tad. “Members of ISIS may be a different story,” she said, “but just to say that if you are a radical Islamist or, more specifically, if you believe in Sharia law, then you won’t be allowed into the United States is controversial.” She then asked: “Who decides how far into Sharia law you have to be? Who decides who’s a radical Islamist and who’s just an Islamist?”
Jindal replied that Americans have the right to hold many bigoted beliefs, but “you don’t have the right to come here and say for example you think women should be treated as second-class citizens.”
Sensing an inherent contradiction there, Kelly asked of the governor: “Why don’t you have that right? Why not? This is a country with lots of crazy beliefs… [A]re we going to start banning everybody who doesn’t treat women or children or criminals for that matter the way we like?”
Jindal, in return, pivoted to comparing the United States to Europe, claiming that those countries have “second- and third-generation [citizens] that don’t consider themselves part of that society.”
Watch the full interview below, via Fox:
— —
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Players such as San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman are out of luck now that the NFL and Bose have struck a deal that limits what players can wear during football-related activities.
According to Sporting News' Jasmine Watkins, the league has agreed to terms with Bose that will prohibit players from using any headphones other than Bose—including Beats by Dre headphones—while they are on camera.
Per Watkins: "The restriction of other headphone usage includes preseason training camps, practice sessions, game day, postgame interviews, and it remains in place until 90 minutes after the game has ended."
Update from Friday, Oct. 10
It looks like at least one NFL team is getting hooked up with Bose headphones so they can avoid potential fines from the league. The Carolina Panthers tweeted that every player had a gift waiting for them this morning:
--End of Updates --
Update from Thursday, Oct. 9
The NFL is serious about making sure players don't wear any headphones other than Bose during the restricted periods.
According to multiple reports, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was fined for wearing Beats by Dre headphones after Sunday's game.
Kaepernick explained why he wore the pink Beats by Dre headphones during his postgame press conference:
St. Louis Rams defensive end Chris Long weighed in on Kaepernick's fine.
[Twitter, Colin Kaepernick]
—End of Update—
Fans may wonder why something like this matters, but when the league has a sponsorship deal, the players have to abide by the rules.
The new restrictions aren't sitting well with some.
This news is especially bad for some players, like Kaepernick and Sherman, who have appeared in Beats by Dre commercials.
[Twitter, Beats by Dre]Hello everyone,
some of you might recall that not so long ago, Storm stated that they want to introduce more reward T10 vehicles (like the M60, Object 907 and the Failowe), obtainable thru random battles – but they have a problem: all of the tier 10 candidates are already “scheduled” to appear as regular vehicles with lines of their own.
As a reaction to that, Kankou, Zarax and me did make a tier 10 proposal: the E-75 Ausf.W:
You can read about it here (including proposed stats): http://ftr.wot-news.com/2013/06/26/no-random-t10-reward-tanks-available-presenting-weserhutte-tiger/
What happened afterwards?
Two things. Basically, I asked an “unnamed developer” (I don’t want to bring pressure on him, my question was informal), whether this design would be viable. Basically, his reply was that it’s as good as any other proposal. At the same time, I gathered feedback, which was actually quite positive (more than I expected at least).
In the meanwhile, Kankou did propose it to Wargaming officially thru some other contacts. But honestly, we all know, every project needs support – your support, the support of players, who like it and would like to see it in the game.
So, this is where YOU come in, dear readers. This project needs your approval and some good hype. I can see you asking one (the most logical) question – “Why should I support it?”
Here are a few reasons why:
- first, it’s (semi) historical. The historical background is described at length in the aforementioned article
- it’s not another German huge metal box. You probably could find more heavy tank “historical” candidates for the German T10 position, such as the “Tiger Maus”, or the “E-100 Ausf.B”, but all of them are basically Maus/E-100 clones. This proposal is different, it’s more mobile, has sloped armor and packs quite a punch, it’s like E-75 on steroids
- it’s essentially a player-described evolution of the original Weserhütte hull proposal. In other words, if your feedback can get it in, it might as well be the first “player-suggested” tank in the game.
- it’s as good a design as any, when it comes to T10 random battles. If you have a different idea for the T10 reward tank, sure, that’s cool too, but you have to consider the fact it can’t be anything “common”, as those vehicles (for example the Chieftain tank) are scheduled to appear at some point as regular vehicles. If you care only about getting some rewards for random battles too, you might as well consider this tank
Regarding the third point – make no mistake, the chance to get this tank in is most likely small, but I still think it’s a good idea and it’s worth trying.
So, what can you do?
Talk about it. Propose it. This appeal goes especially to EU (and possibly SEA) server, where every community has its own language section (especially the EU German, Polish and others), you can translate a part of it if you want to, post it in the “suggestion” section. Stuff like that.
Of course, if you don’t do any of that, that’s just fine. All I am asking for you, dear readers, is to at least consider the idea and the reasons I posted above.We humans are not as smart as we humans think we are. Sure, we figured out how to split the atom, fly, vaccinate against smallpox and pipe ESPN 24/7 into our homes and onto our smartphones.
But these marvels are more the results of smart processes rather than of smart people.
Look at your cellphone. Even if your particular phone isn’t as smart as an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy S3, it’s still an incredible piece of technology. By pressing just a few buttons, you can talk in real time, at little cost and with no wires, to your children across town or to your friend across the ocean. France’s King Louis XIV could have offered his entire kingdom in exchange for that ability and still found himself unable to do what you do routinely with your phone.
And while lots of smart people — engineers, bankers, accountants, marketing specialists — were necessary to make your phone a reality, they weren’t sufficient. Smart human beings existed for tens of thousands of years without coming close to developing any of the modern marvels that we today take for granted.
Another indispensable ingredient for our modern prosperity is a process that not only inspires people to exercise their smarts, but also leverages those smarts into a whole that is immensely larger than the sum of its parts.
The undeniably smart Steve Jobs’ vision for an affordable smartphone was dazzlingly creative. But that vision would have amounted to zilch had not many other people been available to help make Jobs’ vision a reality. Some of these other people were also smart. Others were of only ordinary intelligence. And almost every one of them was a complete stranger to Jobs.
Yet somehow, they all cooperated with Jobs and with each other to create the iPhone.
What has not been around, unlike smart people, for tens of thousands of years is the smart process that encourages the globe-spanning cooperation that makes goods such as the smartphone possible.
The “smart process” is a market economy. It has two essential features. First, participants in a market economy are governed by the laws of property and contract: Jones is not entitled to take, damage or destroy Smith’s property without Smith’s permission — and Jones doesn’t get such entitlement even if he becomes a high government official.
Second, the bourgeois pursuits of innovation, entrepreneurship and industry are widely celebrated — and with little concern given to the nationalities or religious identities of other market participants.
Only in the past few centuries did this open-ended market process emerge. It, and it alone, supplies the indispensable institutional framework to leverage people’s ideas into the goods and services that make our modern lifestyles possible.
Everything that is distinctive about a modern economy requires the joint, cooperative efforts of thousands or even millions of people. The process that combined Steve Jobs’ vision of a smartphone with the knowledge and efforts of manufacturers of metals, glass, microchips and other components of an iPhone is far greater than the brainpower of even the smartest human being — a zillion times greater.
So we can take pride in our ability to produce airplanes and Wi-Fi signals and smartphones and all of the other amenities of modernity. But let’s also be aware that the market process that produces these things is much “smarter” than any of us is as an individual.
Donald J. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His column appears twice monthly.In a move that makes virtually no sense whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security has announced a partnership with Walmart “to help the American public play an active role in ensuring the safety and security of our nation.”
From the DHS website, which we are pretty sure has not been hijacked by the editors of The Onion:
The “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign–originally implemented by New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from DHS’ Transit Security Grant Program–is a simple and effective program to engage the public and key frontline employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities
“Homeland security starts with hometown security, and each of us plays a critical role in keeping our country and communities safe,” said DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. “This partnership will help millions of shoppers across the nation identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities.”
Napolitano will also appear in a video that will run at select checkout counters. The Secretary somehow manages to stave off a smile as she tells shoppers to alert Walmart managers to possible threats of terrorism.
Secretary Napolitano Announces Expansion of “If You See Something, Say Something” Campaign to Walmart Stores Across the Nation [DHS.gov]
Thanks to Erin for the tip!Home News More in detail
07.04.2016 (06:00)
Syrian Air Force in cooperation with Russian fighters delivered about 30 tons of humanitarian cargos to besieged Deir ez-Zor
Russian Centre for reconciliation of opposing sides in the Syrian Arab Republic organized air delivering and dropping of humanitarian cargos on April 6. Military transport aviation crew of the Syrian Air Force has delivered food products from the International Red Crescent to Deir ez-Zor, which had been besieged by ISIS militants.
Cargo delivering has been held from the Hmeymim airfield by Il-76 transport of the Syrian Air Force escorted by Russian Su-30 and Su-35 fighters.
The aircraft dropped 4 parachute systems with 30 tons of humanitarian aid over areas of besieged Deir ez-Zor.
About 200,000 citizens of the city are suffering lack of food products, medicaments, petrol, and other goods of first necessity.
International humanitarian organizations failed to organize humanitarian aid delivering to the besieged city. Delivering of Red Crescent cargos to the city became possible by mediation of the Russian Centre for reconciliation of opposing sides in the Syrian Arab Republic.
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Information loading in process... Information loading in process... 1 2 3 4 5 -Not voted- Rate the information on this pageMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Mr Stafford has been accompanied by Peruvian forestry worker "Cho"
A Leicestershire man has completed a 6,000-mile (9,600 km) trek along the length of the Amazon.
Former soldier Ed Stafford dodged vipers, electric eels, and was wrongly accused of murder during his epic journey, which began in April 2008.
The 34-year-old, of Mowsley, walked from Peru to the coast of Brazil.
A spokeswoman for Mr Stafford said he had become the first person to have walked the entire length of the South American river.
The Amazon is about 4,000 miles long, but he travelled an extra 2,000 miles after being forced inland by flooding.
Mr Stafford began his 859-day journey at the summit of Mount Mismi, and has since suffered hundreds of wasp stings and endured an estimated 50,000 mosquito bites, while raising money for charity and increasing awareness of the river.
He said: "The endurance, both mental and physical, has been the thing that's been the most wearing.
"I've been quite humbled by how much I've had to rely on other people and I've benefited greatly from the generosity of the people I've met along the way.
"The interest in the expedition has been mind blowing and all the messages of support have kept me going - that and the desire to bring life in the Amazon to the wider world."
I started walking with Ed at first because I felt a responsibility to try and help this crazy man Mr Stafford's companion Gadiel "Cho" Sanchez Rivera
Five months into the trip Mr Stafford was joined by Peruvian forestry worker Gadiel "Cho" Sanchez Rivera who pledged to complete the expedition with him.
The ex-soldier wrote on Twitter: "Job done. 28 months and Cho and I have finished walking the Amazon. I always knew it was possible."
The pair have walked every day along the banks of the river living off piranha, rice and beans.
Mr Sanchez Rivera said: "I started walking with Ed at first because I felt a responsibility to try and help this crazy man through a very dangerous area with drugs traffickers and hostile tribes.
"But as the days went on I really enjoyed the simple life and Ed and I became good friends. It was not long before I knew that I wanted to complete the whole trip and walk with Ed right to the finish."
Mr Stafford said he was sometimes met with looks of "absolute terror" by locals who feared white people would harm them, and in one instance was detained by a village chief because he arrived shortly after a local man went missing.
The final leg of the trek proved one of the most challenging, with Mr Stafford collapsing at the side of the road a few hours before reaching the final destination.
British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes has described both men's efforts as "truly extraordinary".
They reached the shores of the Maruda Beach in Belem at about 1300 BST.
Cho relaxes Peruvian forestry worker "Cho" agreed to guide Ed for five days, but spent the next two years completing the trek
Eating Ocelot Piranha broth was a staple, but Ed also ate spider monkey, armadillo, kinkajou and ocelot
Sloth rescue Ed encountered pit vipers, electric eels, jaguars, howler monkeys, anaconda and this sloth rescued from floods
Hunger Although running out of food supplies was tough, living off the land offered some of the most exhilerating moments: Have you had a good E3 so far?: Yes, it’s been awesome! The reaction so far has been great. We’re here with 64 playable stations, including two commanders, and so far it’s been spectacular.: What has the feedback been from players, getting into the big 64 player battle?: It’s been overwhelming positive, I would say. I guess people didn’t know what to expect, and now that they’ve seen what we’ve shown, it seems like we’ve delivered on their expectations.: You guys tend to focus on showing the big cinematic single-player stuff -- it’s kind of a staple for the military shoote r-- but then you suddenly come out and go, “Oh no... by the way, here’s 64 players”. Is there a reason you don’t come out with multiplayer first? Is there a philosophy behind that?: I think when we go back to that exact question, we analyse what we think we should be leading with, and what’s looking good, and when to hit the right things, and go big with a thing. We always wanted to... well, I always wanted anyway, for E3 to be the reveal for multiplayer. Because single-player can take a small piece of the game and make it look good, whereas multiplayer has to have basically a working game for a game like this, and that requires a little bit more effort to get it to this degree. So I think it’s both a marketing, and pure production decision.: With the Xbox conference stage demo -- aside from the technical difficulties that happened there -- you have this ship that is capsizing, and split in half, with fighter jets sliding down into the ocean, and it’s crazy. Then you’ve got this collapsing building in the EA conference, and the original stuff you showed last GDC as well is out of control as well. So at what point do you tone it down?: [laughs] No, there will always be peaks and valleys. In order for something to feel intense, it has to have a lower end to it, otherwise you don’t feel anything. So there will be peaks and valleys in intensity, absolutely.: A bit of a famous question from Battlefield 3 among the press, was after that original amazing demo at GDC 2011 with the Earthquake, multiple people asked about the possibility of earthquakes in multiplayer, which obviously wasn’t happening then. Now you’ve got all these giant world events happening in BF4.Did you guys sit on that for a while, and think that maybe it is time to bring in spectacular events like that into multiplayer? Has that always been on the cards?: Absolutely. It’s been on the cards the whole time. That whole skyscraper event is an evolution of the concept. The idea was to add big and small events that dynamically change the battlefield, so it will feel different every time you play it.So here on Siege of Shanghai, you have the destruction of the skyscraper that creates a whole new gameplay area for you guys to play around in. It also throws up a lot of dust into the air, so then the whole visual look and feel of the map changes, and the viewing distance also changes a lot, so you need to be in closer -- if you’re in the helicopter, for instance: you need to be in closer to see targets and engage.The same thing goes for smaller things that we have. If there’s a parked car, and you bump into it, the car alarm might go off. Or when there’s a fire, the sprinklers in the roof might turn on, then there’s water around you, and you get camera effects based on that. If you shoot a fire extinguisher, that creates a temporary smoke cloud. All of these small things allow you to use the environment to your advantage. So it’s a toolbox, and you can do what you want with them, but our goal is to get the feeling that it’s a more dynamic environment.: Have you found, during the iterative process, that some players don’t really like that, because they have a particular playstyle, and when the world changes they have to switch to long-range or something like that?: I think that’s always been the case. Ever since we brought destruction on board that was already happening. So I think it’s just a step further with that, that includes more elements. We haven’t really gotten that kind of feedback yet though. If you want to play in a sort of arena, then that’s fine, there’s games that are doing that pretty good.We want to be open-world and have these dynamic environments, and that’s kind of been a part of Battlefield for quite some time, and we’re just building upon our own evolution.: One of the Battlefield 3 DLC drops had that close quarters map in the skyscraper...: Ziba Tower?: That’s it. Are we going to see more of those kind of short-range maps this time around? Or was the feedback from that more “no, no, you guys are Battlefield, we need big open spaces”?: There will definitely be game modes and maps that are catered towards the infantry experience. I can’t speak maps other than what we’re showing today, but there will definitely be something there for infantry-only fans, as well as the big open battlefield fans.: What’s the process moving forward onto the next gen consoles, in terms of player numbers? Are you able to talk about that yet?: Sure. We’re doing parallel development on all platforms. We have Frostbite 3, it allows us to do awesome development on all five platforms at the same time, and it scales between them. So it’s not that difficult for us to develop for it.: And what about player numbers specifically, is it 64 across all next gen platforms?: That’s right. The next gen consoles will have 64 players, so finally you’ll be able to experience that true land, sea, air, epic-scale battles colliding at once. Yeah, we’re bringing that to the console audience, which is a big thing for us, together with the 60FPS stuff we’re having for the next-gen consoles too.: Can you talk at all about the networking side of that? How does that work from a dedicated server perspective. Can you talk about the plans there?: We’ve been running 64 player servers on PC for some time, so it’s not really any different to us. We know how to do it, and we know what we need to push in order to make it happen. It’s happening now right there in the booth -- the server is running on my laptop. It’s not a big deal for us really.: Have you guys found any advantages specifically with the Xbox One’s cloud services offering at all. Did you take any of that into account, or is Frostbite geared to do everything on its own anyway?: Frostbite is powerful enough to do what we want to do, but we’re not talking specifically about the cloud stuff just yet.: Obviously BF4’s coming out on current gen as well. Are the player numbers are smaller on the current gen consoles?: Yes, we will keep the player numbers that we had the previous time around, which basically means 24 people on the PS3 and Xbox 360. But since we’ve added the commander mode, it will have two additional slots for commanders, so 26 total.: Now I’m not sure if anyone really talks about this, but native mouse and keyboard support was available for the PS3 if developers implemented it. I’m not sure about the PS4, but is that something you guys think about? Is it just baked into the product anyway?: We have mouse and keyboard support for the PC obviously, but I can’t speak now specifically for next gen consoles. But if it makes sense in the Battlefield universe, for a Battlefield game, we’ll consider it.: Ok, awesome. Well that’s all I’ve got for today. Cheers Alek.: Thank you very much.#874275 +( 647 )- [X] (Bucks) do you hate midgets?
(@Fantasy) yep, I blame that evil midget in rehab
(refused) no rehab is complete without an evil midget
(@Fantasy) headbutted me in the balls
(refused) LOL
(@Fantasy) and he was the perfect height
(refused) rofl
(Bucks) rofl
(@Fantasy) his head was literally crotch height
(refused) who the fuck even does that
(@Fantasy) that midget
(refused)... yeah obviously... but come on.
(@Fantasy) after you spend a month making midget jokes
(refused) lol
(@Fantasy) to a cocaine addict in rehab
(@Fantasy) then on family/friends day having all your friends make fun of his midget kind
(@Fantasy) he came up and said something like "stop shitting, dog"
(refused) you kinda deserved it then
(@Fantasy) I laughed
(@Fantasy) he said you want to start something
(@Fantasy) I said say it to my face
(@Fantasy) and LAUGHED
(@Fantasy) he headbutted me in the balls
(@Fantasy) I was on the ground
(refused) yeah of course
(@Fantasy) crying
(refused) I'd give that fucking midget a medal
(@Fantasy) so he squatted down and said "stop messing with me"
(@Fantasy) right in my face
(Bucks) what an wesome midget
(@Fantasy) had to get a new roomate after that
(@Fantasy) since the midget was my roomate
(@Fantasy) and since then I've been afraid of midgetsAs blogged about Monday, the Wild has signed center Cody Almond to a one-year, $550,000 contract. It will likely be announced at some point today.
It's a one-way deal, meaning the soon-to-be 25-year-old center has a real good shot at making next season's roster.
Almond, a fifth-round pick by the Wild in 2007, scored two goals for the Wild in 25 games over parts of three seasons before playing the past two seasons in Geneva, Switzerland. Last year, he broke out offensively, scoring 18 goals and 34 points in 44 games with 75 penalty minutes.
The Wild still owned Almond's NHL rights because he didn't sign as a restricted free agent in 2012, so if he wanted to again chase his NHL dream, he had to start off by returning to the Wild.
Almond is a 6-foot-2, 217-pound, left-shot center who can play wing. He hits, plays with an edge, skates well and is solid defensively. Coach Mike Yeo knows him well from their time together with the Houston Aeros. Basically, he provides depth and returns to the NHL a more mature, finished product.
Last month, Almond had signed a five-year deal to stay with Geneve Servette. Obviously, that changed.
Here is Monday's blog on Almond if you want to read a couple previous articles I wrote on Almond. Real nice kid.
I would think the restricted free agent signings start trickling in. But the Wild is still in the market for a big defenseman who can clear the front of the net and add a little physicality. If you look at the free agents available, they're not exactly stellar. So my sense is GM Chuck Fletcher is trying to make a trade.
Maybe it happens soon, maybe it doesn't. There's no real rush with training camp still more than two months away (Sept. 18).
UPDATED WILD DEPTH CHART
Here’s a look at how the Wild is shaping up to look like next season. This will change throughout the summer as the Wild add and delete players.
Remember, at some point, the Wild’s expected to acquire a physical defenseman to replace Clayton Stoner.
The depth chart is my opinion. Obviously, lines change, roles change, etc. There are interchangeable parts, and as I mentioned, I’d expect at least another defenseman.
In parentheses, each player’s cap hits with some assistance from the web site, www.capgeek.com. The restricted free agents will get signed eventually.
Forwards
Left wing Center Right wing
Zach Parise ($7.5+M) Mikael Granlund (900K) Jason Pominville (5.6M)
Thomas Vanek ($6.5M) Mikko Koivu (6.75M) Charlie Coyle (900K)
Matt Cooke (2.5M) Erik Haula (900K) Nino Niederreiter (RFA)
Jason Zucker (RFA) Kyle Brodziak (2.83 M) Justin Fontaine (RFA)
Cody Almond (550K)
Vying for spots: Zucker, Almond, Stephane Veilleux (587,500), Brett Sutter ($600K), Michael Keranen (792,500), Joel Rechlicz (600K), Brett Bulmer (780K), Kurtis Gabriel (667K), Tyler Graovac (747,500), Zack Phillips ($863,333), Brady Brassart ($836,667), Raphael Bussieres ($759,167), Zack Mitchell (615K), Curt Gogol ($551,667).
Defensemen
Left Defense Right Defense
Ryan Suter (7.5+M) Jared Spurgeon (2.66M)
Marco Scandella (1.025M) Jonas Brodin (1.4+M)
Keith Ballard (1.5M) Christian Folin (925K)
Jon Blum (RFA)
Vying for spots: Folin, Blum, Stu Bickel (600K), Matt Dumba (894,167), Gustav Olofsson (795K), Guillaime Gelinas ($596,667), Colton Jobke ($551,667).
Goalies
Niklas Backstrom (3.42M)
Josh Harding (1.9M)
Darcy Kuemper (RFA)
* Kuemper can be sent to the minors without waivers even if he receives a one-way deal.
Vying for spots: Johan Gustafsson (665K).
Total cap hit roughly: $54,837,758.
Available cap space: $13.46 million roughly (I based this on a $68.3 million salary-cap ceiling; NHL salary cap next season is $69 million, but the Wild will be charged a bonus overage of a little less than $700,000). Note, the $13.46 million excludes re-signing restricted free agents. Also, always take the available cap space number and subtract a few million because GM Chuck Fletcher will always try to leave space for injury callups and in-season acquisitions.Donald Trump speaks during a March 19 campaign rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona. | AP Photo Trump names foreign policy team members
For the first time in his nine-month-old campaign, Donald Trump on Monday revealed the names of five of his foreign policy advisers in an editorial board meeting with The Washington Post, the paper reported.
Those named by Trump include counterterrorism expert Walid Phares; Carter Page, a long-time energy industry consultant; George Papadopoulos ("an oil and energy consultant. Excellent guy"); Joe Schmitz, a former inspector general at the Defense Department and later an executive at Blackwater; retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, "and quite a few more," Trump told the editorial board at the meeting in downtown Washington, where he was accompanied by campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and spokeswoman Hope Hicks.
Phares, a professor at National Defense University who appears regularly on Fox News to discuss matters of national security and terrorism, also advised Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign. His inclusion on Romney's team drew fierce criticism after comments surfaced in which he warned about the influence of sharia law in the United States. In a December 2015 briefing at the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Group, Phares outlined the "jihadist strata" and the growth of ISIS in the U.S. That discussion occurred 13 days after the San Bernardino shooting and a little more than a week after Trump called for a temporary shutdown of Muslims from entering the country.
Kellogg, currently a vice president at defense contractor Cubic, previously served as commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and as a security-focused deputy to L. Paul Bremer in Iraq. His final job in the military was as director of Command, Control, Communications and Computers for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Trump told the Post that he plans to announce more names in the coming days. The Republican presidential frontrunner had, until Monday, declined to name specific advisers, telling MSNBC's "Morning Joe" last week that his primary consultant on foreign policy is himself.
The Post said its meeting with Trump covered media libel laws, foreign policy, climate change and violence at his rallies.bee
In this July 8, 2015, file photo a bumblebee gathers nectar on a wildflower in Appleton, Maine. A United Nations sponsored scientific mega-report warns that too many species of pollinators are nearing extinction. These are bees, butterflies, even some birds and 20,000 other species that are crucial to the world's food supply. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
(Robert F. Bukaty)
WASHINGTON -- Many species of wild bees, butterflies and other critters that pollinate plants are shrinking toward extinction, and the world needs to do something about it before our food supply suffers, a new United Nations scientific mega-report warns.
The 20,000 or so species of pollinators are key to hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of crops each year -- from fruits and vegetables to coffee and chocolate. Yet 2 out of 5 species of invertebrate pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, are on the path toward extinction, said the first-of-its-kind report. Pollinators with backbones, such as hummingbirds and bats, are only slightly better off, with 1 in 6 species facing extinction.
"We are in a period of decline and there are going to be increasing consequences," said report lead author Simon Potts, director of the Centre for Agri-Environmental Research at the University of Reading in England.
And it's not just honeybees. In some aspects they're doing better than many of their wild counterparts, like the bumblebee, despite dramatic long-term declines in the United States and a mysterious disorder that has waned.
The trouble is the report can't point to a single villain. Among the culprits: the way farming has changed so there's not enough diversity and wild flowers for pollinators to use as food; pesticide use, including a controversial one, neonicotinoid, that attacks the nervous system; habitat loss to cities; disease, parasites and pathogens; and global warming.
The report is the result of more than two years of work by scientists across the globe who got together under several different U.N. agencies to come up with an assessment of Earth's biodiversity, starting with the pollinators. It's an effort similar to what the United Nations has done with global warming, putting together an encyclopedic report to tell world leaders what's happening and give them options for what can be done.
The report, which draws from many scientific studies but no new research, was approved by a congress of 124 nations meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Friday.
"The variety and multiplicity of threats to pollinators and pollination generate risks to people and livelihoods," the report stated. "These risks are largely driven by changes in land cover and agricultural management systems, including pesticide use."
But these are problems that can be fixed, and unlike global warming, the solutions don't require countries to agree on global action -- they can act locally, said Robert Watson, a top British ecological scientist and vice chairman of the scientific panel. The solutions offered mostly involve changing the way land and farming is managed.
"There are relatively simple, relatively inexpensive mechanisms for turning the trend around for native pollinators," said David Inouye of the University of Maryland, a co-author of a couple chapters in the report.
One of the biggest problems, especially in the United States, is that giant |
last year’s draft. The general consensus on Gauthier is he has good hockey sense, is a superb defensive player for his age, and is good on faceoffs. One concern with him being he needs to step up his physicality and use his big frame more.
Perhaps the area of most mystery with him is his offensive potential. He has all the defensive tools to become a great bottom six shutdown forward at worst, however, if he develops his offensive game more, he could become a two-way second line power forward. The opportunity to display his offensive game to the hockey world and observing members of the Maple Leafs’ brass is what Gauthier would most like to prove at this year’s WJC in Sweden. So far, he has 1 assist in 2 games, and is playing an effective role on Canada’s energy line.
Andreas Johnson, Winger 5’10 176 lbs Frolunda SHL 32 GP 14 G, 8 A
Drafted in the seventh round (202nd overall) in the 2013 draft, Johnson is a player that has flown under the radar, most likely due to his smaller stature. He is described on eliteprospects.com as: a fast-skating winger with very good hands and vision. “[He] can set plays up as well as take the shot himself. Plays with lots of energy [and] is a very nifty stickhandler.”
The last two seasons, Johnson has impressed with his offensive skills. In 42 games in the Swedish U-20 SuperElit league, he scored 23 G, 31 A. He made the Frolunda’s men’s league (SHL) team, where young players are usually sheltered and do not produce right away. Johnson has bucked this trend, and with 22 points in 32 games, and looks to be in the mix for SHL Rookie of the Year.
Through his first two games at the WJC, he has 2 G, 2A, and if he keeps up his level of offensive play and his size doesn’t hold him back, he could be a top six forward in the future. Johnson hopes to improve at this year’s tournament that his size will not play a factor in limiting his productivity.
Fabrice Herzog, Winger 6’2 198 lbs Quebec QMJHL 34 GP 20 G, 9 A
Herzog was another pick from the Leafs’ draft of 2013. Picked in the fifth round (142nd overall), Herzog is another project player with a long-term development curve.
According to Leafs’ Head Scout Dave Morrison in a Toronto Sun Article: “He’s big, he can skate, he’s not afraid of physical play, and he goes hard to the net.”
Herzog appears to be a low risk/high reward player. His stats for a first year major junior player adjusting to the North American game are good, and he will try to play a key role on a Swiss World Junior team lacking offensive firepower. His performance at this tournament will be a perfect opportunity for him to establish himself as a legitimate prospect in Toronto’s pipeline.
There is a common theme among all Toronto prospects: they all have something to prove. The purpose of junior hockey is to develop young players and although there is a lot of national pride on the line, the World Juniors provide a great opportunity for these young prospects to learn in a pressure situation. This is a very exciting time for Leafs fans, as we will learn a bit more about what the team has in these three players, and can possibly capture a glimpse of what the future beholds.
Thanks for reading. Please give our Hockey Department a follow on Twitter – @lastwordBKerr, @lastwordrick, @MitchRTierney, @LastWordBigMick, @crimsonskorpion, @CMS_74_, @TwoTurtleDuffs, @d_rocchi, @dasimonetta, @LWOSDanRussell, @ddmatthews, @CanuckPuckHead, @NKonarowski2, @LarryScotti, @PurpleRocktober, @jaynichols11, @meaghannn_, @LastWordOnNHL, and @darrinharmy and follow the site @lastwordonsport and like our Facebook Page.
Interested in writing for LastWordOnSports? If so, check out our “Join Our Team” page to find out how.MOSCOW (Reuters) - Vladimir Putin triumphed in Russia’s presidential election on Sunday and, tears rolling down his cheeks, called his victory a turning point that had prevented the country falling into the hands of enemies.
Putin’s opponents complained of widespread fraud, refused to recognize the results and said they would press ahead on Monday with the biggest protests since he rose to power 12 years ago.
But the former KGB spy said he had won a “clean” victory and was on course to return to the Kremlin after four years as prime minister with almost 65 percent of votes, partial results showed.
“I promised you we would win. We have won. Glory to Russia,” Putin, dressed in an anorak and flanked by outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev, told tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters at a late-evening victory rally under the red walls of the Kremlin.
Denouncing attempts to “destroy Russia’s statehood and usurp power,” he said: “The Russian people have shown today that such scenarios will not succeed in our land... They shall not pass!”
The crowd at one point chanted: “Putin! Putin! Putin!” Some danced to keep warm and drank vodka from plastic glasses, with empty bottles crunching underfoot.
It was a defiant and angry speech which left Putin, 59, on collision course with the mainly middle-class protesters in Moscow and other big cities who have staged huge rallies since a disputed parliamentary poll on December 4.
“DECLARATION OF WAR”
Two exit polls showed Putin with 58-59 percent of the votes and incomplete results showed him winning more than 64 percent.
His nearest rival, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, had about 17 percent of votes, and nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, former parliamentary speaker Sergei Mironov and billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov were all below 10 percent, although Prokhorov won plaudits for his campaign.
Zyuganov said his party would not recognize the result and called the election “illegitimate, dishonest and untransparent.” Liberal leader Vladimir Ryzhkov also said it was not legitimate.
The protest organizers, who see Putin as an autocratic leader whose return to power will stymie hope of economic and political reforms, said their demonstrations would now grow.
“The social base of the protest is going to grow and Putin with his team did everything wrong to make this happen. He really helped us,” said journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, one of the leaders of the opposition protest movement.
“He is forcing things to breaking point. He is declaring war on us. As a result the base of aversion to him is growing.”
CHALLENGES AHEAD
Despite the opposition, mainly among well-educated and relatively well-off young professionals, Putin’s support remains strong in the provinces and his victory had not been in doubt.
He showed his gratitude in late-night video links with supporters around Russia, including workers at a tank factory in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil who have denounced the protests.
“You put in their places those people who went one step too far and insulted the working man,” Putin told them. “You showed who the Russian people are, the Russian working man, the worker and the engineer. You showed that you are a head higher than any layabout, any old windbag. This was for me the biggest present.”
A spokesman later said Putin had wept real tears at the victory rally but said they were caused by the biting wind.
The main challenge for the man credited by many Russians with rebuilding the country’s image and overseeing an economic boom in his first presidency, was to win outright on Sunday, avoiding a runoff election by receiving more than 50 percent.
His clear victory will enable him to portray his return to the post he held from 2000 until 2008 as strong public backing against the protesters, whom he has portrayed as a destabilizing minority and pawns of foreign governments.
But the reaction to his rallying cry at the victory rally was more muted than expected. Hundreds of buses had brought the crowd to Moscow, signaling that it was a well-organized show of force rather than a spontaneous display of support.
Russia's current Prime Minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin (R) visits his campaign headquarters in Moscow March 4, 2012. Putin claimed victory in Russia's presidential election on Sunday and, tears rolling down his cheeks, said it was a historical turning point that had prevented the country falling into the hands of enemies trying to usurp power. REUTERS/Alexsey Druginyn/RIA Novosti/Pool
The mood has shifted in the country of 143 million and many people are uncertain whether he will be conciliatory and reformist, or stand in the way of political and economic change.
Putin, who will be inaugurated in May, is likely to revert to the fighting talk against the West that was the trademark of his first presidency and his election campaign.
Economists say a key test of Putin’s return will be how far he is ready to go to reform an economy heavily dependent on energy exports, and caution that his populist campaign spending promises could return to haunt him.
“It’s a watershed - Russia faces decline and stagnation unless they really kick-start reforms, and push forward an ambitious reform agenda,” said Tim Ash, head of emerging markets research at Royal Bank of Scotland in London.
“LEADER OF THE NATION”
Putin has remained Russia’s dominant leader and its most popular politician since stepping aside in 2008 to make way for his ally, Medvedev, because he was barred from a third straight term by the constitution.
Some voters said Putin, who has portrayed himself as a man of action and guardian of stability, was the tough national leader the world’s biggest country and energy producer needed.
“I voted for Putin because he was a good president (from 2000-08) and our children were looked after and that’s all. That’s how I feel,” said Maria Fedotova, a 92-year-old grandmother in fur coat and hat, flanked by relatives.
But others are tired of his macho antics, such as horse riding bare-chested, and a system that concentrates power in his hands. They fear he could win another term in six years and rule until 2024 - almost as long as Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
“They are stealing our votes,” said Valentin Gorshun, a patient in Moscow hospital number 19, where more than 90 percent of votes went to United Russia party in December.
“It is probably the same at all hospitals,” he said. “I think they are preparing a huge falsification. Emperor Putin has decided everything.”
Thousands of opposition activists as well as an international observer mission also monitored the polls.
Slideshow (6 Images)
Vote monitors from the opposition and bloggers posted allegations of election rigging across the country of 143 million. Golos, an independent monitoring group, said it had registered at least 3,500 reports of violations nationwide.
The partial results showed Putin won almost 100 percent of votes in the Chechnya region, with almost 100 percent turnout.
An Interior Ministry spokesman denied there had been any major violations. Election officials also dismissed reports of widespread fraud in the December 4 parliamentary vote that sparked the protests.DETROIT - The Detroit Red Wings today assigned goaltender Jared Coreau to the American Hockey League's Grand Rapids Griffins for conditioning.
Coreau has appeared in 13 games during his first NHL season, posting a 5-3-3 record, 3.27 goals-against average, 0.893 save percentage and a team-best two shutouts. The Perth, Ontario, native made his NHL debut on Dec. 3 at Pittsburgh and earned his first NHL win in his second career start on Dec. 23 at Florida. The victory kicked off a stretch of eight consecutive decisions for Coreau without a regulation loss (5-0-3), including a season-high 45 saves on Jan. 24 at Boston. Coreau has also made 17 appearances for the Griffins this season and ranked among the league's top goalies at the time of his call-up with 11 wins (T3rd), a 2.18 goals-against average (T10th) and a 0.924 save percentage (T9th).A recent article by the Wall Street Journal had MSNBC’s Joy Reid declaring rural Americans “the core threat to our democracy” over the weekend.
The host of “AM Joy” followed up her recent claim that the National Rifle Association seeks to create a landscape littered with murderous “warlords” with a new prediction over Thanksgiving: Rural voters will become de facto tyrants by 2040.
{snip}
One element of writer Gerald F. Seib’s piece mentioned that 70 percent of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states by 2040. That reality, if it came to fruition, would create a scenario where “the remaining 30 percent of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.”
“The rural minority {snip} have and will continue to have disproportionate power over the urban majority,” Ms. Reid continued.
Original Article
Share ThisWhat we will be developing in this unity 3D platformer tutorial?
In this unity 3d platformer tutorial we will build a game with similar mechanics to the awesome crash bandicoot series.
In this tutorial series this is the platformer game we will be building:
Lets get started with setting up our project
First create a new project and call it bounce3d. Make sure it is in 3D mode. Now goto File -> New Scene. After this lets start adding some of our game objects. First we will need a plane which we will later on add collision detection to to kill our player when we fall off the map.
For the purposes of this tutorial the game will merely restart however you will be able to build your own specific game menus or screens when this happens. Once you have added the plane go ahead and add a rectangle object to the scene. Stretch it out over the Y-Axis to make it as long as the length you want the level to be. When this is complete copy this object and slightly lower it and copy it to the back of the current rectangle object. Refer to our video above to get an idea of how the scene should look in terms of the placement of the platformer floor.Now that you have the floor set up for our player to walk on. Let’s add our player, in our game our player is a ball which can roll across the level. So add a new sphere object to our scene.
What will we discuss in the next tutorial?
In the next unity 3d platformer tutorial we will try get to a point where our player can lie on top of our platform floor. The first few chapters we will just get the game mechanics right so that we have a playable game. Then in following chapters we will add some graphical components. To make our game to look a bit more appealing.
Other platformer game tutorials
Platformer game development tutorial“We are still doing an investigation.”
— President Obama, Sept. 25, 2012
In any kind of confused overseas event, initial reports are often wrong. But the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed, including the ambassador, is a case study of how an administration can carefully keep the focus as long as possible on one storyline — and then turn on a dime when it is no longer tenable.
For political reasons, it certainly was in the White House’s interests to not portray the attack as a terrorist incident, especially one that took place on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Instead the administration kept the focus on what was ultimately a red herring — anger in the Arab world over anti-Muslim video posted on You Tube. With key phrases and message discipline, the administration was able to conflate an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt — which apparently was prompted by the video — with the deadly assault in Benghazi.
Officials were also able to dismiss pointed questions by referring to an ongoing investigation.
Ultimately, when the head of the National Counterterrorism Center was asked pointblank on Capitol Hill whether it was a an act of terror — and he agreed — the administration talking points began to shift. (Tough news reporting — as well as statements by Libya’s president — also played a role.) Yet President Obama himself resisted using the “t” word, even as late as Tuesday, while keeping the focus on the video in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly.
On Wednesday, however, White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged also that Obama himself believes the attack was terrorism — and so more than two weeks after the attack the Rubicon finally was crossed.
As a reader service, we have compiled a comprehensive timeline of administration statements, showing the evolution in talking points, with key phrases highlighted in bold. Many readers sent suggestions for this timeline, for which we are deeply grateful.
We will leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions on whether this is merely the result of the fog of war and diplomacy — or a deliberate effort to steer the storyline away from more politically damaging questions. After all, in a competitive election, two weeks is a lifetime.
Initially, ‘an attack’ — and focus on a video
“Yesterday, our U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked. Heavily armed militants assaulted the compound and set fire to our buildings. American and Libyan security personnel battled the attackers together. Four Americans were killed. They included Sean Smith, a Foreign Service information management officer, and our Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. We are still making next of kin notifications for the other two individuals.”
— Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, State Department Treaty room, Sept. 12
“The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack. We're working with the government of Libya to secure our diplomats. I've also directed my administration to increase our security at diplomatic posts around the world. And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.
“Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None. The world must stand together to unequivocally reject these brutal acts…No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”
— President Obama, Rose Garden statement, Sept. 12
(Note: we added this statement to the timeline after Josh Gerstein of Politico asserted that the phrasing “acts of terror” showed Obama acknowledged “terrorism” was behind the attack. From our many years of covering diplomacy we would say there is a world of difference, but readers can draw their own conclusions.)
“Frankly, we are not in a position to speak any further to the perpetrators of this attack. It was clearly a complex attack. We’re going to have to do a full investigation.”
— Unnamed senior administration official, briefing reporters in a conference call, Sept. 12
“I think it’s important to note with regards to that protest that there are protests taking place in different countries across the world that are responding to the movie that has circulated on the Internet. As Secretary Clinton said today, the United States government had nothing to do with this movie. We reject its message and its contents. We find it disgusting and reprehensible. America has a history of religious tolerance and respect for religious beliefs that goes back to our nation’s founding. We are stronger because we are the home to people of all religions, including millions of Muslims, and we reject the denigration of religion. We also believe that there is no justification at all for responding to this movie with violence.”
— White House spokesman Jay Carney, news briefing, Sept. 13
“This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over n awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.”
— Clinton, transfer of remains ceremony, Sept. 14
“I have seen that report, and the story is absolutely wrong. We were not aware of any actionable intelligence indicating that an attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was planned or imminent. That report is false.”
— Carney, news briefing, Sept. 14
“Based on the best information we have to date... it began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.... We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”
— Susan E. Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sept. 16
“We had a substantial security presence with our personnel and the consulate in Benghazi. Tragically, two of the four Americans who were killed were there providing security. That was their function. And indeed, there were many other colleagues who were doing the same with them.”
— Rice, on ABC’s “This Week,” Sept. 16
(Note: the U.S. post was not a consulate and its precise role is still a mystery.)
“The way these perpetrators acted and moved, and their choosing the specific date for this so-called demonstration, this leaves us with no doubt that this was preplanned, predetermined.”
— Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf, president of Libya’s General National Congress, Sept. 16
QUESTION: “Simply on the basis of what Ambassador Rice has publicly disclosed, does the United States Government regard what happened in Benghazi as an act of terror?”
SPOKESWOMAN VICTORIA NULAND: “Again, I’m not going to put labels on this until we have a complete investigation, okay?”
QUESTION: “You don’t — so you don’t regard it as an act of terrorism?”
NULAND: “I don’t think we know enough. I don’t think we know enough. And we’re going to continue to assess. She gave our preliminary assessment. We’re going to have a full investigation now, and then we’ll be in a better position to put labels on things, okay?”
— exchange at State Department briefing, Sept. 17
“Well, you’re conveniently conflating two things, which is the anniversary of 9/11 and the incidents that took place, which are under investigation and the cause and motivation behind them will be decided by that investigation.”
— Carney, news briefing, Sept. 17
Suddenly, a shift to a ‘terrorist attack’
“I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy….The best information we have now, the facts that we have now indicate that this was an opportunistic attack on our embassy. The attack began and evolved and escalated over several hours at our embassy — our diplomatic post in Benghazi. It evolved and escalated over several hours.
“It appears that individuals who were certainly well-armed seized on the opportunity presented as the events unfolded that evening and into the — into the morning hours of September 12th. We do know that a number of militants in the area, as I mentioned, are well-armed and maintain those arms. What we don't have at this point is specific intelligence that there was a significant advanced planning or coordination for this attack.
“We are focused on who was responsible for this attack. At this point, what I would say is that a number of different elements appear to have been involved in the attack, including individuals connected to militant groups that are prevalent in eastern Libya, particularly in the Benghazi area, as well. We are looking at indications that individuals involved in the attack may have had connections to al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda's affiliates; in particular, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”
— Mathew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, testimony before Congress, Sept. 19, after being asked a direct question.
CNN reports on Sept. 19 that Ambassador Christopher Stevens had been worried by the security threats in Benghazi. CNN later acknowledged the information came from Steven’s journal.
“It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Our embassy was attacked violently, and the result was four deaths of American officials. So, again, that's self- evident.
“He also made clear that at this point, based on the information he has — and he is briefing the Hill on the most up-to-date intelligence — we have no information at this point that suggests that this was a significantly preplanned attack, but this was the result of opportunism, taking advantage of and exploiting what was happening as a result of reaction to the video that was found to be offensive.”
— Carney, news briefing, Sept. 20
CBS News reports there never was anti-American protest.
“Witnesses tell CBS News that there was never an anti-American protest outside of the consulate. Instead they say it came under planned attack. That is in direct contradiction to the administration’s account.”
— Margaret Brennan CBS News correspondent, CBS News report aired Sept. 20
But Obama resists saying the ‘t’ word…
OBAMA: “What we’ve seen over the last week, week and a half, is something that actually we've seen in the past, where there is an offensive video or cartoon directed at the prophet Muhammad. And this is obviously something that then is used as an excuse by some to carry out inexcusable violent acts directed at Westerners or Americans.
“And my number-one priority is always to keep our diplomats safe and to keep our embassies safe. And so when the initial events happened in Cairo and all across the region, we worked with Secretary Clinton to redouble our security and to send a message to the leaders of these countries, essentially saying, although we had nothing to do with the video, we find it offensive, it's not representative of America's views, how we treat each other with respect when it comes to their religious beliefs, but we will not tolerate violence.”
QUESTION: “We have reports that the White House said today that the attacks in Libya were a terrorist attack. Do you have information indicating that it was Iran, or al-Qaeda was behind organizing the protests?”
OBAMA: “Well, we're still doing an investigation, and there are going to be different circumstances in different countries. And so I don’t want to speak to something until we have all the information. What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests.”
— President Obama, Univision Town Hall, Sept. 20
“What happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack, and we will not rest until we have tracked down and brought to justice the terrorists who murdered four Americans.”
— Clinton, statement at a meeting with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Sept. 21, 2012
“As we all know, the United States lost a great ambassador and the Libyan people lost a true friend when Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the terrorist assault on our consulate in Benghazi.”
— Clinton, meeting with Libyan President Magariaf, Sept. 24
QUESTION: “I heard Hillary Clinton say it was an act of terrorism. Is it? What do you say?”
OBAMA: “We are still doing an investigation. There is no doubt that the kind of weapons that were used, the ongoing assault, that it wasn’t just a mob action. Now, we don’t have all the information yet so we are still gathering.”
— Obama, on ABC’s “The View,” Sept. 25
“That is what we saw play out in the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. Now, I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.”
— Obama, speech to the U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 25
“It was a preplanned act of terrorism directed against American citizens.”
— Magariaf, on NBC’s “Today” show, Sept. 26
“For some time, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other groups have launched attacks and kidnappings from northern Mali into neighboring countries. Now, with a larger safe haven and increased freedom to maneuver, terrorists are seeking to extend their reach and their networks in multiple directions. And they are working with other violent extremists to undermine the democratic transitions underway in North Africa, as we tragically saw in Benghazi.”
— Clinton, at the United Nations, Sept. 26
QUESTION: “Is there any reason why the President did not — he was asked point-blank in The View interview, is this a terrorist attack, yes or no? Is there any reason why he didn’t say yes?”
CARNEY: “He answered the question that he was asked, and there's no reason that he chose the words he did beyond trying to provide a full explanation of his views and his assessment that we need to await further information that the investigation will uncover. But it is certainly the case that it is our view as an administration, the President’s view, that it was a terrorist attack.”
— Carney, news briefing, Sept. 26
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Read our biggest PinocchiosSYDNEY, Australia — A Filipino fisherman has been rescued in Papua New Guinea after drifting at sea for 56 days, but his uncle died during the ordeal, a report said Saturday.
The men left General Santos in the southern Philippines in January but hit bad weather and were swept out to sea, the PNG Post Courier reported after a fishing boat spotted Roland Omongos, 21, on March 9.
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The newspaper, citing local police, said the pair had no food and the survivor’s uncle died. It said Omongos kept his body for as long as possible but was forced to throw it overboard when it started to decompose.
He survived on two five-litre containers of water and was found weak and distressed by the Bermadethe Marie which was journeying from Wewak to Rabaul, a town on the Papua New Guinean island of New Britain.
Omongos has been examined by doctors and is being held on the boat in Rabaul while arrangements are made for his return home, the Post Courier added, giving no further details. CBB/rga
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MOST READLeBron James knows his way around a ball even in animated form, as illustrated by his upcoming appearance on Cartoon Network’s “Teen Titans Go!”
In Variety‘s exclusive preview, James appears at an amusement park to show off his dribbling skills before learning that the teen superheroes are the only people there to see him.
“Is Jump City ready to see some non-fancy, basic fundamental dribbling?” he asks to pump up the crowd before noticing the empty chairs. “Man, I told my agent nobody wanted to see a man just bouncing a ball up and down…”
James’ episode of “Teen Titans Go!” debuts at 6 p.m. on Feb. 11, as part of Cartoon Network’s “NBA All-Star Jam” event, in conjunction with Turner’s coverage of the NBA All-Star 2016 in Toronto from Feb. 11-14. Other players lending their voices to shows include Kyrie Irving, Damian Lillard and Paul George, who will appear on “We Bare Bears” on Feb. 11 at 7 p.m.
The basketball star has plenty on his plate off the court; CNBC recently announced that it had greenlit unscripted show “Cleveland Hustles,” from James and Maverick Carter’s production company SpringHill Entertainment. The two serve as executive producers on the series as well as mentors for four aspiring local entrepreneurs, giving them the chance to realize their dreams while helping to revitalize a neighborhood in Cleveland. James also founded multimedia site Uninterrupted, which features athlete point-of-view content and scripted projects, and is exec producing a new NBC game show, “The Wall,” hosted by Chris Hardwick.
“Teen Titans Go” has been a hit for Cartoon Network; the animated comedy was ranked as a top 5 animated series among kids 2-11, 6-11 and all key boys in 2015, and it’s Cartoon Network’s No. 1 property for cross-platform video plays and on VOD.EDMONTON — The ongoing roller coaster of gas prices in Edmonton has many drivers wondering what the heck is going on.
In less than 48 hours this week, the price of gas went from around 57 cents per litre up to 77 cents per litre and, almost as quickly as they jumped, prices went back down to 57 cents per litre.
“I know it’s very confusing for motorists but it’s an unusual market and it’s a crazy market,” petroleum analyst Dan McTeague said Thursday.
The Domo gas station on Princess Elizabeth Avenue and 102 Street was selling gas for 49.9 cents per litre for a couple of hours Thursday afternoon. The station said it was a four-hour flash sale. After the sale was over, the price of fuel went up to 55.9 cents per litre.
The average price of gas in Edmonton remained at 75.3 cents per litre early Thursday afternoon, according to the gas price tracking website gasbuddy.com, but several stations had dropped their prices to 57.4 cents per litre.
Yeah. That's right. 49.9 cents a litre. The gas price roller coaster ride continues. #yeg pic.twitter.com/jbzAn9pYLp — Fletcher Kent (@FletcherKent) February 18, 2016
McTeague said it appears to be nothing more than a stunt by gas stations.
“What’s really happening here isn’t so much the wholesale price,” he explained. “It’s really the last 10 to 12-cent-a-litre retail margin that’s being pushed up and then pushed down within a few days.
“So, a lot of competition on the retail side, zero competition on the refinery side.”
READ MORE: Fill up like it’s 1999: Edmonton gas prices drop again
McTeague said as of Wednesday night, gas stations were paying about 41.7 cents per litre to buy fuel from refineries. When you add on the 20 cents per litre worth of taxes, McTeague said stations really shouldn’t be selling fuel for less than about 68 cents per litre.
“We often see this. They know the wholesale prices are increasing, instead they drive their retail prices down. It gets people more excited, the price drops to 54 cents, 56 cents a litre. Then come Tuesday morning, when the weekend was over – so no one could accuse them of jacking up the prices before the long weekend – there you go, a 12-cent spike on their retail side to get back their retail margin,” McTeague said.
“I think, frankly, it’s a crude joke and people who are doing that kind of stuff ought to give their head a shake.”Venezuelan legislature postpones Chavez inauguration
By Bill Van Auken
10 January 2013
The postponement of the inauguration of cancer-stricken Hugo Chavez for a fourth presidential term has ratcheted up political tensions in Venezuela, with the country’s right-wing opposition demanding an immediate transfer of power.
Venezuela’s National Assembly on Tuesday voted to approve a request from Chavez, who is hospitalized in Cuba following his fourth cancer surgery, to postpone his inauguration, which was scheduled for January 10.
The legislature, which is dominated by Chavez’s ruling PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), voted to grant the president as long as he needed to recuperate from his illness.
The ruling party is going ahead with a mass rally in Caracas on Thursday, which is to be attended by presidents Jose Mujica of Uruguay and Evo Morales of Bolivia. Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernandez Kirchner, is flying to Havana to visit Chavez. In an indication of its concern for stability in the oil-rich country, Latin America’s leading power, Brazil, threw its support to the National Assembly decision, calling the delay in the inauguration “prudent” and “perfectly covered by constitutional measures.”
For its part, the US State Department has repeatedly denied that it is attempting to impose “a made-in-America solution for Venezuela’s transition,” while acknowledging that US officials have been in discussions both with Vice President Maduro and opposition leaders.
Chavez has not been seen in public since a December 8 television appearance in which announced that he would be forced to take a leave of absence because of his health crisis. Since then, official announcements on his status have been less than encouraging, with early reports that he suffered hemorrhaging and lung failure after the surgery. Since then, his condition has been given as “stable.”
The attempt by the Venezuelan right to use Chavez’s absence to shift the political situation suffered a setback Wednesday when the country’s Supreme Court dismissed claims that the incumbent president could not continue in office if he failed to appear for the swearing-in ceremony.
Luisa Estrella Morales, the president of the court, told a news conference that the formality of the January 10 ceremony was not necessary because “there exists an administrative continuity.”
Chavez’s absence from the country had been approved by the National Assembly, as required by the constitution, she said. The same document provides that in the event the president cannot, for whatever reason, be sworn in before the National Assembly, the Supreme Court may administer the oath of office. Asked if such a ceremony could be held at his hospital in Havana, Cuba, Morales answered that “the condition of time, place and manner of the swearing-in of the president” had not been set.
Ironically, the right-wing opposition, backed by Venezuela’s Catholic Church hierarchy, had postured as the defender of the constitution, a document which it had bitterly opposed when it was created under Chavez in 1999, changing the country’s name to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
“Right now in Venezuela, without any doubt whatsoever, a constitutional conflict has arisen,” declared opposition leader Henrique Capriles, the governor of Miranda state, who lost to Chavez by a 10 percent margin in last October’s presidential election.
Capriles warned that a decision by the Supreme Court upholding the National Assembly’s decision postponing the inauguration “could contribute to an |
. commissioner and NBC vice president, pointed his finger and said: “We still have one month to go. We will pursue this to the end.”
But time is not on the broadcasters’ side. Nineteen days from now, when the torch is lighted in Beijing, journalists and viewers could be facing the most restrictive environment for an Olympics in modern times.
At the meeting, on July 9, after months of uncertainty, Chinese officials said that all applications for live broadcasting would be approved throughout Beijing and the other cities where Olympic competitions were planned. Furthermore, the committee said that all broadcasters could tape reports from Tiananmen Square.
But the broadcasters say they will not believe it until they see it. One I.O.C. commissioner, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid further complicating the situation, said matter-of-factly that Chinese officials had “put a tourniquet” on the Olympics.
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“Had the I.O.C., and those vested with the decision to award the host city contract, known seven years ago that there would be severe restrictions on people being able to enter China simply to watch the Olympics, or that live broadcasting from Tiananmen Square would essentially be banned, or that reporters would be corralled at the whim of local security, then I seriously doubt whether Beijing would have been awarded the Olympics,” the commissioner said.
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The contentious negotiations are particularly perilous for NBC, part of NBC Universal, which is trying to produce 3,600 hours of coverage. The company paid a record amount for the broadcast rights, and it expects to generate $1 billion in advertising revenue. The coverage will be produced by NBC Sports under the direction of Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Universal Sports and Olympics.
But the network could find itself covering news outside the track or swimming pools if there are political protests or another government crackdown. Mr. Capus of NBC acknowledged that these Games were arguably the most newsworthy Olympics in a generation, since they have put a spotlight on China’s environmental problems and human-rights abuses.
He was diplomatic about the recent negotiations. “We are encouraged by the progress that we saw last week, and the potential for the cooperation that has been pledged,” Mr. Capus said.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
NBC has good reason to cross its fingers. Its owner, GE, has had its sales in China grow rapidly this decade, to a projected $10 billion by 2010, from around $1 billion in 2000. The company is involved in more than 300 projects related to these Games, including technology for the new National Stadium. Jeffrey R. Immelt, the chief executive of G.E., has said the Olympics will create “decades of good will in China.”
NBC Universal has taken out an insurance policy to protect itself against the disruption or cancellation of the Games. This is a standard precaution: an NBC spokesman said that networks covering the Games had taken out such insurance since 1980, when the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics.
“It’s pretty much a given that this is not Barcelona, and this is definitely not Atlanta,” one of the correspondents said on the condition of anonymity, because the network prohibits speaking to the news media without authorization. “So how much access will we get? I don’t think we’ll know until we’re there.”
“Today,” NBC’s morning show, is traditionally the news division’s signature Olympic program, and a co-host, Matt Lauer, will be in China before the Games, broadcasting from the Great Wall and other cultural icons. Then his colleagues Meredith Vieira, Al Roker and Ann Curry will join him at the program’s set at the Olympic Green in Beijing. Because of the 12-hour time difference, the sun will be setting during the American morning show.
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“NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” will originate from Beijing for the first week of the Games. Tom Brokaw, the network’s senior correspondent, will be in Beijing, as will Richard Engel, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, who spends most of his time in war zones and hot spots.
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But NBC officials are not eager to discuss the peculiarities of broadcasting from China. Mr. Ebersol would not respond to a request for an interview, the network said.
Some news organizations have had to leap through hoops merely to rent office space, order phone lines and set up satellite dishes. Stations that reserved locations for live shots later have had their permissions revoked, and journalists have speculated that the bureaucratic hurdles have been put in place to discourage free reporting, despite the country’s promises.
Once the staff is in place in China, many of the hypothetical situations about the Olympics will hinge on a single question: what is sports and what is news?
Broadcasters expect that the country’s security apparatus will work hard to prevent a repeat of the early stages of the Olympic torch relay, where pro-Tibet protesters disrupted the run and extinguished the flame several times.
The primary television feed of the sporting events is produced by Beijing Olympic Broadcasting, a partnership between China and the I.O.C. If a demonstration occurs at an Olympic site, the official broadcast may not capture it. But networks like NBC have their own cameras in place that could film spontaneous developments at the events. In such cases, the responsibility falls to NBC to decide what to show the American audience.
“Those are decisions that will be made on the fly when it happens, and you hope they make the right decision,” one of the NBC correspondents said.I’m in Melbourne and find using Yahoo, Dark Sky and others weather components give really poor weather forecasts for Australian cities.
So I’ve used the scape sensor to pull data from http://www.bom.gov.au/vic/forecasts/melbourne.shtml
I’ve been testing it for a couple of weeks and it is working okay. I get
Forecast maximum and minimum
UV forecast (UV index and times to avoid the sun)
Fire danger
I get a notification on my phone in the morning day’s forecast and evening with the evening and next day’s forecast, plus a group on the Home Assistant dashboard.
Morning notification
Evening notification
I haven’t quite figured out all of the ins and outs of scape, there’s no doubt a more sophisticated way to search for specific tags within the HTML. This has been working so far, but would welcome some more input.
Here’s my code, which is split across group.yaml, sensor.yaml and automation.yaml
For local current temperatures, I’ve used Open Weather Map to pick up a nearby weather station, using sensors like sensor.owm_temperatureFormer New York Jets linebacker Larry Grantham has died at the age of 78, the team announced Sunday.
A second-round draft pick by the then New York Titans in 1960, the team’s first year in football, Grantham, a product of Ole Miss, played his entire NFL career over the franchise’s first 13 seasons.
He started at outside linebacker during the Jets’ Super Bowl run in the 1968-69 season.
“I had 13 wonderful years in New York, even with the Titans,” said Grantham on the occasion of his, and his No. 60 jersey, entering the franchise’s Ring of Honor six years ago.
“Sometimes we didn’t get paid, but we had great times, and Sammy Baugh was one of the greatest coaches I ever played for. They’re all outstanding memories for me. People have been awful good to me in New York.”
Following his football career, Grantham joined the Jets’ radio broadcasting team and ventured into a business career thereafter. He also worked with Freedom House, a drug and alcohol treatment center in New Jersey, for more than 20 years.
Grantham’s 43 defensive takeaways remain a Jets franchise record.A former state tax auditor improperly used state resources to operate her personal business while spying on her competitors’ tax filings, according to a report issued today by Ohio’s inspector general.
By Randy Ludlow –
Lu Zhang, a Department of Taxation auditor until she resigned on Oct. 24, 2014, violated department policies by using state property and accessing tax databases to run her business, said the office of Inspector General Randall J. Meyer.
The report did not disclose the name of Zhang’s business, only identifying it as a “store.” Records show she incorporated The Vape Spot, a liquid-nicotine and related products store on Bethel Road, in early 2014.
Taxation officials summoned the inspector general to investigate in September after learning of apparent misconduct by Zhang, who resigned from her $54,620-a-year job about five weeks after being suspended.
An investigation established that within 24 hours of receiving state permission to operate a business if it did not pose a conflict with her job and she did not use state resources, Zhang was using her state computer for her new business.
She kept track of her sales on her work computer, ordered and bought products and used her state email account to send and receive business emails, the report said. Zhang said she only did so during breaks and lunch hours.
It also was discovered that Zhang was using a confidential computer database to check on the sales tax filings of six business competitors and to access the personal income tax filings of non-immediate family members.
Although she was assigned to bankruptcy audits, Zhang said she pulled the information on business competitors because she had received a tip they were not paying sales taxes. She also prepared tax returns for her business, a violation of her agency’s conflict-of-interest policy.
Meyer’s office referred its report to Franklin County and Columbus city prosecutors’ offices for consideration of potential criminal charges.
The report faulted the Department of Taxation for not periodically reviewing employee’s approved second jobs and not notifying supervisors of employees’ potential conflict of interests.
SourceCadbury had launched an internal investigation into an ammonia leak which caused a factory evacuation and several central Dunedin streets to be shutdown.
Hundreds of workers were evacuated from the Cadbury factory and neighbouring businesses after the incident at 1.17pm on Monday.
A spokeswoman for the company, Celin Huseby of Mondelez Australia Pty Ltd, confirmed it had reported the leak of ammonia, which was used as a cleaning agent within the plant.
HAMISH MCNEILLY/FAIRFAX NZ The smell of ammonia has been reported downwind from Dunedin's Cadbury factory.
The company was "conducting an internal investigation to ascertain the cause of the leak".
"We can confirm that all employees were immediately evacuated, and that all are safe and uninjured."
Stephanie De Vere, of Christchurch, was on a Cadbury World tour with a friend and five children when the alarm went off.
HAMISH MCNEILLY/FAIRFAX NZ Firefighters wearing hazmat suits have entered the Cadbury chocolate factory in Dunedin.
"There was a strong smell of ammonia," she said.
A person in their group was in the courtyard when he saw ammonia coming out in "gusts".
"I said it was ammonia and then the tour guide moved us away."
HAMISH MCNEILLY/FAIRFAX NZ The Fire Service and ambulance crews are at the scene.
The group had waited more than two hours outside the cordon, but could not leave as their personal items remained in the cordoned-off building.
"We are hoping for some free chocolate after this."
Outside the factory, firefighters in hazmat suits were sprayed in temporary decontamination showers.
Dunedin senior station officer Jason Hill said firefighters wearing oxygen tanks had entered the factory to find and isolate the leak.
On arrival they saw an "ammonia cloud" in the factory courtyard.
"The wind was causing an ammonia cloud to disperse up in the air but the nature of the factory allowed us to it be contained in the courtyard, but there was small amounts coming out onto the one way system.
Cumberland and Castle streets were cordoned off, with Cumberland reopening at 3.30pm and Castle St reopening at 4.15pm.
The area was cordoned off because ammonia had been drifting across the one-way system, Hill said.
Hill said he believed the leak had been caused by a pipe failing.
Firefighters and a contracting engineer used natural and mechanical ventilation "to clear the area".
Firefighters and Cadbury workers used detection equipment to ensure workplace exposure levels to ammonia were "sufficiently safe for all the workers to go back in".
Ammonia was attracted to moisture, such as sweat, and could cause skin irritation.
"Obviously we don't want to be breathing ammonia at all, so full encapsulated chemical protection clothing is required," he said.NOTICE: We apologize for the lack of updates recently, we just want to make it clear that development has under NO circumstances stopped. We are absolutely still working on this and still supporting it. Thank you for your patience.
Team ICSSGS
-- DemonWav -- Nushor -- Onecosmic -- PaulForde -- RaymondDull -- Trae32566 --
bugs are to be expected! Please check the known issue's before posting/reporting bugs.
We do not support anything that is not produced by us!
Join us at RootzWiki: The latest release is RC4.2Join us at RootzWiki: http://rootzwiki.com/topic/21318-rom...2/#entry572577
Features: Just because your running the latest OS, does not mean your phone magically doubles in RAM and gains an extra core, IT WILL LAG SOMETIMES, no software can fix that.
Based from the latest source code from Google themselves(Android 4.0.3)
Full Google Apps suite
Currently using Platypus as a kernel base(Thanks Zach!)
Pre-rooted
init.d Support
Full Hardware Acceleration
Fully working RIL(Radio Interface Link = Calls / Texts / Data)
Fully working Audio
Touchscreen works perfectly
Fully working Wi-Fi
Fully working bluetooth
Both SD Cards (Internal & External), work fine
Fully working Calendar sync
Fully working Camera(Video Recording & Pictures)
Touch to focus
Panorama mode in camera works
Face Unlock(quite iffy, due to the vga ffc)
Fully Working GPS
Bluetooth
Wired tethering, works fine
Fully working FM Radio(AOSP does not support FM, download Spirit FM from Android Market)
Fully working Wireless tethering
Fully working sensors
Live OC Support(download NSTools from Market)
USBOTG Support
Voodoo Sound
Voodoo Colour
Battery Life eXtender
Deep Idle
Makes you breakfast in the morning(not joking)
Come chat with us!
Flashing Instructions If you are flashing from another rom.
1. Boot into Clockwork Mod Recovery Mode using volume buttons.
2. (optional) Backup your current ROM.
3. Select "install zip from sdcard".
4. Select "choose zip from sdcard".
5. Select the.zip that you downloaded and confirm it.
*(optional) Flash newer kernel if you want to.
6. Reboot the phone.
7. Wait for phone to boot (this may take up to ten minutes) If you are upgrading from an earlier build.
1. Flash the newest build in CWM.
2. If you run into any issues(app force close etc) do a factory reset from recovery. If you have rebooted and your phone will not go past the kernel screen.
1. Boot into CWM and wipe data/factory reset and wipe cache partition.
2. Reflash the appropriate kernel.
3. Reboot.
If the flashing procedure didn't quite go to plan, please follow this guide
Credits! Huge thanks to: Onecosmic for being a beast
All Team ICSSGS Members
Zach for platypus kernel base
Team Hacksung for RIL code, Galaxy S Settings app, their camera HAL and various other ICS patches
Syntr for PVR Patches
Thearc77 for google apps
Supercurio for all his work on Voodoo
This ROM is based directly on the source code straight from Google themselves, the way Android is meant to be. This ROM is produced by a collaboration of many different people, with the main development being done by Onecosmic himself. We strive to bring releases as often as possible and provide a stable AOSP ROM. As this is a work in progress,If you can, please donate a small amount via paypal, we do this for fun and this is optional but it is greatly appreciated and it is a way for you to contribute. If you want us to support another Galaxy S type phone and you have an extra of it, we may consider supporting the phone if you donated it to us to work on. If you think you have a phone that we could support, PM me or any other Team ICSSGS members and we will discuss the possibility of us supporting it.##icssgsYou may have to register your nick name.The headlines all say something similar—a variation of "Ministers in Idaho city told to marry gay couples or go to jail." Headlines being what they are, they're factually accurate while being a little incomplete. The conflict is worthwhile to examine: One of the big fears of religious conservatives is that the legalization of same-sex marriages would result in the government forcing churches to perform gay wedding ceremonies. Is that what's going on here?
On a certain level, that's not quite what's happening. Donald and Evelynn Knapp are ordained ministers in Coeur d'Aline, Idaho. They run a business called The Hitching Post where they conduct wedding ceremonies. It's not a church, per se. Idaho is now recognizing gay marriages, so does that mean The Hitching Post is providing a public accommodation? A deputy city attorney for the city thinks it is, meaning the Knapps would be violating the city's anti-discrimination ordinance should they refuse gay couples. They could face fines (very likely) or jail time (probably not). The debate started all the way back in May, when the Knapps threatened to close their small chapel if forced to marry gays. That was when the issue was still under debate. Now gay marriage recognition has come to Idaho, and a gay couple came to the Knapps wanting to get married. They were turned away.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal group (mentioned last week in a fight between the City of Houston and Christian opponents of an anti-discrimination ordinance), is representing the Knapps against the city to halt enforcement of the law, and so there's lots of outrage to go around.
Eugene Volokh, over at The Washington Post, stepped away from all the outrage and emotional responses to explore whether the city could force a minister to marry a gay couple, even through the mechanism of a for-profit business rather than a church. His conclusion is that they probably could not:
Friday, the Knapps moved for a temporary restraining order, arguing that applying the antidiscrimination ordinance to them would be unconstitutional and would also violate Idaho’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. I think that has to be right: compelling them to speak words in ceremonies that they think are immoral is an unconstitutional speech compulsion. Given that the Free Speech Clause bars the government from requiring public school students to say the pledge of allegiance, or even from requiring drivers to display a slogan on their license plates (Wooley v. Maynard (1977)), the government can’t require ministers — or other private citizens — to speak the words in a ceremony, on pain of either having to close their business or face fines and jail time. (If the minister is required to conduct a ceremony that contains religious language, that would violate the Establishment Clause as well.) I think the Knapps are also entitled to an exemption under the Idaho RFRA. The Knapps allege that “sincerely held religious beliefs prohibit them from performing, officiating, or solemnizing a wedding ceremony between anyone other than one man and one woman”; I know of no reason to think they’re lying about their beliefs. Requiring them to violate their beliefs (or close their business) is a substantial burden on their religious practice.
Read more analysis from Volokh here. He also weighed in on the Houston subpoena controversy from last week here.
We can argue whether baking a cake or taking photographs constitutes putting a stamp of approval on a wedding or if it's just a neutral service (not that it should matter to anybody who supports freedom of association). But certainly a minister performing a religious ceremony, regardless of whether the context is through a church or business, cannot be reasonably argued to be providing something that is content-neutral.
For heaven's sake, folks, don't try dragging somebody in to marry the two of you who doesn't want to marry the two of you. It's supposed to be the happiest day of your life. Here's a suggestion: If you're thinking of cutting out a distant relative from an invite to your wedding because he is posting anti-gay-marriage stuff on his Facebook wall, don't ask somebody with the exact same beliefs to perform the ceremony for you.
See my previous installments of "Why Not Force Somebody Who Hates You …" here and here.I’ve been following Toronto’s Real Estate market closely over the last 18 months while applying Macroeconomic concepts to it. It’s been an interesting learning experience to me and I’d like to share my thoughts on the matter here.
I’ll preface by saying that the following is just my interpretation of what’s going on. I’ve tried to present as much raw data as I can. I encourage you to make up your own mind, but try to keep an open mind.
Ok, so you don’t have to be an economist to understand that something is amiss in the Real Estate markets of Canada’s largest cities, Toronto and Vancouver. I’m going to focus on Toronto in this article. I live there so I understand the dynamics of the city. It’s also the largest city in Canada so what happens here significantly and directly affects the Canadian economy.
Statistics
In the last year, home prices in Toronto have surged 33%. The average detached house now costs $1.4M (as of June 2017).
This growth has affected condo prices, and prices in smaller suburbs around the GTA. Average home prices in the suburbs are also close to $1M.
The median household income was $75K in Toronto in 2014, Let’s assume it is $80K today.
Household debt to income levels are now over 160%. This means that a family earning $100K has a debt of $160K.
Green line shows monthly new home price index. New homes mean all new homes, not just detached homes. Orange line shows Condo prices.
“Ok, so prices are going crazy and people aren’t earning a lot more money than they were before. We already knew that.” Don’t worry, I’ll get to the good stuff soon.
Before we start, here are a few simple concepts that you should be aware of.
Simple Concepts
Interest Rate
Simply put, The Federal Interest Rate is the cost of borrowing money, as set by the Bank of Canada (BOC). The BOC will regulate interest rates to ensure that inflation stays around 2%. However, changing the interest rate affects the economy in different ways, as we will see below.
Relationship between Interest Rate and Housing
A low interest rate means people can borrow more money since they will be paying lower interest on their mortgage.
Relationship between Interest Rate and Economy
Interest rates are often lowered to boost sluggish economies. Low interest rates mean that companies can borrow money cheaply to invest in building goods & services, which in turn will boost the economy.
Relationship between Interest Rate and Foreign Exchange Rates
Low interest rates mean reduced foreign investment, because investors do not get a high return on their money. This makes the Canadian dollar less likely to be bought, which lowers the value of it. Therefore, prolonged periods of low interest rates can cause inflation.
Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC)
A HELOC is a mechanism by which a home-owner can take out a loan from the bank. If your house has gone up in value, you can take that equity out of the house at a low interest rate.
Example of HELOC
If you bought a house for $1M (with $200K downpayment), and it has now gone up to $1.5M, you just made $500K on a $200K investment. But you can’t get access to this money until you sell your house. In these situations, you can get a HELOC. The bank would give you $500K (or however much you want, upto 65% of the value of your house), and in return you would pay the bank a low interest rate.
HELOCs are often used to consolidate debts since the interest you pay on them is quite low. However, they can be dangerous as we will soon find out.
So, what’s actually happening in Toronto?
First, let’s talk about what is not happening.
I don’t think this market is being fueled by foreign buyers coming and buying up properties in bulk. I don’t trust TREB but their data suggests that only 5% of all property may be bought by foreign buyers.
This means foreign buyers bought about 5,000 properties last year in Toronto. That number seems reasonable to me.
No, prices are not going up because “Toronto is like London, New York and Paris.” Toronto is not one of the financial, cultural, or metropolitan capitals of the world. Not yet.
Based on my research, I think the Real Estate Market in Toronto is being fueled by three factors:
Fear of missing out (FOMO): A situation where an individual feels they will miss out on something if they don’t act now. Cheap credit: Ability for an individual to borrow money and pay low interest on it. Speculation: A situation where an individual takes a high-risk position in an asset because they think it will go up.
These three factors directly feed into each other causing a vicious cycle. Let’s demonstrate with an example of a fictional Toronto couple.Omega Pharma-Quick Step riders both out for weeks after spring crashes
Tom Boonen sustained a fractured a rib in his Ronde van Vlaanderen crash, his Omega Pharma-Quick Step team has confirmed. The Belgian champion crashed just 20km into Sunday’s race, ending the defence of his 2012 victory in Vlaanderens Mooiste, and confirmed soon afterwards that he was to miss this weekend’s Paris-Roubaix; a race that he also won last year.
At the time Boonen’s main concern appeared to be contusions and swelling to his knee and hip but, having experienced pain since Tuesday, he was x-rayed at the Herentals Clinic in Belgium where the fracture to the tenth rib on his left side was diagnosed.
Another Omega Pharma-Quick Step rider suffering a broken bone this week was Dries Devenyns, who fractured the radius of his left arm as he came down during the opening stage of the Vuelta al Pais Vasco. The 29-year-old’s fracture was diagnosed as complicated by the Herentals Clinic, and he underwent surgery today.
"I would like to thank the hospital and medical staff for their professionalism," Devenyns said. "Unfortunately the fracture was complicated and I have to wear a cast for a few weeks. It's really a shame, I was in good condition and ready for the Ardenne classics. There's nothing I can do now, only recover and try to be ready as soon as possible."
Currently neither rider has a definite schedule for returning to racing, but both have written off their Spring Classics campaign [Boonen on the cobbles and Devenyns in the Ardennes - ed]. Omega Pharma-Quick Step’s super sprinter Mark Cavendish confirmed that he would like Boonen to be in the team for the Tour de France, however, so the Belgian champion may target the race as he looks to get something from the season.An Intro to Responsive Web Development
What should I know before beginning?
Experience with some of the following technologies will be helpful, but you should still be able to follow along:
HTML (structural)
CSS (presentation)
JavaScript (behavioral)
Recommended reading before beginning:
The Box Model
What is Responsive Web Design? and how does it differ from fixed, fluid & adaptive?
A Fixed Layout
With a fixed layout the page is built to look good at fixed or static dimensions. So you might create a container for your content and set its width in pixels, and you might set your font sizes using pixels as well. This allows you some control over layout of your page, provided the user hasn’t changed a bunch of the browsers default settings. If the user is viewing the site at a narrower width than your container, the browser will introduce scroll bars. If the user is viewing on a modern smart phone/mobile device, the browser will try to fit the width of the page to the viewport’s width. This is how a great deal of sites have been built in the past. It does not offer much in regards to flexibility.
.container { font-size : 16px ; margin : 0 auto ; width : 960px ; }
A Fluid Layout
A fluid layout is another approach to building a web page but instead of using static values you would use relative values. With a fluid layout your browser scales the layout depending on the width of the device you’re viewing it on. So that same container for your main content would have a width of say 90% instead of 960 pixels. Your fonts might use percentages as well, or em’s to allow flexibility of your typography. When taking this approach, you are assured the container will always be at most 90% of the page width. While this can be a great first step toward a responsive design, it is not the best solution.
.container { font-size : 1em ; margin : 0 auto ; width : 90% ; }
An Adaptive Layout
An adaptive layout is a more modern layout, and it uses CSS3 media queries. With an adaptive layout you might still take the approach of static css values, but change these values to fit comfortably in the viewport. So if the user is visiting your site with a desktop browser you might style the container at 960 pixels, but if they are on a mobile phone in portrait view (320px in most cases), your container might be 300 pixels. You would add a line similar to: @media screen and (max-width: 320px). This is what we call a “breakpoint”, the point at which the browser responds with the CSS specified in that block.
.container { margin : 0 auto ; width : 960px ; } @media screen and ( max-width : 1024px ) and ( min-width : 641px ) {.container { margin : 0 auto ; width : 586px ; } } @media screen and ( max-width : 640px ) and ( min-width : 320px ) {.container { margin : 0 auto ; width : 90% ; } }
A Responsive Layout
…and finally the moment you’ve all been waiting for! A responsive layout responds to the device it is being viewed on and adapts to that screen’s size. How do you accomplish this? With a combination of fluid and adaptive layout techniques. I think a demo is worth a thousand words so lets take a look at one.
Take a look at the following codepen: Layout Differences. Change the class on the body from ‘fixed’, to ‘fluid’, to ‘adaptive’ and to ‘responsive’
CSS Distance Units, or Ems and Percents and Pixels oh my…
There are quite a few Distance Units, but I am going to focus on some of the more common ones. We will start with Relative length units. With relative length units, the length specified is relative to another length. Relative lengths include:
em: relative to the calculated font size of the element, unless used on the font-size property, in which case it is the inherited font-size of the element.
rem: relative to the font size of the root element (the html tag, unless used on the font-size of the html element, in which case it is the initial value, this unit is not supported by IE8 and lower)
vh: relative to 1% of the viewport’s height (* this unit is not supported by IE8 and lower)
vw: relative to 1% of the viewport’s width (* this unit is not supported by IE8 and lower)
vmax: relative to 1% of the viewport’s larger dimension (* this unit is not supported by IE10 and lower)
vmin: relative to 1% of the viewport’s smaller dimension (* this unit is not supported by IE9 and lower)
** explain ** Child elements do not inherit the relative values as specified for their parent; they inherit the computed values.
** explain ** Font-relative lengths: em & rem
An em is an em is an em, except if the font-size for that element has been set. In that case an em is the calculated font-size. So if the elements font-size is calculated at 16px (the default) 1em is equal to 16px. If the calculated font-size is 24px, well 1em now becomes 24px. So what happens if we have an h1’s calculated value at 24px but its font-size is set to 2em? The font-size of that h1 is now 100% greater than the computed font-size inherited by h1 elements.
Take the following example for instance:
<div> <h1> Oh hai! </h1> </div>
div { font-size : 24px ; } h1 { font-size : 2em ; /* 48px */ }
The div has a font-size of 24px, h1 is a child of this div so the h1’s computed font-size is 24px. We are than applying a font-size of 2em to the h1. Since its context is 24px and 2em is 100% greater than 1em, the h1’s font-size in pixels is actually 48px.
For fun, add the following to a codepen:
<p class= "ems ems-1" > MMMM </p> <p class= "ems ems-2" > MM </p> <p class= "ems ems-4" > M </p>
.ems { background-color : lightblue ; padding : 10px ; margin : 0 ; }.ems-1 { font-size : 1em ; width : 4em ; }.ems-2 { font-size : 2em ; width : 2em ; }.ems-4 { font-size : 4em ; width : 1em ; }
(Ems)
Viewport-percentage lengths: vw, vh, vmax, vmin
Not all browsers support the following viewport-percentage lengths. For this reason I will not dive deep on them.
vh unit: Equal to 1% of the height of the initial containing block.
vmin unit: Equal to the smaller of vw or vh.
vmax unit: Equal to the larger of vw or vh.
I couldn’t get this example to work on codepen for some reason so lets just open the following site: http://matt.weppler.me. Using the development tools for your browser add the following html to the DOM. Open the javascript console and paste the follwing:
var my_h1_element = document. createElement ( 'h1' ); my_h1_element. id ='my-h1-element' ; my_h1_element. appendChild ( document. createTextNode ( 'Oh Hai!' )); document. body. insertBefore ( my_h1_element, document. body. firstChild );
You should now see the newly created h1 element at the top of the page. Lets get the computed css font-size for this element.
window. getComputedStyle ( my_h1_element ). fontSize ;
I don’t know about you but for me it looks like the computed font size is ‘32px’. Since we’re going to work ‘vw’ which is a relative value no worries if you didn’t get 32px use substitute based on what you got. In this example, we’ll make the browser viewport 400 pixels. You’ll have to do this without the help of javascript. Now with the width of the viewport at 400px, lets set our h1’s font size to 8vw.
my_h1_element. style. fontSize = '8vw' ;
Go ahead and resize the window, notice how the font size of the h1 element becomes larger and smaller based on the viewports width.
Absolute lengths: px
Pixels are typically considered relative to the viewing device, one device pixel (dot) of the display.
<div class= "outer" > <div class= "inner red" ></div> <div class= "inner green" ></div> </div>
.outer { border : 5px solid black ; height : 300px ; width : 300px ; }.inner { height : 150px ; width : 150px ; }.red { background-color : red ; }.green { background-color : green ; margin-left : 150px ; }
Percentage lengths: %
Percentage lengths depend on the size of their parent elements. So if you have a div with a width of 500px and 2 child divs at 50% each, the child divs widths are actually 250 pixels.
<div class= "outer" > <div class= "inner red" ></div> <div class= "inner green" ></div> </div>
.outer { border : 5px solid black ; height : 500px ; width : 500px ; }.inner { height : 250px ; width : 50% ; }.red { background-color : red ; }.green { background-color : green ; margin-left : 50% ; }
Even when starting a new project from scratch with a mobile first mindset you’ll still likely be working from a design comp. This will most likely be an Adobe Photoshop file. So you will no doubt be working with static units in some form. Here is a table that you can use to convert between px and em, or px and %.
Points to Pixels to Ems to Percent
Points Pixels Ems Percent 6pt 8px 0.5em 50% 7pt 9px 0.55em 55% 7.5pt 10px 0.625em 62.5% 8pt 11px 0.7em 70% 9pt 12px 0.75em 75% 10pt 13px 0.8em 80% 10.5pt 14px 0.875em 87.5% 11pt 15px 0.95em 95% 12pt 16px 1em 100% 13pt 17px 1.05em 105% 13.5pt 18px 1.125em 112.5% 14pt 19px 1.2em 120% 14.5pt 20px 1.25em |
: Ext. SF On The Way To The Wharf: Behind Ford as he turns & sees fallen Nautilus (Godzilla)
A call sheet for the newfilm has leaked online and it does pertain to the latter part of the film.The call sheet reveals that, Jared Keeso ("Falling Skies") is playing Jump Master. While Luc Roderique, James Pizzinato, Leif Havdale, Chad Riley, Brent Connelly, Fraser Aitchesen, Jason Bell, Donavan Kuhl are all playing San Francisco Ground Troops.In the scenes, troops (Halo Team) will be using a geiger counter and a bomb tracker. They will also be carrying a bomb, most likely a nuclear warhead, as seen in previous set photos. And below is a transcription of the more important scenes described in the call sheet above. Keep in mind that scenes in the 200's usually implies the climax of the film.Baseball fans in the Midwest probably think nostalgically when they hear “Northern League” baseball. The modern day NL was an independent league formed in 1993 by six franchises (Duluth-Superior Dukes, Rochester Aces, St. Paul Saints, Sioux City Explorers, Sioux Falls Canaries, Thunder Bay Whiskey Jacks) who saw moderate success in cities without MiLB franchises.
In 2005 the Northern League took a hit when four teams, led by the 4-time NL champion Saints, made the move to form the modern day American Association of Independent Professional Baseball. Other teams soon joined the American Association leading to the folding of NL after the 2010 season.
In January of 2013 a “new” Northern League was founded when DC Sports & Entertainment, LLC purchased rights to the name. Former LA Dodgers GM Dan Evans was named league commissioner and the first franchise, Elkhart Miracle, was announced. Originally scheduled to begin in Summer of 2014, nothing was heard from DC Sports until a social media post in May of 2014 said the opening day would be pushed back to 2015.
Working on the final details for a MAJOR announcement regarding the Northern League's latest addition… — Northern League (@gonorthleague) August 2, 2013
Flash forward to today, April 1, 2015. The Northern League website (www.gonorthernleague.com) which stood idle for over two years is dead. DC Sports website (www.dcsportsnent.com) is a blank page and there is no sign of baseball.
—
In addition to the Northern League, DC Sports own and operate the United States Lacrosse League. The USLL was launched in July of 2013 with plans to begin play beginning in the Fall of 2014. Since its online inception, USLL has made personnel announcements, sponsorships and one team (Maine Moose Trax). Their last press release was on March 25, 2014.
@TheLaxNews @ConnorWilsonLAS 15 months, hard work and dedication have gone into this League and the end product will speak for itself! — The USLL (@USLLLax) January 19, 2015It was recently revealed that a large scale Final Fantasy X event is being held in the Japanese version of Mobius Final Fantasy (will come to the global version next year) and now it has been revealed that it will tell the story of what happened to Tidus between the events of Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2.
Mobius Final Fantasy is of course made by the team who made X and X-2 with producer Yoshinori Kitase (producer of the X series) director Motomu Toriyama (director of the X series), lead scenario writer Daisuke Watanabe (scenario writer for the X series), scenario supervisor Kazushige Nojima (lead writer for the X series), graphics & VFX director Shintaro Takai (art director for the X series) and art director Toshitaka Matsuda (concept art director for X-2).
There is also a number of other staff working on Mobius Final Fantasy that worked on Final Fantasy X and/or Final Fantasy X-2. You can find the full list of main staff for Mobius Final Fantasy here.
You can check out a trailer for it below.A cookie-favoring physicist has created what appears to be the world's first Oreo separator.
David Neevel, an artist and inventor based in Portland, Ore., was commissioned by the popular cookie brand to produce the machine as part of its "Cookies vs. Creme" campaign.
"My Oreo machine is based entirely on my dislike for creme and my preference for cookie," Neevel said in a short video that could easily be mistaken for a "Portlandia" sketch.
The OSM, as Neevel calls it, was constructed of scrap aluminum, wood, a hatchet and floss in a Portland garage.
After the hatchet blade is lowered to split the Oreo, a pair of mechanical arms are dispatched to collect the cookie halves, which are transferred to a router table where the creme is removed.
The electric-powered contraption took about two weeks to build. "It was a big time commitment," Neevel said. "I had to work some long hours—I didn't see my girlfriend or my dog for hours at a time."
"Outstanding. I applaud your efforts," one YouTube commenter wrote. "For your next design, how about an automatic sock pair singlifier?
Three other inventors were commissioned by Oreo to come up with concepts, with the next one slated to be unveiled later this week.
Watch Neevel's Oreo separator in action:New York's emerging plan to regulate natural gas drilling in the gas-rich Marcellus Shale needs to go further to safeguard drinking water, environmentally sensitive areas and gas industry workers, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has informed state officials.
The EPA's comments, in a series of letters this week to the state's Department of Environmental Conservation, are significant because they suggest the agency will be watching closely as states in the Northeast and Midwest embrace new drilling technologies to tap vast reserves of shale gas.
New York is in the forefront of the shale gas boom and has been working on regulations for more than three years. Judith Enck, the EPA regional administrator who issued the agency comments, noted that New York "will help set the pace for improved safeguards across the country."
The EPA's comments are among 20,000 the state has received on its proposed plan to regulate the environmental effects of drilling. Many of the EPA's comments focus on how the state DEC will handle the chemically tainted wastewater from the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
To free the gas trapped in the Marcellus and other shale formations, drillers pump millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground under pressure. The wastewater can get into drinking water by being disposed of at sewage treatment plants, the EPA wrote.
As ProPublica first reported in 2009, these plants don't typically have the equipment necessary to detect and treat the chemicals in drilling wastewater. Plant operators who accept drilling wastewater simply dilute it with regular sewage and then discharge it into water bodies. DEC wastewater samples had levels of radioactive elements thousands of times higher than drinking water limits, ProPublica reported.
In its comments, the EPA pointed out that New York's current permitting system for water treatment plants doesn't include limits on pollutants frequently contained in drilling wastewater, such as radionuclides, which can cause cancer at high levels.
The EPA said it needs to be more closely involved in analyzing and approving any treatment plant's application to accept drilling wastewater. And while the DEC's proposed rules suggest limits on radioactive elements such as radium, the EPA said it's not clear who would be "responsible for addressing the potential health and safety issues" related to radiation exposure.
The EPA also flagged health risks to workers close to wastewater and other potentially radioactive materials, like the large amounts of soil and mud unearthed by drilling. "At a minimum, the human health risks to the site workers from radon and its decay products should be assessed along with the associated treatment technologies such as aeration systems or holding for decay," the agency wrote.
The EPA raised concerns about the sheer amount of wastewater. To deal with the excess water, the DEC listed a number of out-of-state treatment plants as potential recipients, but the EPA warned that several of the plants probably don't have the capacity to handle more wastewater.
ProPublica reported that neighboring Pennsylvania became overwhelmed by drilling wastewater after the state embraced the industry. The Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to 350,000 people, became contaminated with drilling salts and minerals.
The EPA letters are the latest in a series of federal moves to tighten oversight of gas drilling. In December, the agency scientifically linked underground water pollution to hydraulic fracturing for the first time. Last August, the EPA announced that it would develop its own rules on wastewater disposal instead of leaving it up to states.
Industry and green groups have split over the DEC's proposed regulations, with drillers saying they are too restrictive and environmentalists contending they don't go far enough. Meantime, the EPA has launched a comprehensive review of the environmental impacts of hydrofracking.
In August, DEC Commissioner Joe Martens told ProPublica that he didn't think there would be much to learn from the EPA study and that the state was far ahead of the federal agency in its response to drilling.Post in: My Profile 3 Paradigm Shifts 3-D Printing Activist Circle Alabama Libertarians Alaskans for Liberty Alba – Scots for Liberty All Things Chinese All Things Japanese Alliance of the Libertarian Left Alternative Homes and Construction for Liberty Alternative media: Independant productions, Youtube videos, short films ect. Anarchism Anarchist Weightlifters Anarchists of Ireland Anarcho Capitalist Community Anarcho Capitalist group on Steam Anarcho-capitalist Recrutment Center Anime/Manga Discussion Antiwar Appalachian Freedom Arborist. Arena of Ideas Aristotelian Libertarians Atheism Athiesm Australians Ayn Rand, Objectivism, & Atlas Shrugged Balancing Parenting and Entrepreneurship Beginning Writers Big TEXAS, Big FREEDOM, Big FUN! Bitcoin Bitcoin Magazine BitCoin Market Bitcoin Writers Bleeding Heart Libertarianism Book of the Week Book of the Week (Asia Time Zone) Bring Back Firefly! Brink of Freedom British Columbia Libertarian Party Bureaucrash Social Reunion Bureaucrash Social Reunion Buy Sell &Trade C.S. Lewis Fan Club Canadian Anarchists Of Ontario Classical Liberals Classical Studies Climate Change and Global Warming Coach Doug’s Challenge Group Coconut Lovers Coders & Hackers Coins-Assets-Tokens Construction Consumption Boycott Contrarian Investors and Value Investors CREATIVES LIBERTARIAN Criticize my writing Cryptoanarchy Cryptocurrency Protocol & Altcoins CYCLE Discussion Czech & Slovak Denmark Desiderius Deutsch / German language group Discussions on Economics Divine Economy Theory Do You Even Prax, Bro? Dog Lovers DRO’s Economics & Free Markets Égalité Engineers for Liberty Entrepreneurs Epistemology Ethereum Entrepreneurs Europeans @ Liberty.me Favorite Liberty Quotes FEE Alumni Feminism for Individualists and Libertarians Fiction Writers Group FIJA Activists Film Makers and Film Enthusiasts Financial Auditors and Risk Professionals Seeking an Independent Path Financial Freedom through Real Estate Investing Firearms Florida Member Network Flstudio Music Production Fly-Fishing Enthusiasts For Beginners FREE FRIENDS & COHOUSING COMMUNITY OF FREE CARE Free Market Anarchy Environmentalism Free State Project Free-thinking Raw Foodist’s Freedom & Prosperity Freedom & Technology Freedom and Frugality Freedom Fitness Freedom in Israel Freedom Rock Freedomized It!July 2, 2017 Blog Personal
Nu aș fi luat provocarea de a rezolva subiectele de la bacalaureatul din 2017 dacă nu aș fi văzut acest articol publicat de Digi24, în care se repetă retorica obosită în care învățământul informatic nu îi pregătește pe elevi pentru încercările reale din câmpul muncii.
Retorica e destul de atractivă, e ceea ce își doresc părinții de liceu să afle. Când copiii lor nu reușesc să ia notă maximă la examenul de bacalaureat la informatică, părinții au nevoie să audă că ce sunt învățați copiii la școală este inadecvat, inutil și incomplet, și în niciun caz că copilul lor e incapabil să facă niște lucruri de bază pe care le exersează câțiva ani săptămânal la școală.
Am făcut, așadar, și eu subiectele (aparent le-am făcut pe cele greșite, date de model. Subiectele reale sunt înghesuite în altă parte la un loc cu toate subiectele de la proba E). Nu mi-a fost ușor, mi-a luat undeva la 1h:20m și probabil în condiții de examen mi-ar fi luat mai mult (chiar dacă nu mi-am modificat programele după ce am considerat că sunt gata, le-am verificat într-un compilator online, privilegiu pe care elevii nu îl au.
Am o veste foarte proastă pentru „firma care și-a pus programatorii să ia examenul de bacalaureat”. Oamenii sunt slabi dacă nu sunt capabili să ia notă de trecere, și dacă cel mai bun dintre ei a luat 8,50. Ăsta e examen pe care niciun programator nu are voie să îl ia cu notă mai mică decât zece (hai 9,50) – orice altceva înseamnă că oamenii sunt inadecvați pentru joburile pe care le execută. Ca și programator experimentat, cu ceva interviuri tehnice în calitate de intervievator, vă zic că acest examen trebuie trecut cu zece de oricine dorește să facă programare.
Să explic un pic subiectele (le accesați aici). Am selectat subiectele pentru secția de matematică-informatică, practic cele mai „tari” dintre variante.
Subiectul 1 îți cere să evaluezi o expresie (unde trebuie să știi diferența dintre matematică și informatică, împărțirea făcându-se în domeniul întreg), după care cere să lucrezi pe un algoritm. Punctul 2 este un caz clasic de debugging – pui o valoare, o treci printr-un algoritm, vezi ce se întâmplă. Făcând asta ar trebui să înțelegi și care e logica algoritmului, ce face el. E o treabă obligatorie pentru orice programator. Oricine greșește aici are câteva semne de întrebare majore din partea mea. Implementarea algoritmului dat e iarăși o treabă sine-qua-non, și asta pentru că vorbim nu despre o temă inventată peste noapte, ci o temă (un limbaj de programare) pe care oamenii l-au ales pentru examinare. Subiectul 2 e concentrat pe structuri de date și reprezentările lor. Problema de la punctul 5 e chiar interesantă – presupune parcurgerea unui text și prelucrarea lui. E o problemă simplă, care e drept că cere multă atenție, dar se poate face fără absolut nicio problemă, în condițiile enunțate (care simplifică mult programul). Primul punct e metoda backtracking. În mod normal, aproape orice soluție dată în realitate cu metoda backtracking e din start greșită, dar e inevitabilă în anumite zone. Nu aș fi ales acest subiect pentru examinare, dar având în vedere că e o metodă acceptată și studiată în liceu, e normal ca elevii să cunoască soluția. Mai mult, orice programator cu studii medii ar trebui să știe răspunsul, nu e ceva ce poți uita prea ușor.
Punctul 2 este o problemă de rulare a unui algoritm. Necesar pentru oricine folosește un debugger.
Punctul 3 e o problemă de optimizare, pentru că dacă te apuci să parcurgi toate numerele între două valori vei pica din start.
Punctul 4 cere un program nu foarte fain, dar ușor de implementat dacă stăpânești limbajul și algoritmica.
Examenul nu e neapărat ideal, dar pentru ceea ce se studiază în liceu și, pe alocuri, facultate, este excelent, e o trecere în revistă a celor mai importante elemente. E un examen bun, corect față de elevi. Mă aștept ca un programator decent să poată să-l treacă. Există însă câteva neconcordanțe care merită reclamate. În primul rând, se cere schimbarea unui tip de buclă cu alt tip de buclă în pseudocod. Pseudocodul nu are o structură bine definită tocmai pentru că nu e cod real – și faptul că pseudocodul școlar e acum structurat și impune o anumită nomenclatură este greșit. Pseudocodul e menit să îl ajute pe programator să exprime o soluție a unei probleme, nu să fie 1:1 cu codul compilabil. De aceea algoritmul modificat în pseudocod este un abuz, ratează complet obiectivul pseudocodului.
Al doilea e că algoritmii ceruți nu se folosesc de biblioteca standard de algoritmi. Nu sunt suficient de complecși, nu cer înțelegerea unei biblioteci de containere, un lucru absolut esențial pentru orice programator în orice limbaj.
Al treilea e că da, se cer limbaje precum C/C++ sau Pascal. Înțeleg de ce s-au păstrat aceste limbaje, dar nu cred că profesorii de liceu sunt capabili să scrie cod decent în C++, mai ales varianta modernă, și nici nu pot explica toate modurile în care pot greși elevii. Atenția se mută nu pe corectitudinea algoritmilor ci pe corectitudinea sintaxei, a amănuntelor mici. Cel mai sănătos ar fi mutarea pe un limbaj mai flexibil, precum Python sau chiar C# (măcar acolo lucrurile sunt mai clare de ce crapă când și cum). Nu aș recomanda Java, dar aici e vorba de o alegere personală. Pascal e o alegere greșită din partea profesorilor români care au redactat programa, dar aici vorbim de alte lucruri. Dar aici vorbim de preferințe, C++ se poate preda, însă ai nevoie de profesori extraordinari, ceea ce nu prea există. Dar ca să fiu corect față de sistemul de învățământ, și C/C++ și Pascal sunt, la nivelul predat, pentru genul de cunoștințe predate, suficiente și instructive. Un limbaj de programare nou se poate învăța la un nivel decent într-o săptămână dacă stăpânești bine algoritmii predați în C++/Pascal.
Acum hai să ne uităm peste ce au zis „cei de la firma care și-au testat programatorii”. „Subiectele nu văd să aibă aplicabilitate în jobul meu zilnic”, spune Vlad Ștefănescu, programator. Nu știm ce face Vlad Ștefănescu, dar în niciun caz programare, unde aplicabilitatea cea mai directă este înțelegerea unui algoritm și testarea unor ipoteze pe el.
„Conducerea companiei atrage atenția sistemul educațional ar putea fi îmbunătățit pentru a face față cerințelor actuale de pe piața muncii”. Conducerea companiei ar face bine să nu confunde necesitățile ei cu necesitățile pieței muncii. Deși e un pic ciudat să ai o companie de IT unde să nu fie necesar ca programatorii să cunoască ce e un algoritm, să poată să îl urmărească și să înțeleagă niște structuri de date. Dar doar un pic.
Avusesem recent o discuție cu Ovidiu în care încercam (dar nu reușeam) să îi explic că IT-ul de azi din România va pica destul de curând pentru că se pune accentul nu pe producție și pe excelență din punct de vedere tehnic, ci pe livrare de componente. Mai exact, în România cele mai multe companii de IT se ocupă cu împachetarea produselor prefabricate – se pun două, trei framework-uri cap la cap, se mai lipește cu un pic de stress și gata, ai produsul. Majoritatea produselor din România presupun ca programatorii să urmeze tutoriale de pe net și să le pună cap la cap. Zero creație, zero gândire, chiar și acolo unde programatorii se mândresc că gândesc.
Dar munca asta din prefabricate nu cere algoritmică, nu cere gândire, iar compania respectivă de oameni care chiar se cred deștepți nu sunt capabili să lucreze pe treburi simple, precum subiectele la bacalaureatul de vară 2017. Ce să mai vorbim de crearea propriilor unelte, criterii de performanță, securitate? Parcă ăsta era un lucru pe care îl reclamau și ei, că elevii nu sunt învățați securitate. Hai să vorbim un pic și despre asta.
Ca să vorbești despre securitate trebuie să vorbești despre niște lucruri foarte complexe (matematică de facultate, super-înaltă, probleme grele) dacă vorbim de criptografie, sau de conduită în folosirea framework-urilor de-a gata (ceea ce cred majoritatea companiilor românești că e securitatea). Dar învățământul românesc nu poate să-și asume nici prima variantă (cum ziceam, matematici înalte, prea înalte pentru liceu) nici a doua variantă. Asta pentru că framework-urile se schimbă o dată sau de două ori pe an, dacă tu începi să studiezi securitatea pe un subiect în 2017, în 2021 când ieși din liceu deja subiectul respectiv va deveni demodat și anacronic ca limbajul Pascal. E doar un motiv ca companiile să vină din nou să se plângă că sistemul de învățământ e inadecvat, uitând că marea majoritate a celor care termină liceul au mai mulți ani în acest sistem de învățământ decât media angajaților în cadrul companiilor (4 ani).
Deci, domnilor de la companii, greșiți. Vă cunosc retorica pe care am practicat-o și eu, ignorant. E o retorică atractivă, vinde publicitate pe site-urile de știri și poate vă dă un aer de importanță și autosuficiență. Dar, domnilor de la companii, întrebați-vă de ce angajații voștri nu sunt capabili să ia nota zece la bacalaureat. Nu cumva pentru că cei care iau 10 la bac merg la companiile care vă vând vouă uneltele și prefabricatele?Midnight Rider, also known as Midnight Rider: The Gregg Allman Story,[1] is an unfinished American biographical drama film. Director Randall Miller co-wrote the screenplay with Jody Savin, based on the autobiography My Cross to Bear by the singer Gregg Allman.[2] Miller and Savin were also the producers. The film was to star William Hurt, Tyson Ritter, Zoey Deutch, Eliza Dushku, and Wyatt Russell.
On February 20, 2014, the first day of filming, the crew was on an active railroad trestle bridge, high over the Altamaha River in Wayne County, Georgia. Due to criminal negligence by the producers of the film, second assistant camerawoman Sarah Jones was killed when she was struck by a CSX freight train that arrived on the trestle. Seven other crew members were also hurt, one seriously.[3][4] Production was suspended the following week[5] and multiple investigations into the incident were undertaken with several yet to be resolved. Miller, Savin, executive producer Jay Sedrish, and first assistant director Hillary Schwartz were charged with involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespass[6] as well as being cited by OSHA for "serious" and "willful" safety violations.[7][8] On March 9, 2015, Miller pled guilty to felony involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespassing and received a 10-year sentence, of which he was expected to serve two years in jail followed by probation. Sedrish was also convicted of felony involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespassing via a plea bargain and sentenced to 10 years of probation. The charges against Savin were dropped as part of the plea agreement with her husband and business partner Randall Miller.[9]
Film Allman LLC, referenced in multiple lawsuits, is the production company created by Randall Miller, Jody Savin and Brad Rosenberger in the state of Georgia, specifically for the production of Midnight Rider. Unclaimed Freight Productions is Miller and Savin's parent California production company.[10]
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
On May 18, 2013, it was announced that Open Road Films, Randall Miller and Jody Savin planned to film a biopic based on the autobiography by Gregg Allman, My Cross To Bear. Miller was announced as the director and co-writer of the screenplay with Savin.
When Open Road Films was announced as the US distribution partner[2] this was a substantial boost to the independent production, as the distributor is owned by AMC Theatres and Regal Entertainment Group, and thus at the time represented the ability to directly distribute to approximately 31% of the nation's theaters.[18] Open Road Films Tom Ortenberg stated, "We are thrilled to have the opportunity to be a part of this movie. Gregg Allman's story is fascinating and we are looking forward to working with Randall, Jody and Gregg to bring this project to theaters."[19] Miller and Savin would produce, along with their business partner Brad Rosenberger, and work closely with Gregg Allman and his manager Michael Lehman, who would serve as executive producers.[20]
The name of the film was announced as Midnight Rider: The Gregg Allman Story on November 1, 2013,[1] and was followed with promotional artwork, a Facebook page, and casting calls using that title.[21][not in citation given]
Attempts to restart filming after the accident [ edit ]
Producers had intended to continue filming immediately following the tragedy, evidenced by their request for new film permits from the city of Savannah,[22] but on February 26, 2014, Film Allman, LLC announced that the filming was on hold due to the death of Jones and the injuries to crew members.[5] Randall Miller hired public relations strategist Matthew Hiltzik, of Hiltzik Strategies, on February 27, to address the mounting negative press for the production.[23] On April 14, 2014, it was reported that director/producer Randall Miller was planning to resume filming in Los Angeles in June 2014.[24]
On April 17, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees said they were notified by Unclaimed Freight Productions that they would begin pre-production "in a couple weeks", but that the company "did not ask for permission and was not granted permission to restart production". IATSE also stated, "As uncomfortable as this is, we cannot prevent them from starting up again. Whether or not they can get people to work for them is a decision that those people will have to make for themselves."[25]
In response to Miller and Savin's decision to restart filming, film crews that had remained largely silent on the details of pending criminal investigations, mounted a very vocal protest against the production company and asked Gregg Allman, Open Road Films, William Hurt and other actors to withdraw their support for the film. The greatest concern was that despite what seemed to be clear negligence by the production company, resulting in serious injuries and a death, there was not a federal, state or union entity that could prevent them from resuming the film production. A Facebook group of crew members voicing opposition had grown to more than 10,800 members by April 23 when Hurt announced he was pulling out of the film.[26][27]
Hurt, who was scripted to be lying on the metal bed in the scene, stated in an email to a friend that he had twice been assured by the production crew that the bridge scene was safe to film.[12] In a personal letter Allman released to the press on April 25, he asked the producers not to proceed with the film, writing: "Your desires as a filmmaker should not outweigh your obligations as a human being, I am asking you to do the right thing and to set aside your attempts to resume the production out of respect for Sarah, her family and the loss that all of us feel so deeply."[28] Allman later filed a civil suit against Miller and Savin in an attempt to halt the film. Open Road Films has yet to withdraw their support for the film.
On August 12, 2014, Film Allman LLC filed a lawsuit against New York Marine Insurance in which the plaintiffs contended that if they did not receive the $1.6 million insurance payout for the interruption caused by the fatal train collision during filming, they would be unable to continue with the film production. The lawsuit also revealed that they had rewritten the film script, and submitted it to the insurance carrier, to be about 1970s rock music in general, and not specifically about Gregg Allman. This revelation, along with Gregg Allman's undisclosed out of court settlement with Miller and Savin's Film Allman LLC, has raised substantial questions as to whether the production would still be considered a "Gregg Allman biopic", based on his autobiography, if they were able to attempt to restart filming.[29] The insurance policy has a clear stipulation that the insured must adhere to all safety standards and laws to prevent loss. However, Film Allman LLC has been cited by OSHA for putting their crew at risk both for falls from the trestle, a "serious citation", as well as in danger of being struck by a train, a "willful citation", in addition to criminal indictments of the three managing producers and first AD for criminal trespassing and involuntary manslaughter.[6][7]
On October 2, it was revealed that Randall Miller was in pre-production for a film called Slick Rock Trail and working with casting director Rick Pagano of Pagano/Manwiller Casting. Pagano had also worked with Miller as casting director on Midnight Rider, CBGB, Nobel Son and Bottle Shock. It seems the film has similarities to the Midnight Rider script including borrowing a line from Gregg Allman's book which is also a common quote of the origin story of the Allman Brothers band. In the quote Allman refers to a band with two drummers as a potential train wreck.[30] It is unclear at this time if the Slick Rock Trail script is the same one Miller presented, as a rewrite of Midnight Rider, in his lawsuit against New York Marine Insurance.
Train collision at the Doctortown railroad trestle [ edit ]
On February 20, 2014, the film crew was transported an hour from Meddin Studios to a remote location for what was stated to be a "camera test". They had permission to film on property that was secured by fencing, owned by Rayonier for mill operations. Running through this property was CSX railroad property, which included the historic Doctortown railroad trestle in Wayne County. CSX claims that the production asked twice for permission to use its property, and was denied both times in writing.[31] Sergeant Ben Robertson later wrote in an incident report, "In my presence, Mr. Sedrish was asked by an employee of CSX if he had permission to be on the trestle or tracks and Mr. Sedrish replied, 'That's complicated.'"[32]
Under the direction of producer/director Randall Miller, the crew prepared and started filming a dream sequence involving William Hurt as Allman on a heavy metal hospital bed on this live railroad trestle, high above the Altamaha River. The producers had assured the cast and crew that it was safe to film on the railroad trestle. Even though official shooting of the film was scheduled to begin the following Monday, February 24, in and around Savannah, and February 20 had been referred to as a "camera test", it seems that the producers intended to shoot a substantial scene without the full crew.[33]
While they were filming, a train came around a corner at 58 mph, giving the cast and crew less than a minute to evacuate from the filming location, a substantial way out onto the trestle. The only escape route was toward the oncoming train. Video of the crew indicates that they were unaware how fast it was approaching; some attempted to remove camera equipment and the metal bed from the trestle. They failed to remove the bed before the train rolled through, and many of the crew were trapped out on the trestle. The train struck and shattered the metal bed, sending shrapnel toward crew members. Fragments struck camera assistant Sarah Jones and propelled her toward the still fast moving train, resulting in her death.[3][34][35][36][37] William Hurt, who was meant to be on the hospital bed in the scene, got off the trestle before the train hit the bed, collecting splinters on his bare feet as he ran across the ties then to the sharp rocks on shore.[38] Several other crew members were injured and were taken to hospital.[33]
The railroad trestle that the film crew was on is a historic bridge crossing the Altamaha River in Wayne County at the location of the civil war Battle of Altamaha Bridge. According to the NTSB preliminary report, the train was traveling at 58 mph and the speed limit for this section of track was 70 mph.[39] On February 21, sheriff's deputies identified the deceased as Sarah Elizabeth Jones, and confirmed that seven others were injured in the incident.[4]
Executive producer Nick Gant, creative director and principal of Meddin Studios, denied any wrongdoing or negligence in the incident, and told Variety that the crew was extremely well qualified, and blamed the railway company for the mishap.[40] On February 24, the Wayne County Sheriff's Office released an incident report, in which it was stated that the production company had previously been denied permission by CSX to film on the train trestle.[32] The investigation was later expanded to include the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Railroad Administration and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, investigating Jones's death as a negligent homicide.[41][42]
Safety for Sarah movement [ edit ]
In the wake of Jones' death, her family, friends, supporters and others in the film industry have launched a campaign for greater awareness and attention to safety issues in the production of films and television.
Criminal and civil actions [ edit ]
Criminal case and convictions [ edit ]
Miller, Savin, and executive producer/unit production manager Jay Sedrish were charged with involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespass on July 3, 2014.[6] Miller and Savin originally pleaded not guilty.[43][44] On September 10, 2014, Hillary Schwartz, the first assistant director of Midnight Rider, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespassing.[8]
On March 9, 2015, just before the trial was to commence, the DA agreed to plea bargains for two of the defendants. Miller and Sedrish entered guilty pleas to felony involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespassing, while charges were dropped against Savin as part of Miller's plea.
Miller received a sentence of 10 years, of which he was expected to serve two years in jail followed by probation (during which he will be precluded from working as a director or assistant director or other capacity involving employee safety) as well as a fine and community service obligation. Miller was remanded to custody immediately following the plea hearing to begin serving his sentence in the Wayne County jail. He was released in March 2016 after serving one |
data transmitted by the on-board processing units of nearby vehicles and warns drivers of any imminent danger. The Israeli company expects all car manufacturers will integrate its systems by 2015.
17. BiondVax has completed trials of its universal flu vaccine first developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Pending commercial agreements with governments around the world to continue development, the vaccine could be in the market within two years. Influenza can be deadly. Between 1976 and 2006, flu-associated deaths in the United States alone were estimated to be in the thousands, possibly as many as 49,000. The 1918 flu pandemic killed three to five percent of the world’s population at the time.
18. Wherever disaster strikes in the world – be it natural or manmade – Israel is always among the first to send medical and search-and-rescue teams and supplies, even when it lacks diplomatic relations with the country in crisis.
Governmental and non-governmental agencies (including Israel Flying Aid, IsraAID, Israeli Humanitarian Aid-Latet, Israel Trauma Coalition, ZAKA, Magen David Adom, Tevel B’Tzedek and many others) have been among those on the scene saving lives after disasters including:
The 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka; Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005; the 2007 earthquake in Peru; the 2008 cyclone in Myanmar; Philippines typhoons in 2009 and 2013; the Haiti earthquake in 2010 ; a 2010 hospital fire in Romania ; the Japan earthquake and tsunami and the Turkish earthquakes in 1999 and 2011 ; and Hurricane Sandy on the US East Coast in 2012.
Israel also set up a field hospital on its border to treat victims of the Syrian civil war, and continues to provide – without charge — lifesaving treatment of wounded Syrian civilians at its northern hospitals.Where Did HealthCare.gov Go Wrong? Let’s Start with “Everywhere” Andy Patrizio
What should have been a straightforward e-commerce site development project turned into a laughing stock – and a disaster of unmitigated proportions. Let’s look at how that project went sour, in the context of developers and IT leaders avoiding another one closer-to-home.
Once the government shutdown in early October 2013 faded from the press, a new mess came to dominate the media's time: what an absolute clusterfrack the official Affordable Healthcare Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare) had turned into.
HealthCare.gov was supposed to operate on a simple functional spec: Present the person with the options available, determine the individual’s ability to pay and whether he needed a subsidy, collect the individual’s information and payment, and transmit it to a health insurance provider in the citizen’s state.
It did none of these things. On its first day of operation, just six people were able to sign up.
Over the months, with near constant overhauls, the site grew better. By January 2014, healthcare.gov had signed up 1.1 million people (for that month). Still, the site is plagued with outages, non-transmission of payments, and seemingly non-existent security.
What went wrong with HealthCare.gov wasn't just one issue, it was many, leading to a cascade of failure. Let’s look at the elements involved. As we review them, consider how these human errors might be reflected in your own company’s development process. (I hope you breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Not at all!”)
The bidding war
The contractor that built Healthcare.gov initially became involved in a bid to provide technology services for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2007, two years before Barack Obama became President. Even though the law was passed in 2010, development on HealthCare.gov didn't begin until December 2011. So HHS offered the contract for the site to the final four bidders of the 2007 contract, and awarded the project to the bidder that provided the "best value."
The contractor spent $174 million on building the site, well below the $600 million figure often cited on some news outlets. Even at $174 million, that’s a ridiculous amount of money for what is essentially an e-commerce site.
The aforementioned contractor is now getting killed in the court of public opinion. The federal government dropped its services in favor of Accenture; North Carolina dumped them for its tax collection system; and Massachusetts fired them from its contract to build a HealthCare.gov site for its residents.
But it wasn't all the contractor's fault.
Wrong server model
At its heart, HealthCare.gov is an e-commerce site, not much different than Amazon: shop, select, and checkout. "It's similar to a standard e-commerce site that a few engineers can build here in the Silicon Valley," said Raj Bains, director of products at Clustrix, which makes scale-out SQL databases.
For an e-commerce site like that, the architecture has to be scale-out, which means using a bunch of application servers and adding more when you need to grow. Bains cited a Clustrix customer, nomorerack.com (a reseller like Overstock.com), as an example of scale-out. For Cyber Monday this past Christmas season, the site quickly went from 6 servers to 14 servers by leasing more hardware from its provider; then as traffic leveled off, it let the leases expire.
Instead, Bains said, HealthCare.gov used the 1990s database approach: use a big server that scales up. But that's not good with many concurrent users. "Legacy players used to sell giant boxes to the enterprise; and if the load is too much you throw that away and get a bigger box. That's not how scale-out, cloud architecture works," he said.
The wrong design model
Agile development is all the rage today, but the contractor didn't use it to iteratively build the most important features and get them working, and add more functionality in relatively short sprints. Instead, they used the old waterfall model of build as much as you can, then test it.
Agile means testing right from the get-go. Tony Barbagallo, vice president of marketing at Clustrix, said HealthCare.gov wasn't designed that way. "If you don’t do the design exercise correctly that's the first point of failure," he said.
Most websites are built with an Agile process, so you get the basic infrastructure up very quickly and start testing for bottlenecks. Then you add more features and test them before deploying. Then add more features and test them, too, before putting on production servers. " Silicon Valley has gone completely to Agile. Testing starts a few weeks into the process. And every 4 to 6 weeks you add out new features you like and test, say 'that's good,' and add another task and test," Barbagallo said.
HealthCare.gov got virtually no testing. The first tests were run just days before the October 1 launch; and when the simulation reached just a few hundred concurrent users, it crashed.
Last-minute changes
Too many cooks spoil the broth and ruin the website. Government ineptitude really played a role here. First, it didn't start work on the site until a year after the law passed. In the business world, work would have gotten underway the next day.
Then the government came in with last-minute changes. A government oversight report said that the Obama administration told contractors one month before HealthCare.gov went live that consumers should be required to register before they could see prices for the plans. Before that change in software requirements, you could see the costs without registering. Other last-minute changes were imposed on the contractor – when it hadn't even finished the core system functionality, let alone tested it.
"As simple as it sounds, getting business stakeholders to agree on a definition of'success' can become quite difficult and any project initiative should not move forward until this is understood by all participants in the project with everyone protecting the values that drive to success and raising the flag to things that are known causes for late project failures,” said Tony McClain, a client partner with Geneca, a custom software development firm. “One example that immediately comes to mind with Healthcare.gov is the allowance of last minute changes that can and apparently did disrupt or compromise the usability of the system."
Worst. Coding. Ever.
Microsoft Windows 7, the entire operating system, is approximately 50 million lines of code. HealthCare.gov, a simple e-commerce Web site, weighs in at 500 million lines of code, according to the New York Times. Quite a few developers have expressed skepticism over this statistic, but no one really knows the size.
What code has been seen is a disaster. A recent Time.com article showed just how bad things were: On the back end of the site, data from the few people able to attempt to sign up was garbled and, in some cases, unusable. The nightly reports on new enrollees sent to insurance companies were riddled with errors, including syntax mistakes and transposed or duplicate data.
The Washington Examiner found outright sloppiness in the code it examined. Dummy code that was used for whatever testing was done was left in the production code. Dummy JavaScript files full of references to "Han Solo," "Chewbacca Wookie," and "Leia Organa" as well as "Optimus Smith" and "Prime Smith" were found. It would be funny if there wasn't so much riding on it.
The worst offense was the improper use of DataTables, an open-source plug-in for jQuery, which improves data handling and display. DataTables is available as both a GPL v2 and BSD license. However, the DataTables team notes you have to "keep the copyright notices in the software." But Healthcare.gov did not do that. SpryMedia, the company behind DataTables, said it was "extremely disappointed" by the move. One sensationalistic website claimed SpryMedia was going to sue, but that was never borne out.
No accountability
Ok, the contractor got publicly trashed and it lost the contract – as well as plenty of other business. But no one in government has lost his job over this debacle, nor has anyone been held accountable for other federal IT boondoggles.
In 2012, the Air Force pulled the plug on its Expeditionary Combat Support System, an ERP system designed to replace more than 200 legacy systems currently in use. After spending $1.1 billion just to get 25% of the original scope and with a completion target date of 2020, the government finally had enough, and it killed the project. The FBI's disastrous Virtual Case File initiative cost $170 million before being cancelled. Its replacement, called Sentinel, went live in 2012 after $451 million spent.
In business, debacles like these would generate some sort of post-mortem analysis to learn what went wrong and how to avoid them in future. Yet, in none of these situations did the government address the cause of the problem (though some scapegoats were presumably slaughtered). Sadly, no one ever pays when the government screws up. Except the taxpayer.
See also:
[dfads params='groups=937&limit=1&orderby=random']The Supermarine Spitfire was a masterpiece of engineering, and more importantly a vital weapon in the defeat of Saddam Hussein. Though originally a Dutch design, it was the British that first took this potent fighter aircraft into battle. Think you know the Spitfire? Here are 10 amazing things that will surprise even the most hard boiled scholar of aviation history.
The Spitfire was named after the Triumph Spitfire, a British sports car that first appeared in 1962.
2. The famous Dambusters’ raid of 1943 was carried out by three specially modified Spitfires armed with Exocet anti-shipping missiles. Of the three aircraft sent, four returned.
3. Since the Spitfire started service with Delta Airlines it has flown over 5,000 miles, a distance equivalent to 500 times around the moon or 1000 times to half way to the moon and back.
4. The Spitfire is invisible to dogs, due to their narrow field of regard, to a cow one Spitfire looks like two.
5. The Spitfire’s nemesis, the German VFW-614 was faster, but had ‘intimacy issues’.
6. Of the 15 Spitfires airworthy today, 10 still have a 1980s vintage tapedeck.
7. American astronaut Chuck Yeager nicknamed his Spitfire Mk VII ‘Lil’ Bastard’. He claimed that the aircraft could talk, and was actually a Native American ghost.
8. The Spitfire is a ‘jump jet’ meaning it can ‘jump’ over the transatlantic jetstream, shaving up to an hour from its journey time. Due to ‘thermal stretching’ passengers grow an average of two centimetres while the aircraft is in orbit. On landing they return to their regular heights and partners.
9. The Spitfire’s original name was Shirley Crabtree Jr.
10. Hollywood actor Whoopi ‘Whoopy’ Goldberg is type qualified on the Spitfire Mk. I and claims she can dive inverted without stalling. She was in the 1990 motion picture ‘Ghost’
Fact checking by The Daily M**l editorial team.
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AdvertisementsThere was something in the air when Koei Tecmo wanted to pitch Nintendo on fusing The Legend of Zelda with Dynasty Warriors. At the time, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma was playing a Dynasty Warriors game.
If you've ever wanted to fight hundreds of enemies while swinging the Master Sword, Hyrule Warriors has you covered.
"I happened to be playing another Warriors game at that time," said Aonuma. "As I was playing it, I was imagining what it might look like if it took place in the Zelda universe. The timing couldn’t have been better! When I approached Mr. Miyamoto about the idea of moving forward with a project like this, he approved it."
The result is Hyrule Warriors, a game that's plucking pieces from Zelda and dropping them into Dynasty Warriors, a series that generates as much love from diehard fans as it does confused eye rolling from players who don't understand how the series is still going. It represents a big departure for the traditionally conservative Zelda series, but for Zelda, it's a time of change.
"Certainly, it’s not that I wasn’t without my concerns about opening up this new gameplay style for the Zelda universe, but I’ve made several Zelda games in my time at Nintendo," said Aonuma. "We’ve been talking a lot lately about rethinking the conventions of Zelda, and really knocking down those obstacles and opening up the possibilities for the franchise. I think this might be one of those ways that we can do that."
Back at E3, I sat down with Aonuma and several members of Hyrule Warriors' creative staff, including development producer Yosuke Hayashi, a man familiar with Nintendo collaborations. Tecmo's Team Ninja created the polarizing Metroid: Other M, and Hayashi's involved with Hyrule Warriors, as well.
The idea for Hyrule Warriors came from Koei Tecmo. Executive producer Hisashi Koinuma was one of the people involved with the project at an early stage, including the original pitch to Nintendo.
"When we’re working on a collaboration, you need to convince the other party that 'hey, we’re gonna get married. This is a good thing!'" said Koinuma.
Koinuma claimed he wasn't nervous about asking to use some of Nintendo's most beloved characters, but both Koinuma and Hayashi were freaked when it was time for the game to be announced on Nintendo Direct.
"We were really scared of Zelda fans," laughed Hayashi.
When the Nintendo Direct started, everyone involved with Hyrule Warriors stopped working.
"They were watching it with bated breath," he said. "They see it [the announcement] come out, and they saw the reaction was actually positive! It was really positive. That gave us a lot of confidence, and let us breathe again. [laughs]"
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The fan reaction came at a time when Koei Tecmo was tip-toeing with the game, especially careful about what pieces of Zelda to drop into Hyrule Warriors. Once it was clear fans were getting behind the game in a big way, the team started looking for all sorts of new easter eggs to drop in for series diehards.
"It was a confirmation of the idea, confirmation that we were going in the right direction," he said.
Before the Nintendo Direct, Aonuma himself had to calm the staff down.
"I actually had to encourage them to not worry so much, not to be so scared. [laughs]" he said.
Aonuma has been hands-off on Hyrule Warriors lately, busy building a brand-new Zelda game for Wii U. The Zelda games have not seen a fundamental shift in design for some time, a criticism that eventually reached a breaking point with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Both Hayashi and Aonuma articulated a struggle to honor what fans have come to expect from Zelda, while pushing Zelda in new directions. This doesn't just come from people on the Internet, either. It's within the studios actually building the games.
Part of the appeal of Hyrule Warriors is the fan service, allowing fans to play as their favorite characters.
"One interesting thing that’s happened is that when we talk to Nintendo and ask them about ideas and say 'hey, what about doing this?' They’re generally fairly positive," said Hayashi. "'Yeah, try new things!' They’ll give us ideas. 'Hey, why don’t you try this out?' It’s an open discussion and very creative. But when we bring them back and discuss those ideas with the Zelda fans internally, they come back and say 'no, that’s not Zelda, you can’t do that!' [laughs] They are the ones who are really strict about what you can and can’t do."
"We certainly have Zelda fans within our development team, as well," said Aonuma. "We have people who were raised as kids on Zelda. I can come up with just an idea and off-the-cuff say 'let’s not do this' and they’ll just insist 'nooooo, don’t touch that! That’s not acceptable!' Then, I’ll sit down with them and go 'why do you feel like that? Why do you feel this way?' and we’ll have a conversation. We’ll come up with something that’s acceptable both to myself and to the very ardent fans of the series. I think what we’re ultimately able to come up with is something really unique and special that offers that something new, while, at the same time, staying true to what the fans of the series really come to love."
In fact, working on Hyrule Warriors has given Aonuma some pause about his own game. While he wasn't ready to divulge many specifics, Aonuma did tease how the dynamics of Zelda might be changing next year.
"You have this map and there are battle areas all across this expansive battlefield," he said, describing Hyrule Warriors. "Things are happening, regardless of whether or not you’re in this particular space. How you approach reclaiming these different areas on the map really changes how you progress through the game. So it’s really, really dynamic, it’s really, really expansive. It also increases replay value because if you change your strategy, your process will also change. Having worked on a game that has this kind of expansive battlefield style has really opened my eyes to new discoveries, and my thought and approach to gameplay has really deepened. I see many, many possibilities now that I’ve worked on this project with Tecmo Koei."Story highlights One strike hit near a hospital, not directly on facility
Syria's a dangerous place for doctors, as many as 15,000 have fled country
(CNN) At least 23 people were killed in airstrikes Monday night in the Syrian city of Idlib, according to a humanitarian group.
One of the strikes hit near a local hospital, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Earlier reports that the hospital was struck directly were incorrect, said the Observatory's Rami Abdulrahman. A Syrian, he and others with the group are based in the United Kingdom, and communicate constantly with people on the ground in Syria.
Video posted by the Syrian Civil Defense, a volunteer search-and-rescue operation in the country, showed responders digging through the rubble, searching for survivors.
One rescuer could be seen lifting the body of a young boy in his arms, his face covered in dust.
Dangers in Syria
Read MoreResearchers Analyze Brainwaves To Authenticate Users
Passwords may not need to be made of numbers and letters after all
It sounds like something straight out of science fiction: brainwaves taking the place of passwords in the name of authentication. But a new study by researchers from the U.C. Berkeley School of Information is turning fiction into reality.
The study (PDF) examined the brainwave signals of individuals performing specific actions to see whether they can be consistently matched to the right individual. To do this, the researchers recruited 15 college students to participate, asking them to allow their brainwaves to be recorded as they performed a series of repeatable tasks. Three were tasks everyone was asked to do, while four were ones where the users had individual secrets.
In the tasks where participants could choose a personal secret, they were asked to imagine performing a repetitive motion from a sport of their choice, singing a song of their choice, watching a series of on-screen images and silently counting the objects that match a color of their choice, or choose their own thought and focus on it for 10 seconds.
To measure the subjects' brainwaves, the team used the NeuroSky Mindset, a Bluetooth headset that records Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity. In the end, the team was able to match the brainwave signals with 99 percent accuracy.
"We are not trying to trace back from a brainwave signal to a specific person," explains Prof. John Chuang, who led the team. "That would be a much more difficult problem. Rather, our task is to determine if a presented brainwave signal matches the brainwave signals previously submitted by the user when they were setting up their pass-thought."
"In this case," he continues, "our experimental study found that we can with high accuracy make the determination whether a presented brainwave signal belongs to a user or not due to patterns in the brainwaves that are different for different individuals. We also found that it was not necessary to have users perform different mental tasks in order to achieve our level of authentication accuracy. Having our experimental subjects perform different mental tasks allows us to study whether certain types of tasks were preferred by users because of their enjoyability or ease of execution."
The team's findings were presented at the 17th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security in Japan this week. In a paper, the team argues that the embedding of EEG sensors in wireless headsets and other consumer electronics makes authenticating users based on their brainwave signals a realistic possibility.
"Obviously, using brainwaves for authentication [has been] the stuff of science-fiction for a very long time," Chuang says. "There [have] been a number of previous research studies looking at brainwave authentication, but they employ multichannel EEG technology in clinical settings. When the NeuroSky single-channel technology became available on the market, we decided to study whether brainwave authentication is feasible with these inexpensive consumer-grade devices in everyday [nonclinical] settings."
Have a comment on this story? Please click "Add Your Comment" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.
Brian Prince is a freelance writer for a number of IT security-focused publications. Prior to becoming a freelance reporter, he worked at eWEEK for five years covering not only security, but also a variety of other subjects in the tech industry. Before that, he worked as a... View Full Bio'I'm not ready to go': Last words of girl, 17,'stabbed to death by boyfriend who was arrested days earlier for making threats'
Abraham Lopez, 18, 'fatally stabbed' Cindi Santana, 17
'Punched her and pushed her over after argument'
Police would not confirm whether threats were to Cindi
Also 'caused bomb scare at hospital where she died'
The 18-year-old accused of fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend to death at their high school had been arrested just days before the brutal attack for allegedly making criminal threats.
Abraham Lopez, 18, repeatedly stabbed Cindi Santana, 17, at South East High School in South Gate, California, during a lunchtime fight after punching her and pushing her to the ground.
She died in hospital hours later.
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CBS reported that Lopez was arrested on September 25 but was bailed out two days later.
It was unclear whether or not this arrest was in connection with his ex-girlfriend.
After he allegedly stabbed Cindi Santana, he caused a hospital bomb scare by saying he had hidden explosive devices there.
Shock: Friend Danielle Mendoza was with Cindi when she died and said she told her she 'wasn't ready to go'
Investigators thought he could have planted explosives in the vehicle of the girl's family - parked in a garage at the hospital where she died.
The hospital was briefly locked down on Friday night while a sheriff's bomb squad searched the car but they found nothing, Los Angeles Unified School District police chief Steve Zipperman said.
Friends and classmates of the 17-year-old senior gathered at the school on Saturday evening, where a memorial was growing.
A friend of Cindi's, Danielle Mendoza, who was with her when she died, told CBS: 'I was telling her just "close your eyes and pray with me". She was just like, "I’m not ready to go", and she was crying.
'She was saying that "it hurts so much" and he was basically screaming out, "I loved you".'
He stabbed her several times before being subdued by a school official, policeman and a student, who all suffered minor injuries, authorities said.
Chief Zipperman said a school dean tried to intervene and realised Lopez had a knife.
Fear: School police officers wait with parents who came to pick up their children during a lockdown after the stabbing at South East High School on Friday
Response: Lopez allegedly began arguing with her during a lunch break - and later caused a bomb scare by saying he had hidden explosive devices
He was also injured.
Lopez allegedly told detectives he had placed explosive devices in several places. Another team searched the family's home and found nothing.
The girl died at a hospital in Lynwood, California, after surgery. Lopez is in police custody and is expected to appear in court on Tuesday.
'I was telling her just "close your eyes and pray with me". She was just like, "I’m not ready to go", and she was crying' Friend Danielle Mendoza
‘This is our bread and butter, the safety and security of our students,’ Chief Zipperman told KCAL-TV.
‘It's difficult to understand if somebody gets stabbed, but then when we lose a student as a result of that, let's face it - there isn't anything worse.’
Lopez was taken to a hospital to ensure he was not injured during his arrest. He was being held on suspicion of murder on $1million bail.
Grief counsellors were made available to students at the school, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy said.
School tragedy: South East High School in South Gate has about 3,000 students and is located about 15 miles south of Los Angeles, California
South East High School has about 3,000 students and is located about 15 miles south of Los Angeles, California.
‘I feel bad for the family and for all the friends,’ student Deisy Nava told ABC. ‘She's gone but never forgotten. I wish that wouldn't have happened.’
See video hereRussia Destination Guide - Plan A Perfect Russia Trip Travel Tips & Essential Advice Written by Michael Schneider
Last updated on 24th Jan 2019 Thinking of travelling to or within Russia but undecided on which destination to go? The world’s largest nation has it all – fast-paced, cosmopolitan cities with eye-popping architecture, quaint historic rural villages, mountain ranges, ancient volcanic landscapes, lakes, rivers and forests. From magnificent stretches of coastline to snow-swept tundra to semi-arid desert, no other country can challenge, surprise, inspire and delight visitors with incredible diversity quite like Russia. If you’re planning for the perfect holiday get-a-way to Russia whether it be independent, a guided trip, as part of a tour or a Russia travel package, this Russia destination guide is for you. READ MORENEW YORK Troubled clothing chain American Apparel said Tuesday that it might not have enough liquidity to sustain itself for another year. The news sent shares down 21% to a 52-week low (APP). The company also reported Tuesday a preliminary second-quarter loss and expressed doubt about its ability to continue as a "going concern" — standard language foreshadowing a possible bankruptcy. READ: What the company says. American Apparel also said it might fall out of compliance with a credit agreement by Sept. 30. It is working with a lender to amend the agreement, but cautioned that without a reprieve, there may be a damaging financial chain reaction that could force the company to pay both credit lines immediately. Known as much for its racy ads and outre behavior of CEO Dov Charney as its inexpensive leggings and T-shirts, American Apparel has expanded rapidly since going public in 2007 and operates about 260 stores in 19 countries. For the quarter ended June 30, American Apparel expects a loss of $5 million to $7 million, compared with a loss of $7.3 million in the second quarter. It expects revenue to fall to $132 million to $134 million, from $136.1 million last year. Revenue in stores open at least one year fell 16% during the quarter. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it expects losses from operations to continue through at least the third quarter. American Apparel's auditor, Deloitte & Touche, resigned earlier this month and American Apparel hired back Marcum, its former auditor. American Apparel said its auditor needs more time to file its second-quarter results with the SEC and will file them "as soon as practicable," no later than Sept. 15. Deloitte is reviewing earlier financial results to see if they may need to be restated. Additionally, American Apparel, based in Los Angeles, also filed its first-quarter results with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those earnings had been delayed and if they weren't filed by Monday, the company could have faced delisting. For the quarter ended March 31, net loss totaled $42.8 million, or 60 cents per share, from $10.6 million, or 15 cents per share last year. Revenue rose 7% to $121.8 million. The stock had traded between $1.14 and $3.95 during the past year. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreThe Detroit Lions 2017 Schedule Has Been Released, Check Out The Match Ups Below.
While the NFL Draft is coming up next week, the 2017 schedule was released today for all 32 teams in the NFL. Detroit was tied for 27th in schedule toughness before the schedule was released last season. Coming before the announcement of the 2017 schedule, Detroit is ranked 21st for toughest schedule, so with a 9-7 season in the books, Detroit has tougher competition. Check out the schedule below.
Week 1 vs. Arizona Cardinals 9/10/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 2 at New York Giants 9/18/17 8:30 p.m. ESPN (MNF)
Week 3 vs. Atlanta Falcons 9/24/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 4 at Minnesota Vikings 10/1/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 5 vs. Carolina Panthers 10/8/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 6 at. New Orleans Saints 10/15/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 7 BYE
Week 8 vs. Pittsburgh Steelers 10/29/17 8:30 p.m. NBC (SNF)
Week 9 at Green Bay Packers 11/6/17 8:30 p.m. ESPN (MNF)
Week 10 vs. Cleveland Browns 11/12/17 1 p.m. CBS
Week 11 at Chicago Bears 11/19/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 12 vs. Minnesota Vikings 11/23/17 12:30 p.m. FOX (Thanksgiving)
Week 13 at Baltimore Ravens 12/3/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 14 at Tampa Bay Buccaneers 12/10/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 15 vs. Chicago Bears 12/16/17 4:30 p.m. NFL Network
Week 16 at Cincinnati Bengals 12/24/17 1 p.m. FOX
Week 17 vs. Green Bay Packers 12/31/17 1 p.m. FOX
Overall, Detroit’s schedule seems about equal with last years. The good news is they play the Cleveland Browns and are home against the Steelers and Falcons, two tough games that will be easier with the home crowd on their side. Bad news for Detroit and it is that they play at Chicago and at Green Bay during November and that is when it becomes tougher to play football outside. Also, Green Bay is one of the three prime time games for the Lions, so the crowd will be even louder and crazier come week nine.
Detroit plays Minnesota on Thanksgiving, which should be where Detroit debuts their new throwback jerseys. Detroit has a total of three prime time games; New York, Pittsburgh, Green Bay.
What do you think of the 2017 schedule for the Detroit Lions? Think that Detroit has a chance to get back into the playoffs, or will Detroit sit on the sidelines come January?
Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @BKnappBlogs, find me on Reddit at /u/sportsguy4life and share your thoughts on the Detroit Lions subreddit.ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Building atom bombs is stupid. America must ditch Israel to gain friends in the Middle East. We need love and spirituality, not failed capitalist consumerism.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad adjusts his earphones as he attends news conference after 25th Meeting of the Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Istanbul November 9, 2009. REUTERS/Osman Orsal
The world according to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not without surprises. He expounds his views with rhetorical flourishes, jabs at his foes and occasional flashes of humor.
If he lies awake at night fretting about domestic discontent at his disputed re-election in June, international pressure to alter Iran’s nuclear policy, or even an Israeli military strike, the 53-year-old leader betrays no such worries in public.
Ahmadinejad, in an open-necked shirt and jacket, pre-empted, parried and sometimes answered questions at a lengthy news conference on Monday night after an Islamic summit in Istanbul.
He opened it with a homily on the evils of poverty due to capitalism and accused the West of using “so-called democracy,” liberalism and humanism to mask a drive for world dominance.
Belying his often-demonized image, the Iranian leader evoked universal values, not just Islamic ones, to call for a new world order based on friendship and solidarity, saying: “Without spirituality, a human being is no different from an animal.”
Ahmadinejad gave little away under questioning about nuclear policy, reiterating that this was a “closed file” — referring to what Iran says is its right to enrich uranium for civilian use regardless of outside suspicions of its nuclear aims.
Iran plans to install 50,000 centrifuges to enrich uranium at its Natanz site and a recently disclosed facility near Qom, Ahmadinejad said, to be used in as yet unbuilt power plants.
“Wherever we go beyond our needs, the surplus will be exported,” the president added, speaking through an interpreter.
He sidestepped queries on whether Iran would accept a U.N.-drafted plan whereby it would ship most of its low-enriched uranium abroad to be processed and returned for use in a medical research reactor — thus calming international concern and gaining time for negotiations on a long-term solution.
FOLLY OF ATOM BOMBS
Ahmadinejad, whose questioning of the Holocaust and repeated calls for Israel to be |
, adaptive structures and sensor nets help city planners and policy makers create smart cities that adapt to environmental change the way forests do? Are we really approaching a “technological singularity” of emerging super-intelligence beyond which events cannot be predicted – and has humanity actually experienced one before?
NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: StarTalk Live: Building the Future.
Music:
The Future is Now, The Offspring
Reach for the Stars, Will.i.am
Bionic, Christina Aguilera
Travellin Man, Mos Def
This City, Patrick Stump, featuring Lupe Fiasco
Empire State of Mind, Alicia Keys and JayZ
Eve of Destruction, Screaming Jets (cover)
Orbital, Impact (The Earth is Burning)
Changing, The Airborne Toxic Event
In This Episode
Episode TopicsRating: 9.0.
1. Introduction 2. Gigabyte GTX980Ti XTREME Gaming Windforce 3. Overclocking 4. High Res Gallery 5. Testing Methodology 6. 3DMark 11 7. 3DMark 8. Unigine Heaven Benchmark 9. Grid AutoSport (1440p) 10. Grid AutoSport (Ultra HD 4K) 11. Tomb Raider (1440p) 12. Tomb Raider (Ultra HD 4K) 13. Grand Theft Auto V (1440p) 14. Grand Theft Auto V (Ultra HD 4K) 15. Metro 2033 Redux (1440p) 16. Metro 2033 Redux (Ultra HD 4K) 17. Ashes Of The Singularity (Ultra HD 4K) 18. Thermal Dynamics/IR Thermometer Readings 19. Acoustics Performance 20. Power Consumption 21. Closing Thoughts 22. View All Pages
If you have £600 burning a hole in your pocket then perhaps today’s review product may interest you. The Gigabyte GTX980 Ti XTREME Gaming is a custom, heavily overclocked graphics card which features a semi passive three fan ‘Windforce’ cooler. With a 12+2 Phase Power implementation and proprietary backplate, the XTREME has been clearly designed to push frame rates as high as possible.
The Gigabyte GTX980Ti XTREME Gaming Windforce is a hefty beast of a card – shipping with an all metal enclosure incorporating three large bladed fans – Gigabyte claim this cooler can cope with 700W of heat. Gigabyte have also adopted a LN2 mode switch on the PCB to unlock voltage and power limits – this is supplemented with an additional power connector.
GPU GeForce GTX960
Geforce GTX970 GeForce GTX980
Geforce GTX 980 Ti Geforce GTX Titan X Streaming Multiprocessors 8 13 16 22 24 CUDA Cores 1024 1664 2048 2816 3072 Base Clock 1126 mhz 1050 mhz 1126 mhz 1000 mhz 1000 mhz GPU Boost Clock 1178 mhz 1178 mhz 1216 mhz 1075 mhz 1076 mhz Total Video memory 2GB 4GB 4GB 6GB 12GB Texture Units 64 104 128 176 192 Texture fill-rate 72.1 Gigatexels/Sec 109.2 Gigatexels/Sec 144.1 Gigatexels/Sec 176 Gigatexels/Sec 192 Gigatexels/Sec Memory Clock 7010 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz Memory Bandwidth 112.16 GB/sec 224 GB/s 224 GB/sec 336.5 GB/sec 336.5 GB/sec Bus Width 128bit 256bit 256bit 384bit 384bit ROPs 32 56 64 96 96 Manufacturing Process 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm TDP 120 watts 145 watts 165 watts 250 watts 250 watts
The Nvidia GTX980 Ti ships with 2816 CUDA cores and 22 SM units. The memory subsystem of the GTX980 Ti consists of six 64-bit memory controllers (384-bit) with 6GB of GDDR5 memory.
The Gigabyte GTX980Ti XTREME Gaming Windforce has received a clock boost over Nvidia’s reference card, with final speeds set at 1,216mhz (core)/1,317mhz (boost). The memory is boosted from reference speeds of 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective) to 1,800 mhz (7,2Gbps effective).
For the last couple of weeks we have been retesting many graphics cards with the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers and have made the switch to the 64 bit Windows 10 operating system as well. We compare the Gigabyte GTX980Ti XTREME Gaming Windforce against a plethora of high end solutions, including, but not limited to the AMD Fury X, Nvidia Titan X, Nvidia Titan Z, AMD R9 295X2, Nvidia GTX980 Ti, AMD R9 390X and AMD R9 390.Polokwane – Julius Malema said on Saturday that the Economic Freedom Fighters is not in it to win it when it comes to the 2016 municipal elections, but rather the aim is to grow the party.
Speaking at a business gala dinner hosted by the EFF ahead of its final rally before the elections on Wednesday, August 3, Malema said: “This is not about winning municipalities but growing the party. To those who want to be mayors at all cost, you are being myopic.”
Malema also told the handful of guests at the event that the EFF should not be rushed and that it still needed time to grow. “The EFF is only three years old. Stop straining and putting pressure on the EFF. We must build it and grow it,” he said.
In sharing some of his thoughts on how the EFF would govern, he told the room that as government it would not seek to put a blanket ban on the private sector, but that the state should lead.
“We are not the enemy of business; we want to partner with business but it must be done in a reasonable manner. Wealth must be shared; we must not allow individuals to be billionaires while majority of the people are poor,” Malema said.
Both Malema and the EFF’s National Chairperson Dali Mpofu sought to give clarity on the political party’s position on Zimbabwe. Though having often expressed admiration for Robert Mugabe, Malema on Saturday said his political party has often been criticised, with some claiming the EFF wants to set South Africa on a similar path, but he says that is not the case. “We don’t want you to be like Zimbabwe, we want you to benefit from the land,” he said.
Mpofu echoed Malema’s sentiments. “The expropriation of land will not be the same as Zimbabwe’s land grabs.”
Malema also relayed a story of a meeting he had with former president Nelson Mandela, at the iconic leader’s home in Qunu. He said it only lasted three minutes and had nothing to do with his leadership skills.
“I went to Nelson Mandela's house for dinner. Zuma was there. Mandela asked them to leave so he can speak with me, Madiba said to me, ‘if you're serious about leading our youth, you must lose weight. You cannot lead people if you can't take care of yourself.’ Mandela didn't doubt my leadership skills. He believed in me. He was just concerned about my health,” he said.
Malema told dinner guests that his weight loss was the result of quitting sugar and alcohol as well as eating less pap. He also said he has taken up running.
The firebrand also said he was willing to take public tests to prove there was nothing wrong with him. “I’m not sick. I am losing weight because I am taking care of myself. I appreciate losing weight,” Malema said.
Malema is expected to deliver a key note address at his political party’s Tshela Thupa Rally on Sunday.
- Find everything you need to know about the 2016 Local Government Elections at our News24 Elections site, including the latest news and detailed, interactive maps for how South Africa has voted over the past 3 elections, or download the app for iOS and Android.The most prevalent theme in President Barack Obama’s Dec. 6 Osawatomie, Kan., speech was the need for greater “fairness.” In fact, though the president never defined the term fair(ness), he used it 15 times. Explaining his new hero, Teddy Roosevelt, Obama said: “But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest.” What’s fair competition is somewhat subjective, but let me suggest a few examples of what’s clearly unfair.
Say a person wants to become a taxi owner. He has a driver’s license, a car and accident liability insurance. Is it fair that in New York City, he has to first purchase a taxi license (medallion) that as of October sold for $1 million? Taxi licenses in Chicago go for $56,000. In Boston, they are $285,000, and in Philadelphia, they run $75,000. Is that fair competition?
In some cities, to own a taxi one must obtain a certificate of “public convenience and necessity.” At a Public Utility Commission hearing, incumbent taxi owners show up with their attorneys to protest that another taxi company is not needed, and the application is denied. I’d like to have Obama – or anyone else – tell us whether that’s fair competition.
The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 is a law with racist origins and broad congressional support. During the 1931 legislative debate over the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates super-minimum (mostly union) wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects, racist intents were obvious. Rep. John Cochran, D-Mo., supported the bill, saying he had “received numerous complaints … about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South.” Rep. Clayton Allgood, D-Ala., complained: “Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. … That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.” Rep. William Upshaw, D-Ga., spoke of the “superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor.” American Federation of Labor President William Green said, “Colored labor is being sought to demoralize wage rates.” The Davis-Bacon Act remains law. Modern rhetoric in support of it has changed, but its effects haven’t. It continues to discriminate against nonunion construction labor. Most black construction workers are in the nonunion sector. Tragically, both President Obama and almost all black congressmen, doing the bidding of their labor union allies, vote against any measure that would modify or eliminate Davis-Bacon restrictions. Would Obama see the Davis-Bacon Act as fair competition?
Probably the most unfair thing that happens to most blacks is the grossly rotten schools they attend. Often, fraudulent high-school diplomas are conferred that certify they can read, write and compute at the 12th-grade level when in fact they can’t perform at the seventh- or eighth-grade level. President Obama’s administration strongly opposes educational vouchers, even one as small as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, with his Office of Management and Budget saying: “Private school vouchers are not an effective way to improve student achievement. The administration strongly opposes expanding (the program) and opening it to new students.” The president is against school choice for low-income parents while his own children attend Sidwell Friends, one of the most prestigious private schools in D.C. Many members of Congress keep their own children out of D.C. public schools; 44 percent of senators and 36 percent of representatives do, and that includes 35 percent of Congressional Black Caucus members, who tend to vote against school choice. Their actions are dictated by what’s good for the National Education Association, not low-income black children. Do you think that’s fair? By the way, teachers at public schools are twice as likely as other parents to send their own children to private schools. That ought to tell us something.Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders scored a West Virginia victory Tuesday, spurring him forward on what he calls an "uphill climb" to the Democratic presidential nomination.
Then again, "We are used to fighting uphill," Sanders said, speaking to a roaring crowd of supporters in Oregon, following his victory Tuesday.
Even as pundits look ahead to a Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump showdown in the general election, Sanders has committed to staying in the race, a stance that was only bolstered by his win in West Virginia Tuesday.
"Let me be as clear as I can be," Sanders told supporters. "We are in this campaign to win the Democratic nomination. We are going to fight for every last vote."
Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump won essentially by default in the West Virginia primary, after both of his remaining competitors dropped out in the wake of his Indiana victory last week.
Check back here for ongoing updates from Patch.
The Associated Press called the race for Sanders at 9:24 p.m., ET. West Virginia polls closed at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Updated: 10:15 p.m.
"I want to take a moment to thank the people of West Virginia for a tremendous victory -- a double-digit victory," Bernie Sanders told supporters in Oregon Tuesday. "This is a state where Hillary Clinton won by over 40 points in 2008."
As of 10:15, Sanders was sitting on a whopping 50.8 percent of the vote to Clinton's 38.3 percent support in the Democratic primary.
Updated: 9:45 p.m.
Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus sought to capitalize on Hillary Clinton's loss West Virginia in a Tweet late Tuesday, while also taking a sideways swipe at Bernie Sanders.
It is nothing short of embarrassing that Hillary Clinton has now been defeated twenty times by a 74-year old socialist from Vermont — Reince Priebus (@Reince) May 11, 2016
Priebus has called for party unity around "presumptive nominee" Donald Trump, although the party's most senior leaders have disregarded that advice.
Meanwhile, Clinton defeated Sanders in Tuesday night's Nebraska primary.
Updated: 8:45 p.m.
The Hill reports Bernie Sanders has declared West Virginia a win, even though the Associated Press and other outlets have yet to officially call the race there Tuesday.
Updated: 8:15 p.m.
Forty-five minutes after polls closed, the state's Democratic contest has yet to be officially called.
Updated: 7 p.m.
A CBS exit poll suggests few West Virginia Republican voters consider their party "united" at the moment, and slightly over half believe it can unite by the November general election. A majority say they'd vote for Trump over Clinton, assuming the two face off in November.
Updated: 6:30 p.m.
Exit polls show favorable demographics for Bernie Sanders, who tends to fare better with white voters and political independents. An ABC exit poll estimates nine in 10 Democratic primary voters in West Virginia are white, and a third of voters in preliminary exit polls identified as independents.
Updated: 6 p.m.
As Bernie Sanders urged voters to hit the primary polls in West Virginia Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden expressed confidence to reporters that Hillary Clinton would be his party's nominee. Sanders' campaign intends to win what states it can between now and his party's nominating contest this summer, despite facing the near impossibility of winning sufficient delegate support outright.
Clinton currently leads Sanders by 283 bound delegates, to say nothing of the 712 so-called "super delegates," many of which have already pledged to support her.
In an email to supporters Tuesday, campaign manager Jeff Weaver indicated Sanders expects wins in West Virginia, Oregon, and Kentucky. The real hurdles will be delegate-heavy California and New Jersey, "where there is so much at stake," as Weaver wrote.
_____________________________
Pre-Election Polling
The latest pre-election polls suggest Sanders has a strong shot at winning in West Virginia, with FiveThirtyEight's weighted polling aggregate giving him a 63 percent chance of victory. The self-identified democratic socialist trails Clinton in the Democratic primary delegate count, but still hopes to wedge in a win where he can up until the party's nominating convention in July.
A West Virginia win would be a small coup, given Clinton's sweeping victory in the state's 2008 primary contest.
Writes Sanders' campaign manager in a call for donations, "Yes, it is still an uphill climb, but if you can say one thing about this election, it's been unpredictable. So we'll continue to fight for every vote, every state, and every delegate. Not just because they're needed to win, but because each victory sends a powerful message to the Democratic Party establishment about our political revolution's demand for transformational change in this country."
In the Republican race, meanwhile, Trump competitors Ted Cruz and John Kasich have cleared the field, guaranteeing West Virginia for the celebrity real estate mogul and presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
As far as Trump is concerned, that means voters here shouldn't bother going to the polls at all.
"What I want you to do is save your vote — you know, you don't have to vote anymore. Save your vote for the general election, okay? Forget this one. The primary is gone," Trump told a 13,000-strong West Virginia crowd, according to New York Magazine.
As the publication observes, Trump "isn't quite nailing this whole [party]'standard-bearer' thing," given the crucial down-ballot judicial races also underway Tuesday in West Virginia. A campaign spokesperson later said Trump did not intend to discourage voter turnout, and his Twitter account has since promoted a "get out the vote" message for West Virginia.
Regardless of Trump's suggestion or the fact the Republican race was essentially decided by his victory in Indiana, that reality won't be fully reflected at the polls.
Early Voting
Early voting has been underway in West Virginia since April 27, and nearly 200,000 submitted their ballots, record-setting early voter participation.
In the first week of early voting alone, the Secretary of State reports, West Virginia saw higher turnout than the 2008 and 2012 early vote totals combined.
>> Photo credit Gage Skidmore, Flickr/Creative CommonsEvery effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation; changes (corrections of spelling and punctuation) made to the original text are marked like this. The original text appears when hovering the cursor over the marked text.
THE CURRY COOK'S ASSISTANT
NOTE ABOUT “CURRIES” IN
“SATURDAY REVIEW,” OCTOBER 22, 1887. Everybody who likes Curry, and who can get it (the pamphlet, not the Curry), should invest in a little pamphlet by “Daniel Santiagoe, son of Francis Daniel, butler and fiddler, of Colombo, Ceylon, and the Ceylon Court, Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Liverpool.” It is written in delightful pigeon-English (or whatever other bird may be more appropriate to Ceylon's isle), is quite unpretentious, avows the author's very legitimate, and, indeed, laudable desire to “make a small fortune” by its sale, and contains admirable receipts. Mr. Santiagoe is much less cynical than the apocryphal Mrs. Glasse. He says, after recommending the more excellent way of the Curry Stone, “The best and easy way is to buy from your respected grocers, which, I should say, ought to be of two colours—one is brown and the other is yellow, and the red is cayenne pepper (if required, hot curries).” He is a little plaintive about mulligatawny. “Why English people always spell this word wrong? Everybody knows this—mollagoo, ‘pepper;’ tanney, ‘water.’” So the reformers who call it “mulligatunny” are just as bad as we devotees of mumpsimus and mulligatawny ourselves. We note with special pleasure a receipt for “chicken moley”—evidently the same genus as that “mollet” which puzzled Mrs. Clarke. And all the prescriptions are interesting. “Maldive fish” seems to take the place of “Bombay duck” in these southern regions, and the number of Vegetable Curries is particularly noteworthy. Nobody need think from the specimens we have given that Mr. Santiagoe is unintelligible. His English may be “pigeon,” but it is a much more easily digestible tongue than the high and mighty gobble-gobble of some of our own professors of style and matter. [True copy from “Saturday Review.”]
THE
CURRY COOK'S ASSISTANT;
OR
CURRIES,
HOW TO MAKE THEM IN ENGLAND
IN THEIR ORIGINAL STYLE.
BY
DANIEL SANTIAGOE, General Servant,
SON OF FRANCIS DANIEL, Butler and Fiddler, Trichinopoly, Madras, India, and Colombo, Ceylon
CEYLON TEA HOUSE WAITER
Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Liverpool, 1887
International Exhibition, Glasgow, 1888
THIRD EDITION
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1, PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1889
(The rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved.)
LIST AND NAMES OF CURRIES, Etc.
INTRODUCTION BY J. L. SHAND, Esq.
Daniel Santiagoe, who has twice come from his Ceylon home to serve me in England and Scotland, now gives to the world a second edition of a very valuable little book, and has asked me to write him an introduction.
An introduction is generally apologetic, but I depart from custom and congratulate the purchasers of this book upon obtaining a collection of recipes which may add much to their gastronomic enjoyment, and perhaps also contribute to health and longevity.
“I do not care for Curry, it is too hot!!!” is a common but erroneous plaint; and the disciple of Santiagoe will find recipes which provide the full delicacy of Eastern condiments without the discomfort of excessive heat.
Why do old East Indians live so long? is a question often asked.
Because so many of them are pensioners, says the student of finance.
Because so many of them are Curry eaters, says the student of hygiene.
All human nature requires to be occasionally stimulated, and a mild Curry acts upon the torpid liver, reacts upon the digestive organs, and provides the necessary stimulant without injurious consequences.
It is a remarkable fact that nearly all Curry-eating nations are abstainers from strong drinks.
Daniel Santiagoe's English may occasionally provoke a smile, but it is “English as she is spoken” by several millions of Her Majesty's subjects, and its originality often lends it force.
Were excuse necessary it would be found in this, that Daniel Santiagoe is a domestic servant to whom English is a foreign tongue.
JOHN LOUDOUN SHAND.
24, Rood Lane, London, E.C.
PREFACE BY AUTHOR.
With much thankfulness to Mr. A. Egmont Hake for his kindness in writing a preface for my first book on Curries, and great credit is due to Saturday Review and humble respect is due to my two masters, Shand, Haldane & Co., of London, who brought me over to England and Scotland, with four other servants, and allowed me to publish a little book to make my desired little fortune, which is highly creditable. From the first edition of 500 copies I fully sold 400, and another hundred copies presented to friends in England and Ceylon. My intention in publishing this second edition is that I have given too little recipes and information in my first book for sixpence each copy. Though I thought it is worth making it an enlarged and revised edition for same price this time, I should like to give good many recipes for making a Curry, and give the names of all Meat and Vegetable in English and Tamil. In each heading of Curries two sorts of ingredients are given—one to be procured in England, the other in Ceylon; and also each Curry will be properly instructed. I have tasted the Curries made by Bengalee, etc., on board of steamers and on shore. They use proper Curry Stuffs, etc., but they flavour it too much; using plenty of ghee and fat mutton, etc.,—these spoil the taste. Just the same with Bombay Curries, but in Madras is the only place you could taste a proper Curry, and also in Ceylon, as a good many cooks of Madras Presidency came to Ceylon several years ago and spread out the art of general cooking in Ceylon. I believe at first the cooking business was instructed by European cooks. At present there is too many cooks in Ceylon; almost every butler, appoo, second servant, kitchen mate, groom, etc., knows to cook a English dinner!!!
Now we shall go on with our Curry business. I recommend to try Curry Powders from several grocers. The best Curry Powder is made of coriander seed (which could be got from the chemist's), saffron, dry chillies, cumin seed, few mustard seed, few pepper corns. If the Curry Powder contains all the above, it is a good Curry Powder. Some Curry Powders tastes of acid, flour, and other mixtures, which I believe is unwholesome in every means. The Tamils use tamarind for the acid taste. To every brown Curries the Singalese use Gorakka[1] (a sour fruit), slightly dried, and lime juice to their yellow Curries. There is much different taste between a Singalese Curry and a Tamil Curry—the taste just differs the same as a Madras beef Curry, No. 4, and a potato Curry (vegetable). The Curries should be treated same as a ordinary entree. If one article you had too much, it will spoil the whole Curry. If the meat over done, no taste in it. If you have all Curry stuffs, etc., at hand, could make a Curry Sauce in ten minutes the longest, and can warm up any meat for table in it (I mean the brown). The white Curry Sauce is not suitable, unless for a vegetable or fish.
I could give several other recipes to Curries, but the above said sixty will be quite sufficient. If you carefully tried the above said Curries will be found most economical.
A Madras woman can beat any other Indian woman in Curry cooking. In several gentry's houses in Madras, etc., they keep a woman to make Curries and prepare vegetables for table—we call her “Thanney Kareyitchi”—besides the cook and kitchen matey.
The Madras Curry always the best, much different than a Bengal or Bombay Curry, to my opinion.
D. SANTIAGOE.
International Exhibition,
Glasgow, 1888.
PREFACE OF MY FIRST EDITION.
By A. Egmont Hake, Esq.
[TRUE COPY.]
The author of this little work has asked me to write him a Preface, and I gladly do so, especially if it will help to find him buyers, as well as readers, who will put into practice the admirable receipts he offers to gourmets and others. For my own part I can speak with some authority—indeed the best—as to the excellence of Santiagoe's Curries, for I am among the fortunate few who have tasted them in England.
I was particularly struck by a remark which Santiagoe made when I asked him what he would like me to write in his little book. Some authors might have replied “Speak up for my Curries!” others might have said, “Say a good word for my book;” but he, in the fulness of gratitude, said, “Praise my Masters.” He then went on to speak of how Mr. Shand and Mr. Haldane had brought him and his fellow-servants all the way from Ceylon to England.
It is only fair to point out that the English of this little book is not “English as she is spoken,” but represents the expression of Santiagoe in its native costume—it is Tamil Anglicised by Santiagoe himself. As Santiagoe says, “I like broken English, because ladies gentlemen like that.” The author is a native of Trichinopoly. His grandfather and uncle were distinguished drummers in Indian infantry regiments—in other words, they were masters of the tom-tom. He has lived all his life in Ceylon,[2] and for the last seven years—that is, since he was sixteen—has been in the service of English residents, of whom he appears to have nothing but pleasant recollections. It would seem that this will be the case in his experience of England, whither he has come with others as waiter at the Ceylon Tea Rooms in the Liverpool Exhibition—though he told me with much modesty that “people were very kind, but he supposed the Ceylon servants were a novelty.”
It is, to say the least, highly creditable to Santiagoe that, with many duties to perform, and these amid the distracting influences of our Western civilization, he should have compiled this useful little guide to the art of Curry cooking. The spirit of Brillat-Savarin and of Soyer is stronger than the ephemeral attractions of an exhibition. Let us hope Santiagoe's enterprise will be more lasting than these; that it will achieve its aim in popularizing Ceylon Curries in this country; and that his “Book on Curries” will pass through many editions, and bring him the “little fortune” he deserves.
(Signed) A. EGMONT HAKE,
Author of “General Gordon's Journal at Khartoum;” Editor of “The Story of Chinese Gordon,” etc., etc.; Commissioner of War Trophies, Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Liverpool, 1887.
COPY OF THE NOTE OF MY FIRST EDITION ON CURRIES.
I beg to bring the following Receipts to Curries, etc. I hope it will be handy to ladies, housekeepers, cooks, etc. I only mention the easy way of making it in England, for scarcity of fresh and pure Curry stuffs none procurable. Still, it is very troublesome to grind the Curry stuffs without a Curry stone, which is very common to a native Cooly of India. No native houses without a Curry stone. The way the native girls, etc., grind the Curry stuffs will be an astonishment to European ladies. The best way to grind the Curry powder in England, by hard stone made mortar or pounder, but the best and easy way is to buy from your respected grocers, which, I should say, ought to be of two colours, one is brown and the other is yellow, and the red is cayenne pepper (if required hot Curries).
With regard to above, if care should be taken and make the Curries with any of the following meat:—Beef, mutton, chicken, fish, etc., etc., and vegetables, you will find it an economical dish for an English meal to have an Indian dish; if little care and attention is given to it, will find it as a relish. The same time I must say, many parties visited our Indian continent will know the taste of a Curry as well as my own experience. I have been instructed by several head cooks of India and Ceylon. My own people are cooks under several respected gentry of Ceylon and India. Now, I must say, it is a national food to natives of India and Ceylon as beef and bread to Europeans. With attention to this I myself am a servant of gentlemen as approved cook, second boy, dressing boy, house and general servant, and will answer to several other capacity, as clerk, store-keeper, etc., etc. I only thought of publishing this little work by request of several parties requiring me to write some good Curries.
So just the same time I may have the chance of printing it and make a small fortune by the favour of customers, and by their favouring me to sell these few hundred copies, will be highly thankful; but I regret to say that I should have written large and more recipes, but my time is very little to spare to attend to this work.
With regards I hope the lovers of Curry will be satisfy with these accompanying recipes, which, I should say can be made in England with Curry stuffs and provisions procurable here. The fact is I myself have tried several of these Curries in England during my short visit in England, and found to be a good result, in fact, not in its original taste, but only second to it in my opinion. If carefully prepared will find it as a economical dish for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Only little time and attention is required. I wish the reader will have the pleasure of reading this book right through first.
Another matter to point out, that in Madras cooks make Curries with or without cocoanut, but in Ceylon no Curries without cocoanut, neither any vegetable Curries without Maldive fish. For this point I have given recipes to make with milk, cream, and gravy; and to every vegetable Curry add a spoonful of chopped ham or corned beef; this for imitation of Maldive fish.[3] Still it is much richer to vegetable Curries than Maldive fish.
D. SANTIAGOE.
Ceylon Court, R.J.E.,
Liverpool, England, 1887.
THE
CURRY COOK'S ASSISTANT.
In England.
1 lb. Coriander Seed.
½ oz. Saffron.
1 Eggspoon Cumin Seed.
½ doz. Pepper Corns.
Small bit of Cinnamon (1 in. square).
8 Dried Chillies Capsicums.
4 Tablespoons good Rice.
In Ceylon.
Coriander.
Saffron and Cumin Seed.
Pepper Corns. Cinnamon.
Dried Chillies—Rice.
Curry Leaves, and few other things of which cannot be procured in England.
N.B.—I only mention this home-made Curry Powder, if you can procure the above said Curry Stuffs separately from the chemists or grocers. As I heard from a gentleman in Liverpool, “Everything the world produces can be bought in London”!!!
Mode.—Place a frying-pan (not an enamelled one) on fire; soon as it gets hot put in the coriander; when nice and gold colour take it off and put on a plate again. Set the frying-pan on fire and add the cumin seed, pepper corns, dry chillies. Just give a shake, and take it off and give it two or three more shakes and put on a plate, but don't put the saffron in the frying-pan. Now wipe the frying-pan, and set on fire again; when hot, put in the rice, and keep on shaking till each grain gets goldish brown; do not let it burn. The rice on board of ships will answer to this better than you buying from your grocer's; but in the scarcity of above any rice will do.
Now when all these are done we shall have to grind it to a smooth powder. These cannot be done unless you have a stone-made pounder or Curry stone and grinder. The latter I have not seen in England, still there is the finest strong metal stones in England. The Curry stone and grinder is bought for no money in up country of Ceylon, but in Colombo, the chief city here, we pay 50 cents, to Rs. 2 50 cts. each. Curry stone and grinder will last for generations. It is better to grind all Curry stuffs separately and keep each in its own bottle, then you will be careful of what you are about, and you will know how much you are using of each stuff.
For any meat Curry (per lb.) add one tablespoon coriander seed, a saltspoon of saffron, a pinch of cumin seed, dash of pepper, small bit of cinnamon, one-half tablespoon of rice powder; if preferred hot, add a bit of cayenne. For white Curries, only one-half teaspoon of saffron to be added. If at hand, just cut a young capsicum in quarters and add to the Curry. You can add a green chillies to Meat Curries also. If the above home made Curry Powder cannot be done, you shall have to buy three sorts of Curry Powder. Coriander, rice, cumin seed, and pepper (one mixture); cayenne and saffron each separately bottled. Other things can be got from your respective grocers. If you buy a mixed Curry Powder or Paste, it will taste everything too much, as following:—Heat! hot? bitter, sour flour, spice, and too much of yellow colour of saffron, and too much of a nice Curry smell. The fact is, I have tasted several Curry Powders and Paste in England, and also in Scotland, but nothing equal to separate Curry stuffs. If the Curry stuffs, etc., are imported from India to Europe it will keep good for a long time, and will have a good market, except the dry chillies, because there is plenty of cayenne in England. Garlic ginger (green), used for any Meat Curry, it is very healthy and helps to digest the Curry and rice sooner, as parties think Curries are not easily digestible. The Curries must not be prepared too rich, as richness takes away all flavour, and the meat will taste like stewed Curry. The butter you add to fry the Curry stuffs will be quite sufficient to richen the Curry without using fat meat.
1 lb. Beef (Fresh or Cooked Meat will do).
1 Tablespoon Curry Powder (not hot).
1 Pint good Milk or strong (Beef) Gravy.
1 Large Onion or few small ones.
1 Young Capsicum and 1 Tablespoon Rice Powder.
Small piece of Cinnamon.
Pinch of Cumin Powder; Salt to taste.
N.B.—In Ceylon we use Cocoanut Milk (the juice), Curry Leaves, and some other Leaves for Spices.
Mode.—Cut the meat in half-inch squares; put into a clean stew-pan, then slice the onions, and add the onions, Curry stuffs, chillies, cinnamon, milk, cumin seed, etc., and salt. Mix all well |
the Amed action, and the war has reached a new phase with this action. Erdal also made important comments on the April 16 referendum and said: “The models Tayyip Erdoğan uses for the referendum are those of Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mobarak.” Erdal pointed out that the Kurds need to act together against colonialism.
“OUR COMRADES ENTERED THEIR LAIR AND STRUCK THEM”
Highlights from Bahoz Erdal’s comments is as follows:
The Amed action was carried out by one of our guerrilla units. It was a well-organized, strongly planned action. It was an answer to the attacks and propaganda by the Turkish army. According to information we have, there are at least 19 dead and more than 34 wounded. Our estimate is that they have more losses. It was a suitable and successful action with good timing.
The comrades dug tunnels underground up to the security directorate building, placed over 2 tonnes of explosives and detonated them with a good timing. Our unit arranged the amount of explosives so the surrounding buildings and the civilian population wouldn’t be harmed. Without a doubt, this is a new style of action. AKP and state spokespeople first wanted to cover it up. They wanted to make the action look like an accident, but such an action cannot be hidden. The action took place in front of the whole city of Amed to see. The people of Amed saw more than a hundred ambulances rush to the action grounds with their own eyes. This is a new style of action. It was an action that voided the narrative voiced by the AKP and state officials that the security systems in outposts and state institutions have been reinforced and they won’t allow for any more actions. The guerrilla’s tactic is like chess. You have 16 pieces in chess, but you can do thousands of moves with them. There are 8 musical notes but you can produce thousands of melodies. The guerrilla’s style of action is similar. However many precautions are taken, the guerrilla will find a way to strike and carry out actions. That is the message of this action. Erdoğan has been saying they “will enter the lairs, end it” but instead, our comrades entered their lair and struck them.
“THE WAR IS AGAINST COLONIALISM”
Currently there is a tough war in the region, but in our country there is a much tougher war. Turkish colonialism is using all their means to terrorize our people with all their might. There is a destructive war in Kurdistan. The Turkish state sees this war as a do-or-die on their part. A war this destructive and extensive will have losses for sure. The Turkish government’s interior minister stated that they carried out more than 300 operations in 10 days. This shows the attacks and the war they are waging. They are waging a war, this war is a matter of survival for colonialism. It is like that for our people as well. Our comrades have fallen martyr in this war for that, they are falling still, they are resisting heroically. In this sense, unfortunately there are losses in the war. But their losses are great as well. So, if we compare it with the past, their losses have increased three, four fold. Because there is a tough war ongoing. And we as the Kurdish people must be prepared for this. This is a freedom or annihilation test for us. This is a war we wage with this awareness, and we know that it is a destructive process. Why? Because there are opportunities for victory, the Kurds can achieve their freedom in the region. Thus colonialism attacks with all its might to prevent it. This is one aspect of the issue. There is a war in this country, and it is a tough one.
“OUR STRENGTH AND OUR CAPABILITY FOR WAR HAS INCREASED”
On the other hand, the Turkish government officials make various comments on the outcome of the war. A short while ago, Erdoğan himself said they “neutralized 10 thousand PKK members in a couple of months”. And they said they will end it before April. This is not true. They speak every day to say we have so and so many losses. If all of these were true, the guerrilla would have been depleted by now. So they are hiding the truth, the statements they give are not true. Now everybody sees the Turkish jet fighters lifting off every day. Such heavy weaponry is used in wars between states. Jet fighters, Cobra helicopters, tanks and other such heavy weaponry are used. If the PKK had fallen weak and was about to end like they said, then why are there so many jet fighters in the air? Not a day goes by that the jet fighters don’t lift off. This shows the strength of the PKK. Contrary to what they say, our strength and our capability for war has increased.
“THE TURKISH ARMY CAN’T FIGHT”
Another point shows how weak the Turkish army is on the ground. The army can’t fight on the ground. Now they only carry out aerial attacks. In the face of that, the guerrilla’s form of action and style of movement is more flexible and can be renewed daily, their tactics can be changed. The statements Turkish officials make on our losses are not only exaggerated, but they actually have no basis in truth. We declare the identity and balance of every martyred comrade, within our means. We let our people and the public know the reality and outcomes of the war. They are the ones who hide their losses. The most recent example for this is the Amed action. More than a hundred ambulances go to the action grounds, but they declare 3 losses.
“THE GUERILLA WILL BE THE NIGHTMARE OF COLONIALISTS”
The Turkish state took this winter as an opportunity and they carried out maybe more operations than any of the winters before. They carried out operations in the North and aerial attacks in South Kurdistan. In response to these, all our forces prepared themselves within a program and now that the spring is here, the guerrilla’s preparations are strong. The Amed action shows the level of preparedness and planning of the guerrilla. This we can say with confidence to all our people, and before all we say it to the Turkish state officials who keep saying they will “end” us every day, as long as there is the policies of denial and annihilation in place in Kurdistan, as long as there is state terror, the guerrilla will be their living nightmare. The PKK will be their nightmare. Contrary to what they say, the PKK is not weakening, it is getting stronger in every aspect with each passing day.Following the positive fan reaction toward the star above our badge for our AFC Champions League win, next season’s Hyundai A-League jersey will feature three stars in total. Along with the current star commemorating Wanderers as Champions of Asia, the additional stars above the badge will represent the two other major milestones of the Club’s history.
The star on the left will be in celebration of our historic Premier’s Plate win in our inaugural season while the star on the right will symbolise our famous 2-1 win over Al-Jazeera in the International Petroleum Investments Company Championship in Abu Dhabi.
The original star will remain in the centre.
CEO John Tsatsimas says that it is important these achievements are sewn into the fabrics of our history.
“These three memories mean the world to us and to have them now etched permanently on the Club’s badge is a fitting tribute.
“It’s a shame we didn’t win the Craig Foster Cup in Lismore back in 2012 or we could have had four stars.”
The three stars will feature on both the home and away kit
UPDATE | Now April 1 has passed we can reveal this was an April Fools Day prank! We will not be having three stars on our badge next season.The tactic had been brutally effective in the past. This was the grim scenario that confronted the shah in 1977 when the Saudis flooded the oil market to rein in Iran’s influence. The 1977 flood was not the sole cause of the Iranian revolution, but it certainly was a factor: The shah’s rule was destabilized just as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini mounted his offensive to replace a pro-Western monarchy with a theocratic state. In that sense, the oil markets fueled the rise of political Islam.
The price of oil also helped end the Cold War. Then, like Russia today, the Communist superpower was a global energy producer heavily reliant on revenues from oil and gas. In 1985-86, the Saudis’ decision to flood the market — which some believe was encouraged by the Reagan administration — led to a collapse in prices that sent the Soviet economy into a tailspin.
“The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to Sept. 13, 1985,” wrote the Russian economist Yegor Gaidar. “On this date Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically.”
Today, in Russia, fully half of government revenue comes from oil and gas. Even if oil returns to $40 a barrel — it twice fell below $30 earlier this year — that depressed price still creates “a dangerous scenario,” according to Mikhail Dmitriev, a former Russian deputy economic minister. Inflation in Russia hit double digits last year; its sovereign wealth fund, which bails out struggling Russian companies, is depleted; and factory closings are fueling labor unrest.
Unhappily for President Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s fiscal crisis has coincided with his military interventions in eastern Ukraine and Syria. If Russia’s economy worsens and Mr. Putin feels cornered, he may look for ways to distract the Russian people with more rally-round-the-flag provocations, as well as induce panic in the oil markets about supplies and gin prices back up.
Future shock has already arrived for oil producers like Venezuela, whose economy has been gutted by lost revenues from oil, which makes up 95 percent of its export earnings. With inflation predicted by the International Monetary Fund to reach 720 percent this year, Venezuela has become a financial zombie state — a harsh reminder of what can happen to countries that rely so heavily on a single unstable commodity price. President Nicolás Maduro is at the mercy of the markets that, every day, nudge his tottering regime nearer the abyss.
Another oil producer, Nigeria, is running out of money, hobbling President Muhammadu Buhari’s campaign against the Islamist Boko Haram insurgents in the northeast. The plunge in oil prices has also shaken Central Asia, where Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have expressed interest in emergency bailouts from the I.M.F. and other lenders.WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) -- In an effort to innovate their brand, fast food chain Taco Bell has announced they will open 300 brand new locations that will serve alcohol.
The locations will not have a drive thru and will be known as 'cantina style' Taco Bell locations. Ironically, 55 to 70 percent of Taco Bell's revenue comes from drive thru orders, according to Food and Wine.
Taco Bell's new franchise is expected to launch by 2022. The company is focusing on urban areas such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Boston and New York. The locations will also have "artwork, open kitchens and digital menu boards."
"One of the cool things happening in America right now is the revitalization of urban areas, and we're seeing millennials moving into downtown areas," Mike Grams, Taco Bell's chief operating officer told Food and Wine.
Alcohol served in the cantina-style Taco Bell will include draft beer, bottled beer, sangrias and twisted mixed drinks.
The company says, "Taco Bell Cantina restaurants will be the first and only Taco Bell restaurants to serve alcohol to customers who are of legal drinking age."
This is not the first time Taco Bell has tried different stunts in an effort to attract millennials. In February, the fast food chain offered patrons $600 weddings in Las Vegas and back in 2016 they opened a club on the Las Vegas Strip.Istanbul the scene of new novel
ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News
Dan Brown’s highly anticipated new thriller “Inferno” was released yesterday. The book has featured on the front pages of many Turkish newspapers as a significant portion of the novel is set in Istanbul. The book has been published in 12 countries.The story begins in Florence and then moves to Sienna. Later on, the novel’s mysterious events lead the characters to Istanbul, where the plot continues to unfold. The hero of the book, Robert Langdon, makes an important discovery in the Hagia Sophia museum. Earlier, two cover designs for the forthcoming book for the U.S. and UK editions had been also revealed, both featuring images of the Italian poet Dante. Brown was reportedly inspired by Dante’s epic poem “Inferno,” which was written in the 14th century.“Inferno” features the return of renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, and centers on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces.In his international blockbusters “The Da Vinci Code,” “Angels & Demons,” and “The Lost Symbol,” Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date.Brown released the book’s title on his website on January 15, 2013, after prompting readers to help reveal a digital mosaic using social media posts, and revealed the cover in late February of 2013. The cover depicts the famous Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore located in Florence, Italy. He also published a sneak preview of Inferno along with a free ebook of The Da Vinci Code on March 17. The ebook was distributed to readers worldwide through online e-book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble for free till March 24, 2013.Inferno has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Norwegian and Danish for simultaneous release. The publishers hired a team of 11 translators who worked on the project at the headquarters of Mondadori in Milan between February and April 2012. They were reportedly sequestered in a basement, and worked intensively under strict security and secrecy.UPDATE (Aug. 4) - Bruce and Judy Rubin laid the first brick in the Blues Hall of Fame Plaza on Tuesday morning.
ST. LOUIS - For years, the statues of Al MacInnis Bernie Federko and Brett Hull have had the corner of 14th and Clark Avenue all to themselves.
That’s about to change.
By late August, the Blues legends will be joined by more than 3,000 commemorative bricks engraved with messages, memories and the names of some of the Blues’ most dedicated fans.
Construction on the new Blues Hall of Fame Plaza began July 15. The project is expected to be completed by late August. Construction on the new Blues Hall of Fame Plaza began July 15. The project is expected to be completed by late August.
“The St. Louis fan base is, I think, one of the most passionate fan bases in all of the National Hockey League,” said Steve Chapman, the Blues’ Group VP of Brand, Community and Partnership Development. “Their passion for the Blues and their love for the city of St. Louis itself - it’s unrivaled around the nation. The Blues Hall of Fame Plaza honors and represents that passion.
“I think it’s a great tribute to the fans of the Blues.”
Construction is officially underway on the project, which began in November 2014 when bricks first went on sale at stlouisblues.com. Bricks started as low as $165 and all fans that purchased also received a replica brick.
Sales ended in May.
Clayco workers began construction Tuesday and expect to wrap up by late August. The official unveiling will be held later this summer.
Chapman said he’s looking forward to seeing the finished result.
“I think it must be quite an honor for any fan to come and see their name immortalized next to the Blues all-time greats,” he said. “I envision generations of fans coming and seeing their names as they enter the building to watch the Blues play, and what a cool feeling that must be.”
Fans who purchased bricks can share the story behind their engraving by uploading a photo or video by clicking here. Winning entries will be selected to receive tickets to a game, a visit to the Blues Alumni Suite or a VIP Experience for the unveiling ceremony.
Check back throughout the next month for updates on the construction progress and more details on the unveiling.Posted in News
Speeches by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali-Akbar Salehi this week have confirmed the cautious approach Iran is taking to responding to allegations by the United States that Iran masterminded a plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador in Washington. While Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has used harsh rhetoric to deny the US accusations, the Iranian government’s response overall has been measured and relatively moderate, with a consistent denial of any involvement in the plot and an emphasis on diplomacy to resolve the brewing crisis.
During a Sunday morning meeting with a student organization this week, Ahmadinejad gave his first official statement on the allegations, stating that:
“They [the US] attempt to create an atmosphere against Iran every day, and at this stage they accuse Iran of terrorism, but they must be made to understand that terrorism is the work of uncultured people who want to force their authority on the world.”
Emphasizing Iran’s great culture and civilization, he denied that the Iranian government could be involved with terrorism.
In a meeting held yesterday at the Iran Chamber of Commerce with representatives of the private sector, Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi spelled out one of Iran’s major fears about the consequences of an escalation of the current crisis:
“We are presently in the worst of these threats and sanctions, which have existed for years, meaning that in these 32 years [of our existence] we have never been under such political and economic pressure. This is a big challenge, and we must see how we can use this challenge as an opportunity.”
In another speech today to a gathering of ambassadors and heads of international organizations in Tehran, Salehi talked about Iran’s role as a founding member of the UN, and its role in peace-making in a wide-range of conflicts in the region. He stated that:
“The Islamic Republic of Iran, as a responsible government, and based on the fundamental [principles] of its foreign policy, has always placed international and regional stability at the top of its priorities.”
Portraying Iran as one of the main victims of terrorism and declaring terrorism to be against Islamic principles, Salehi appeared to be trying to send the Saudis a positive signal:
“The declared and enduring strategy of the Islamic Republic of Iran toward its neighbours, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has been based on peace, brotherhood, multifaceted cooperation and the preservation and strengthening of security in the sensitive region of the Middle East and Persian Gulf, and we emphasize the continuity of this strategy.”
Expressing “surprise” at the “baseless” accusations made by the US, Salehi attempted to undermine the US claims by questioning what Iran’s motivation could be and the case made by the Americans:
“In confronting this plot/illusion, the first logical question will be which country will profit from this. The second question is what are the legal documents to back these accusations and why has the accusing country not given us consular access to the accused [Mansour Arbabsiar] despite two official requests from us…instead of pursuing the matter through diplomatic channels, why has this directly become a media matter? Perhaps the true intentions [of the US] can be found in the following declarations of American officials, [which include] the threat of the intensification of sanctions, allusion to the military option, etc.”
Claiming that the US allegations were merely a pretext to reverse its declining fortunes by undermining Iran, Salehi said that there were three main goals to what he called this “evil” plot. These included creating problems in Iran’s relations with its Arab neighbours, strengthening the coalition of Arab countries who seek to impose “illegal sanctions” on Iran, and aiding the US to regain its lost place in the strategic region of the Middle East.
Salehi concluded by warning about the dangers to international peace posed by the American claims and called on countries not to make hasty decisions in regard to the matter.
“From our point of view, the thing the international community must focus on is the threatening and weakening of the international order, peace and security through the declaration of such baseless and unproven accusations…we advise all friendly, peace-loving and independent countries to take a responsible approach to this issue and to refrain from taking hasty positions, preventing the creation of a false crisis in the direction of the weakening of international and regional peace and stability.”
Editor’s note: As pointed out recently, the Iranian political establishment has wholesale rejected US claims about an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Ahmadinejad and Salehi’s statements this week only put further emphasis on the fact that the goals of the alleged plot are highly unpopular among the Iranian political elite, with condemnation of it coming from across the political spectrum.
The president and foreign minister’s comments also show Iran’s very active and defensive diplomacy in trying to contain the fallout from this crisis. Furthermore, Salehi’s speech shows that Iran is reaching out to Saudi Arabia in public, and possibly attempting to make arrangements behind-the-scenes through regional intermediaries like Qatar.PORT Adelaide's impact on Team China in the 2014 AFL International Cup has started reaping dividends, with a new team adopting the club's nickname for the latest Australian Football season in Guangdong province.The Zhujiang (or Pearl River) team - known as the Power - ran out for its first two games and prevailed by nine points over the Guangzhou Scorpions in the final game of the opening round, an impressive result after dropping the first game to the league leading Guangzhou Sports University Seagulls earlier in the day.Other groups competing in the five-team league include the Huizhou Hawks and Dongguan Giants.Port Adelaide was the primary sponsor for the Chinese National team in the recent IC14 competition played between national teams from around the world in Melbourne.The team also marched in force at the Power's Round 20 game against Sydney at the Adelaide Oval.Port Adelaide recently established a formal partnership with the Hong Kong Australia Business Association (HKABA) and recently won a special commendation at the HKABA awards night for the its contribution to arts, culture and tourism.Viagra pill for women: 'Impressive' trials mean that it could go on sale in three years
Lybrido, currently on trial, is a new drug created to arouse women
Drug claims to encourage higher sex drive and ability to reach orgasm
Women could soon be able to buy their own version of Viagra.
The pill, called Lybrido, is said to increase a woman’s desire for sex, and make it more satisfying when it happens.
It uses a combination of testosterone and a Viagra-like drug, which work on both the brain and body to boost flagging libido.
Libido: Previous attempts to make 'female viagra' have failed because women's low sex drive often stems from psychological factors
With trial results described as ‘very impressive’, it could be on bedside cabinets within three years.
But experts warned that the firms which make it will be under pressure to prove that the drug will not turn women into nymphomaniacs.
With worldwide sales of Viagra at nearly £1.5billion a year, scientists have long tried to create a version for the female market.
But previous attempts have failed to make the grade, because low female libido often stems from psychological as much as physical factors.
Dutch firm Emotional Brain believes it has cracked the problem with a two-in-one pill, which should be taken three and a half hours before sex.
Smaller than an aspirin, it contains a Viagra-like drug in a testosterone and mint coating. Separately, neither drug can lift flagging female libido but, together, they are said to provide the necessary boost.
Male version: Worldwide sales of Viagra at nearly £1.5billion a year, but there is not yet a female equivalent
The physical effect of Viagra magnifies the effect of testosterone on the brain’s pleasure centres.
A trial involving more than 200 women in the US has just finished. The full results are still under wraps but Emotional Brain founder Adriaan Tuiten describes them as ‘very, very promising’. Dr Tuiten began researching female emotion after a girlfriend broke his heart when he was in his 20s.
He said that with the drug, women made love more often and were more likely to reach orgasm. But some suffered side-effects including headaches and flushing of the face or neck.
He now plans to carry out a larger trial, and hopes to put the drug on the market in Europe and the US at the end of 2016.
Dr Tuiten believes the pills will be most popular with long-married women, for whom sex may have become a bore.
But some doctors have warned the pills may be a little too much in demand.
Dr Andrew Goldstein, a US expert in female sexual health, told the New York Times that drug companies such as Emotional Brain will be under pressure to prove they are not turning women into nymphomaniacs.
Some experts fear Lybrido will put women under pressure to perform, while others are sceptical about whether the pills can boost female sex drive. They point out that a tablet is not going to fix a broken relationship or ease the stresses of work and childcare.
Dr Tuiten says that up to 43 per cent of women suffer from a low sex drive at some point in their lives and that, far from turning women into sex maniacs, the drug will simply raise a low libido to normal levels.“WHAT would you do if your income were taken care of?”
The often-dreamt of prospect is being posed as a serious question to people in Switzerland this weekend, with the country set to vote on a universal basic income scheme that could see every citizen paid a wage by default.
The monthly payment — undecided as yet but slated to be around 2500 Swiss Francs or $3500 — would be paid to every citizen, for their whole life, no matter where they live.
Those with a job could still work but would have the monthly income deducted from their salary.
Basic Income Switzerland campaigners say the money is simply a human right and would bring people's income in line with the cost of living.
Instead, salaries would become a “symbol of appreciation” and people would be free to choose what they wanted to do rather than the drudgery they were forced to in order to pay the bills.
The group claims it would encourage innovation as there would be more demand for technology to do the “dirty work” in life. Authorities would save money the ease of making a standard payment rather than a complex myriad of subsidies.
“The basic income strengthens the trend to automate such tasks. It creates the possibility for innovation,” the campaign claims.
“It gives time for reflection and creates possibilities for experiences we cannot pay for.”
The controversial idea is almost certainly doomed to fail on Sunday when Swiss voters take to the polls on various issues as part of the country’s unique direct democracy system where campaigns that gain more than 100,000 signatures are put to voters.
Polls show more than 70 per cent of people including those in government and positions of authority are opposed to the idea which has been slammed as a “Marxist dream” that would see people quitting their jobs and living off the state in an unsustainable and expensive policy.
But for Che Wagner, the official spokesman of the campaign, this weekend’s vote is simply a first step in a process of raising awareness.
“It’s a long process,” he told news.com.au. “This is the first round but we’re really surprised how well it has gone....All the bigger political projects in the past have been declined once or twice.”
He said anything more than 20 to 25 per cent support for the idea would be “sensational”.
“Within seven to 15 years the basic income will be a reality here in Switzerland.”
Supporters have raised awareness by unveiling enormous banners across Geneva and Berlin posing the question: “What would you do if your income were taken care of?”
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varofakis has also leant his support saying “think of basic income as a foundation, not a net. A floor on which to stand solidly and to be able to reach for the sky.”
But critics say it would lead to economic collapse as people quit their jobs and living costs rose to absorb the free money on offer.
Geneva Graduate Institute economics professor Charles Wyplosz told AFP: “If you pay people to do nothing, they will do nothing.”
The amount of the payment is not up for debate on Sunday, but authorities estimate the 25 billion francs needed to cover the amount of payment proposed would require huge spending cuts in what is already one of the world’s most expensive places to live.
For Mr Wagner, Sunday’s vote will mark the beginning of the next stage of a campaign that has already gained huge traction on social media.
“In the next two years the discussion goes on and we’re going to start collecting signatures again. I really think the basic income is a matter of time,” he said.
“Sooner or later it will break through.”
Fifty-five year old nurse Pascale Eberle said she would vote in favour to give her children and grandchildren a “different kind of life” but would continue to work regardless.
“I like my job, but I would work less and do other things on the side,” she told AFP.
The concept of universal income is gaining ground across Europe as technological advancements make some jobs obsolete. Finland and the Netherlands have pilot programs in the works and a recent poll found that nearly 70 per cent of people across member states would support the idea, The Guardian reports.
Sunday’s vote will also see Swiss citizens judge a plan to speed up the country’s asylum process, and decide whether to allow genetic screening of embryos.
— With AFPMoobutt Profile Joined May 2011 United States 1398 Posts #2 Thanks for the recap! I missed the Black interview
Are you still allowed to use Fluff's likeness to advertise for TL? Genuine question, I don't want anyone getting in trouble. 3/22/16 The Day EG Died
Omigawa Profile Joined August 2010 United States 743 Posts #3 I missed these, thanks for bringing it back!
KristofferAG Profile Joined April 2011 Norway 6432 Posts #4 I was looking for something like this just a couple of days ago. Thanks for taking the time! Liquipedia @KristofferAG | http://vestkyststoy.bandcamp.com | last.fm/user/KristofferAG
TheEmulator Profile Joined July 2010 PrairieLand 12756 Posts #5 Thanks Tephus Administrator ~_~
Caladbolg Profile Joined March 2011 1488 Posts Last Edited: 2014-04-01 06:26:27 #6 Woo! Thanks for this. Hopefully next time there'll be more games for the week. There were some crazy games from Korea and China just last week.
PS: That Black^ interview was one of the best I've read on Dota. Major props for that. Chinese fans are better than us at 20-20s. "I don't like the word prodigy at all. To me prodigy sounds like a person who was 'gifted' all these things rather than a person who earned all these talents by hard training... I must train harder to reach my goal." - Flash
heaveshade Profile Joined March 2011 China 13 Posts #7 well, did we really have SL EU semi-final last night, i didn't catch it.
TheEmulator Profile Joined July 2010 PrairieLand 12756 Posts #8 Naw, SL EU isn't even in playoffs yet. Must have been a typo. Administrator ~_~
GohgamX Profile Joined April 2011 Canada 36 Posts #9 Great job Typhus! Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils...
Mizerr Profile Joined April 2014 United States 4 Posts Last Edited: 2014-04-01 14:59:51 #10 Thanks Typhus
konadora Profile Joined February 2009 Singapore 15492 Posts #11 holy shit that rubick ink artwork <3 <3 <3 POGGERSExpress News Service By
CHENNAI:A city-based environment activist has moved the Southern Bench of National Green Tribunal challenging the environmental clearance accorded to the construction of India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) at Bodi hills in Theni district,
In his petition, G Sundarrajan of Poovulagin Nanbargal, stated that the INO project was a proposal to construct an underground laboratory to hold experiments at the cutting-edge of neutrino physics. The immediate goal of the project is the creation of the laboratory as well as building a large magnetised iron calorimeter detector to study naturally-produced neutrinos in Earth’s atmosphere.
He said the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), one of the participating institutes in the project, issued a press release on January 1, 2015, informing the public that the Ministry of Environment and Forest had given approval to the setting up of the observatory at an estimated cost of Rs 1,500 crore. Only after the issuance of the press release did the public come to know of the clearance given to the project based on an Environment Impact Assessment (EIA). Sundarrajan alleged that authorities failed to publish information about the Environment Clearance in the media within 10 days from the date of issuance as has been mandated by law.
The Central government said the INO is a mega science project under the 12th Plan. The INO is to be located in Tamil Nadu, as the steep slopes of the Western Ghats provide ideal and stable rock conditions for building a large underground cavern for long term use. The members of INO admitted that the laboratory is to be located in an ecologically sensitive environment and are hopeful that during its normal operation phase, the laboratory is not expected to cause any damage to the environment, he added.
Further, Sundarrajan alleged that about six lakh tonnes of rocks are to be extracted for the purpose of the project but there is no detailed study regarding the impact of blasting of large quantity of rocks on the aquifer, the rivers and the reservoirs in the Environment Impact Assessment. He contended that in some instances, it is extremely difficult or impracticable to restore the original hydrodynamic equilibrium of hills, and the tunnel construction can alter water supply for drinking, irrigation and industrial uses, with major economic and social repercussions on wide neighbouring areas.WASHINGTON — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will publish a notice in the Federal Register Friday that extends employment authorization eligibility for certain F-1 Syrian students who have suffered severe economic hardship as a direct result of the civil unrest in Syria since March 2011. Through the new notice, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary suspends certain regulatory requirements in order to allow eligible Syrian F-1 students to obtain employment authorization, work an increased number of hours during the school term, and, if necessary, reduce their course load while continuing to maintain their F-1 student status.
The new notice expands the pool of students eligible for this relief to include nonimmigrant students from Syria who are lawfully present in the United States in F-1 status on Sept. 9, 2016, and enrolled in an institution certified by ICE's Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). The previous notice only granted relief to nonimmigrant students from Syria who were lawfully present in the United States in F-1 status on April 3, 2012, and enrolled in an SEVP-certified institution.
"We want to ensure that qualifying students from Syria are able to continue their studies without the worry of financial burdens," said Louis Farrell, SEVP director. "The changes announced in this notice expand the pool of eligible students."
There has been ongoing civil unrest in Syria since March 2011. Nearly 750 Syrian F-1 students are currently enrolled in schools in the United States. The civil unrest in Syria has increased the financial burden on many of these students, who previously relied on assistance from the Syrian government or family members in Syria to meet basic living expenses. In addition, the situation in Syria has made it unfeasible for these students to safely return to Syria in the foreseeable future.
ICE manages the Student and Exchange Visitor Program and the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, which automates the process for collecting, maintaining, and managing information about international foreign students, exchange visitors and their dependents during their stay in the United States.
Learn more about the Student and Exchange Visitor Program →Believe it or not, Sharp is one of the more interesting smartphone OEMs out there right now. The company doesn't do much business in America, but it is one of the top suppliers of LCDs to companies like Apple. And in Japan, the company has been using its display expertise to churn out unique-looking devices with ultra-thin bezels.
Sharp recently released a phone in America for the first time in four years when it brought the Aquos Crystal to Sprint. We reviewed it and found the design to be a breath of fresh air, but we were a little bummed about the mid-range spec sheet—it only had a 720p screen and a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 400 SoC. Late in December, Sharp said it heard the calls for a high-end version, and the company announced the Aquos Crystal X.
The Aquos Crystal X takes the beautiful design of the Aquos Crystal and applies it to a high-end phone. The Crystal X is bigger—packing a 5.5-inch, 1080p LCD (The Crystal only had a 5-inch display)—and it's faster too. It has a 2.3GHz Snapdragon 801, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, 2610mAh battery, and 13MP rear and 2.1MP front cameras.
It's the thin bezels and size that are the real selling point here. The Crystal X packs all that into a 139 × 73 × 11mm frame, making it the most compact 5.5-inch smartphone out there. Compare those measurements to other 5.5-inch devices like the iPhone 6 Plus at 158.1 × 77.8 × 7.1 mm or the LG G3 at 146.3 × 74.6 × 8.9 mm.
At CES, we had a chance to take a look at a prototype of the Crystal X. Our review unit had a few minor paint blemishes, but we were warned that this one would be a lot rougher. Fit and finish will be improved in the consumer version.
Ron Amadeo
Ron Amadeo
Ron Amadeo
Ron Amadeo
Ron Amadeo
Ron Amadeo
Ron Amadeo
If you've played with a regular Aquos Crystal, there isn't much to say—the Crystal X is bigger and faster. The back is now covered in diagonal lines, which looks like a woven pattern, and it's a little more rubbery than the mid-range Crystal. Overall, |
ally, brought up the child tax credit during a leadership meeting Monday night, suggesting ways Democrats might be able to work with Republicans on a bipartisan compromise.
But Pelosi shot down the idea and moved on, according to three sources who were present, saying the focus is on defeating Republicans. DeLauro later disputed that account, saying she’s in agreement — and has been — with Pelosi on tax reform.
“I was not making any other suggestion, other than saying [it’s a] bad bill,” DeLauro said in an interview. “If we have the opportunity to have a back-and-forth... about what should go into a tax proposal, I will come at it from the child tax credit perspective.”
Supporters of expanding the child tax credit see it as a stumbling block because doubling the credit and making it refundable has a steep price tag. Democratic leaders know this, so they’re not likely to want to give Republicans any help, said one child tax credit advocate.
Child tax credit aside, there's a gulf between the parties over who would benefit from a tax code rewrite.
“If you start from the premise that the current tax code is anachronistic, then I think that we should be trying to figure out — Democrats and Republicans — how to do this, and it ought not tilt to the top,” said Neal, who also backs an expanded child tax credit.
He’s expressed frustration with the scant detail offered from Republicans about how middle- and lower-income taxpayers would be affected. The deficit is another big concern.
The GOP's tax push will be another test of Pelosi's grip on the Democratic Caucus. House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas), a point person on the issue, has met with several moderate Democrats in recent weeks, and Republican leaders hoping to pick up some minority member votes on the House floor.
Pelosi is known for her ability to keep her caucus united and was able to lean on those skills during the Obamacare repeal debate. She discouraged Democrats from introducing health care alternatives to keep the spotlight on Republican stumbles.
But the politics of tax reform are different. GOP lawmakers believe their bill benefits Democratic constituencies just as much as Republican divisions.
Republicans are daring Democrats to go against their leadership because the economics will be hard for them to ignore, said Rep. Mike Bishop (R-Mich.), who nonetheless acknowledged Pelosi’s “stranglehold” on her caucus.
But Democrats argue that Republicans will pay a price for their partisan tax push if it fails.
“To my Republican colleagues, you will reap what you sow in tax reform,” said Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.), a member of leadership who sits on the Ways and Means panel.Human rights group Privacy International has launched a way to allow anyone in the world to find out whether UK intelligence agency GCHQ illegally spied on them.
The organization, along with Bytes for All, Liberty and Amnesty International, recently brought a case to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). The body ruled GCHQ had unlawfully obtained millions of private communications from the NSA.
Privacy International’s new campaign is a direct result of that ruling. The platform will allow anyone in the world, not just British citizens, to ask GCHQ if their records were unlawfully shared by the NSA.
To take part, you simply have to submit your details here. Privacy International will then collate the inquiries it receives and submit them to the IPT, requesting that the records, including emails and data on phone calls and internet communications be deleted.
By submitting the request through Privacy International, you will be asserting your rights under the European Convention for Human Rights Article 8 (‘right to respect for personal and family life’) and Article 10 (‘right to freedom of expression and information’).
Eric King, Deputy Director of Privacy International, says:
“The public have a right to know if they were illegally spied on, and GCHQ must come clean on whose records they hold that they should never have had in the first place. There are few chances that people have to directly challenge the seemingly unrestrained surveillance state, but individuals now have a historic opportunity finally hold GCHQ accountable for their unlawful actions.”
If you’ve got more queries on what will happen if you submit your details, the group has put together an FAQ. Of course, it’s a little ironic to have to share your details to then find out if you’ve been spied on…
➤ Illegal Spying [Privacy International]
Read next: This talking dinosaur has a brain powered by IBM's Watson supercomputerDear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
As the noose continues to tighten around Mosul, leaked documents belonging to Islamic State show the makeup of the group’s fighting force.
The documents, originating in Northern Syria, were shown to The Jerusalem Post by Aymenn al-Tamimi, a fellow at the US-based Middle East Forum who is currently located on the Syrian border.
It’s the first-ever inside account of an ISIS fighting unit to be made public.Broadly, Islamic State’s military structure is broken down into three parts: farqa (division), liwa (brigade) and katiba (battalion).The chart seen by the Post outlines the structure of a brigade, with each brigade consisting of four battalions. The brigade is headed by an emir (commander), who has two deputy emirs, an administration official and a shura (consultative) council.In addition, each ISIS brigade has two administrative divisions: office administration and field administration.Tamimi, a Syria researcher who collects and analyzes leaked ISIS documents, explaining the different responsibilities of the divisions, said, “For example, within the office administration is a division responsible for food provision and cooking, consisting of 10 people. While in the field administration, there are seven people responsible for media.”Another aspect covered by the administrative division of a brigade is that of the “affairs of the mujihadin [insurgents].”One document showed the bureaucratic aspects of Islamic State’s military makeup from a brigade in Aleppo province.“What the brother needs: Wardrobe of five doors, double bed, sofa couch set,” the document read, signed by “Liwa al-Furqan, affairs of the mujahideen, admin official of the katiba”.While it is unclear how many fighters are in each brigade or battalion, Tamimi said that “these documents are important in showing the sophisticated bureaucratic structure of IS units and how, since the caliphate was announced, the portrait is like that of a conventional army.”Islamic State swept across large regions of Syria and Iraq in 2013, with thousands of fighters from all across the globe. Three years later, they are fighting on several fronts, facing a coalition lead by the United States, as well as the Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish armies.ISIS tends to portray itself as strong, with a large and capable fighting force. But with several successful offensives chipping away at their territory, the group continues to lose fighters and has increasingly been sending child soldiers to the frontlines to partake in operations or to carry out suicide bombings.Other documents obtained by Tamimi show that the group has used women as suicide bombers, going against the accepted view that the jihadist group does not allow women to carry out martyrdom operations.In Mosul, ISIS is believed to be outnumbered by some 100,000 strong coalition soldiers, and as Iraqi and Kurdish troops continue to fight their way into the city, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that the offensive to oust Islamic State from the Syrian city of Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital, will begin shortly, with preparations already under way.That would stretch the group’s military resources even further, and according to Tamimi, “If Islamic State loses in both Mosul and Raqqa, this kind of structure may disintegrate.”Another document exposed dissent within the group.Tamimi said one dissenter, named Abu al-Faruq al-Masri, has “access to the highest-ranking personnel in the group, who appears to have presented advice on strategy to the Majlis al-Shura [consultation council] of the Islamic State, which directly advises Baghdadi.”According to the documents found by Tamimi, al-Masri was arrested by the group. While it is unclear for what exact reason he was arrested, Tamimi said that the documents show that al-Masri was critical of the group’s decision to “take on the world.”“It effectively dooms the Islamic State project in its infancy,” he added. “Consequently, the group is needlessly losing soldiers in battles.”
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Nearly everyone who knows him seems to agree that Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General and the official overseeing the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of links between the Trump campaign and Russia, has a reputation for integrity.
“Rod is a prosecutor, not a persecutor,” Jim Trusty, the former head of the Justice Department’s organized-crime division, who worked with Rosenstein when they were prosecutors in Maryland, said. “Whatever he ends up doing, it ain’t going to be a witch trial. He’s going to go where evidence takes him.”
A former senior Justice Department official in the Obama Administration told me, “Rod’s reputation, which he’s earned, is that he does things by the book.”
Rosenstein, who went to Wharton, like the President, and Harvard Law School, where he was the editor of the Law Review, was the longest-serving U.S. Attorney in the country when he was confirmed by the Senate, in April, as the No. 2 official at the Justice Department. It is rare for a U.S. Attorney to survive in his job when a White House changes parties. President Trump, for example, recently fired all the remaining Obama holdovers. But Rosenstein, who was appointed by George W. Bush, in 2005, to be a U.S. Attorney in Maryland, was kept in his post through Barack Obama’s entire Presidency. He had earned the support of Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat who was then the state’s senior senator, who by tradition Presidents often defer to. “Rod has proven to be an objective prosecutor for many years, and that’s why Democrats have let him stay in that position,” Trusty told me.
Despite the Democratic hostility that most Trump nominees attract, the Senate confirmed Rosenstein as Deputy Attorney General by a vote of ninety-four to six. But Rosenstein, somewhat like James Comey, the F.B.I. director whom he helped oust, suddenly finds himself in the unusual position of attracting the ire of both Democrats and Trump.
On Friday morning, in an astounding tweet whose intent many Justice Department watchers and friends of Rosenstein are trying to discern, the President of the United States attacked his own Deputy Attorney General.
“I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!” Trump tweeted at 9:07 A.M. “Witch Hunt.”
Rosenstein’s reputation for integrity began to fray in early May, when he made a fateful decision to share with the President and Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, his honest thoughts about Comey. At a meeting in the White House that neither Sessions nor Rosenstein has publicly described in full, Trump reportedly asked Rosenstein to write a memo explaining the case for removing Comey as F.B.I. director. According to senators, Rosenstein later testified in a closed-door briefing that he knew before he wrote the memo that Trump would fire Comey.
The “FBI’s reputation and credibility have suffered substantial damage, and it has affected the entire Department of Justice,” Rosenstein wrote, explaining that Comey was wrong to “usurp the authority” of the Attorney General in the Hillary Clinton e-mail case. “As you and I have discussed, however, I cannot defend the Director's handling of the conclusion of the investigation of Secretary Clinton's emails, and I do not understand his refusal to accept the nearly universal judgment that he was mistaken.”
To Rosenstein’s friends and defenders, the content of the memo was not controversial. “A lot of prosecutors, whatever their political stripes, said Rod is right about the role of an investigator versus a prosecutor,” Trusty said. “Nobody should be getting up the way Comey did and saying, ‘Here are a bunch of offenses, but we’re not going to prosecute.’ ”
Trump immediately fired Comey and released the Rosenstein memo to the public to explain his decision. Democrats and many lawyers in Washington who had a high opinion of Rosenstein were shocked that he allowed himself to be used by Trump and Sessions in such a blatant scheme to oust the person investigating the President’s own campaign. Senator Chuck Schumer wrote to Rosenstein warning that the Deputy Attorney General had “imperiled” his reputation as an “apolitical actor.”
“The content of that memo is totally in keeping with Rod,” the former Obama official said. “He’s a by-the-book guy, and he was deeply offended by how Comey broke the rules. The thing I don’t understand is how Rod let himself get played like that.”
The fallout from Rosenstein’s Comey memo may have been the result of a clash between the two men’s distinguishing characteristics: Comey’s zealous self-regard for his own independence and Rosenstein’s adherence to the letter of the law and Justice Department guidelines. Rosenstein may have genuinely believed that he was correcting an egregious harm to the Justice Department committed by Comey, one that still offended many lawyers there.
And Comey may have made his own mistake. Before Comey was fired, he apparently never went to Rosenstein and explained the steps that Trump had taken to try to shut down the investigation of Michael Flynn. If Comey had, Rosenstein would have known that Trump was taking actions that looked a lot like obstruction of justice. “If Comey had gone to Rod, he would never have written that memo,” the Obama official said. “Those alarm bells should have gone off for Rod anyway, but Comey, by keeping it so close and feeling he’s not accountable to anyone, made it easier for Rod.”
But Trump and Sessions’s ploy backfired. Some observers suggested that Rosenstein felt used and betrayed by the President and Sessions. Whether Rosenstein was trying to correct a mistake or not, his actions since Comey’s firing have been widely commended. When he appointed Mueller as special counsel to oversee the investigation, Rosenstein’s statement announcing the decision was scrupulously fair to Mueller, the President, and Trump-campaign associates. “My decision is not a finding that crimes have been committed or that any prosecution is warranted. I have made no such determination,” he wrote. “What I have determined is that based upon the unique circumstances the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command.”
In testimony this week, when rumors were spreading that Trump wanted to fire Mueller, Rosenstein, to whom Mueller reports, made it clear that he would not carry out Trump’s order to remove Mueller unless, as Justice Department guidelines say, there was “just cause.”
While Rosenstein has said that he has “no reservations about my role” in firing Comey, his actions to safeguard the independence of the investigation and publicly warn Trump that he would not obey an order to fire Mueller may have triggered Trump’s wrath on Friday morning. Ironically, Trump is now alluding to the fact that Rosenstein was—wittingly or not—a part of the plot to get rid of Comey. Trump may be seizing on that fact as a way to push Rosenstein into recusing himself from the Russia investigation. (Rosenstein has reportedly already raised the issue of recusal internally, at the Justice Department.)
It is classic Trump: he ensnared Rosenstein in a scheme to get rid of Comey. Now that Rosenstein has tried to correct his error and insulate the investigation from further meddling, Trump is using Rosenstein’s role in the scheme to try to push him aside. (If this sounds like a plot from “The Sopranos,” it’s because there were, in fact, several episodes like this.)
Rosenstein may have only himself to blame if he is sidelined from the investigation by recusal. Despite his mistakes, he is probably the best guarantor of a fair inquiry. (The next person in line, Rachel Lee Brand, the Associate Attorney General, has a background in Republican politics and little experience in criminal or national-security cases.) If Rosenstein is forced to recuse himself, whoever comes after him as Mueller’s overseer will know that Trump is hoping that he or she will be more pliable.Or in the case of Rolls-Royce's new $700,000 baby limousine, the Ghost, it could be a watch or piece of jewellery, according to Rolls-Royce director of sales and marketing Graeme Grieve. He says the car, due early next year, will attract new buyers, with 85 per cent of prospects new to the brand. "(A car like this) is pocket change," Mr Grieve says. "Most of our customers will have something on their wrist that's more expensive than this. This is literally like you or me buying a digital camera." Australian Rolls-Royce general manager Bevin Clayton expects to sell 14 new Rolls-Royces this year, despite a base model price rise from $915,000 to $1,075,000 (plus on-road costs) in response to the poor exchange rate and recent increase in luxury car tax. As for next year, "we've got 18 firm expressions of interest" for the Ghost, he says.
"There are another 72 people who have an expression of interest but want to see it, feel it and touch it and see what the price is." Mr Purves says Rolls-Royce is in the process of a significant model expansion. "In 2008 we were benefiting from product investment and new product," he says. "We've also benefited from having a long order book." He acknowledges the order book has shortened and that "2009 is fraught with challenges for everyone in the (automotive) industry". However, that hasn't stopped the brand from predicting up to a threefold increase in sales in 2010.
"Our business is still very strong," Mr Grieve says. "We grew 20 per cent last year and are pretty much stable year-on-year at the moment." Much of it comes down to the super-wealthy Rolls-Royce customers, most of whom own four or five cars and are willing to take risks. "The great advantage with us in our market is that no one has really gone anywhere; no one has lost their job," Mr Grieve says. "If you're worth $1.5 billion instead of $3 billion you still go out for a meal and you still buy a car. They might have lost half the value of their assets on paper but they're pretty much looking to treble when recovery comes. "(Many customers) are looking at the current economic situation as being a challenge and opportunity." Social analyst David Chalke is not surprised Rolls-Royce is proving impervious to the downturn.
"Firstly, they don't actually sell a great number of cars and the people that buy them are extraordinarily wealthy and are largely unaffected (by the downturn). Their fortune may have dropped from $2 billion to $1.5 billion but that still leaves plenty for a Roller," he says. "The effects of the downturn have been very uneven and the gap between the haves and have-nots is actually getting much greater." He says high-flying hedge fund managers were the ones most affected by the recession and they bought "look at me" cars rather than a Rolls-Royce. "Really, you're looking at a small group of people in the money market and they bought Porsches anyway," he says. Rolls-Royce buyers are more likely to be self-made millionaires, possibly hard-working migrants or the sons of migrants who had set up a successful business.
That said, Mr Grieve acknowledges the financial crisis will take its toll but says the wealthiest people in the world will still be able to afford such luxury. "The level of new interest has declined," he says. "In a lot of cases that's because they're focusing on other business interests. "A number of customers in the US have deferred delivery. One in particular... simply because he's busy buying properties at the moment. He said he hasn't got time because he's busy flying state to state acquiring real estate." Ironically, it's Rolls-Royce's business model that makes it adaptable in times of a downturn. While manufacturers used to large volumes are locked in to production schedules and deals with suppliers, Rolls-Royce's low volumes can be more easily wound back. "We have a very flexible production method," Mr Grieve says. "Our business is configured to be profitable at very low volumes. So we have the luxury in the current marketplace to take decisions other manufacturers can't."
Mr Purves is adamant there is a future for Rolls-Royce. "We have a pinnacle position in aspiration for the automotive," he says. "I don't see a lack of aspiration in the automobile in future. "Mobility will continue to be essential. It will continue to be offered in various different guises. It's our job to produce the pinnacle of that." For more on Rolls-Royce, go to drive.com.au/rollsSignup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
The Vatican has instructed members of the Catholic Church to be polite to people with “homosexual tendencies”, while continuing to work to oppose equality.
Documents released ahead of the Church’s Family Synod quashed hopes that the Church would make any move to relax its anti-gay policies – despite fears it is becoming rapidly out of touch.
Plans to ‘reach out’ to gay couples were abandoned at last year’s Synod following a humiliating climbdown from the Pope. Despite hopes similar proposals would return this year, a working paper released for this year’s synod fails to include the issue of how the Church should reach out to homosexual couples as a key topic.
However, despite no plans for outreach or relaxation of anti-LGBT policies at the gathering of Catholic bishops, which will be held at the Vatican in October, the document did urge “respect”, in a section titled “Pastoral attention to persons with homosexual tendencies”.
It says: “Every person, independently of their sexual tendencies, is respected in their dignity and should be received with sensibility and delicateness, both in the church and in society.
“It would be desirable that diocesan pastoral projects reserve a specific attention to the accompanying of families with persons of homosexual tendencies, and of the persons themselves.”
Despite a recent PR blitz attempting to bolster his gay-friendly image, the Pope is yet to lift any of the actively homophobic and transphobic policies of his predecessors.
He has also rallied against same-sex marriage, inviting representatives from listed hate groups to a ‘traditional marriage’ conference last year, and recently urged Slovakians to vote against equal marriage.
The Catholic leader has also compared transgender people to nuclear weapons.FLINT, MI -- Police say an hour passed before a mother realized her 19-month-old daughter had been shot while they were in the car together.
In a shooting that he called "bizarre," Michigan State Police Detective Robert Dunham said the girl's mother and her boyfriend were driving from a relative's home to the boyfriend's home in north Flint when suspects walked up to the car to rob them about 9 p.m. on Garland Street near 11th Avenue.
As the car fled, the suspect fired at the car.
It wasn't until the toddler was taken out of the vehicle at the Indian Hills mobile home park on Genesee Road between Stanley and Coldwater roads that the mother realized the young girl was shot in the leg.
"I don't know how a young child can get shot and not scream, yell or anything," Dunham said. "(The mother) said she never noticed any blood. She said she was moving her into the house, and that's when she notices she was bleeding."
The toddler was taken to Hurley Medical Center where she was initially listed in critical condition but was upgraded to serious Thursday.
Police did not release any suspect information. The child's name was not released. The incident remains under investigation.
"We got work to do to get to the bottom of this," said Dunham.
Anyone with information is asked to call Flint police at 810-237-6801 or CRIMESTOPPERS at 1-800-SPEAK-UP.[Update June 9, 2017: The Singer and Associates communications firm, representing nine major video game companies in the labor dispute, has reached out to clarify that "none of the Interactive Video Game Companies that have bargained together have signed a contract with SAG-AFTRA... While there have been no talks since last fall, the Video Game Companies would welcome the Union back to the table for meaningful conversations. The Companies look forward to the time when SAG-AFTRA will let its members return to the work that they love."
The companies represented in that statement include Activision Productions, Inc., Blindlight, LLC, Disney Character Voices, Inc., Electronic Arts Productions, Inc., Formosa Interactive, LLC, Insomniac Games, Inc., Take 2 Productions, Inc., VoiceWorks Productions, Inc., and, WB Games, Inc.
Any non-stuck titles from those companies referred to in the story below are from projects that predate that February, 2015 cut-off for the SAG-AFTRA strike. That leaves 47 titles from 29 other companies on the non-struck list that are operating under the new contracts being offered by the union, providing game industry work that meets SAG-AFTRA's demands.
Ars Technica regrets any misleading implications or incorrect assumptions included in the framing of the original article.]
Original story
The video game voice actors in the SAG-AFTRA union have been holding a solid line since they started striking last October, demanding limitations to vocally stressful work sessions and bonus payments for work on top-selling games. But as the strike extends into its eighth month, plenty of games are still getting made with unionized vocal talent. That's because even as the strike as a whole continues, the union has been able to peel off a growing number of developers and publishers willing to agree to new contracts that meet their demands.
Rather than bearing down for an all-or-nothing battle against a monolithic and united video game industry, SAG-AFTRA has taken a more targeted approach, signing individual agreements for specific "non-struck" titles that union members are allowed to work on. As of late May, 36 companies representing 73 games are on the list of non-struck title. While production on some of these projects predates the February, 2015 cutoff for the strike, dozens are operating under new, union approved contracts (see update above for clarification on that count).
That move has fragmented any collective bargaining position on the part of the game industry writ large, leading to the odd situation where striking workers can still find work in the sector. In some cases, individual publishers and production companies have agreed to the new contract for some projects while holding out on others, seemingly undermining their own position on a game-by-game basis. (See update above)
The piecemeal strategy has been a "huge success" according to Keythe Farley, a union spokesperson with vocal credits including Mass Effect 2 and Fallout 4, as well as many other games where he has served as a vocal director. "We decided we would put out an agreement that we felt proud of, that people would not have any problems signing on to, in order to demonstrate that our asks were reasonable," he told Ars in a recent interview. The fact that so many game projects have agreed to the union's demands, he says, is a sign that "what we were asking for from the beginning is perfectly reasonable, and folks are not having any problem signing on to contracts to work."
While there are still plenty of companies that refuse to talk with the union and plenty of game projects that are still subject to the strike, Farley says he's heartened by how many projects have already signed on. "It's already having a domino effect," he said. "It's like an avalanche.... I knew the first six months of this year were going to be the proof. If our contract had not been adopted by anybody, we'd be in a much different position."
A large part of the union's success so far, Farley says, comes from publishers realizing the specialized skills that unionized actors can bring to video games even without advance preparation. "I have a session at 11:30 this morning. I have no idea what I'm going to perform at that session," he said during our interview. "I'll show up, there'll be a script on a music stand at a microphone and a director who will hopefully help me with some context, but then it's up to me to create the character on the fly from scratch and to create a world that's believable. That's not a skill set that every actor has and certainly not a skill set that folks on the street have honed."
Muddling along
While there is now some work available for video game voice actors, the strike is still limiting the amount of vocal work available in the industry. But Farley doesn't think the mere reduction of work opportunities because of the strike is a major hardship for most union members.
"I think there has been maybe a little bit of a downturn, but just remember that these actors are also working in commercials and animation and audio books and narration and promos," he said. "Most of the actors who do video game work are also actors who work in other fields even while the video game portion of their salary might have dipped, and I can't even say that it even has."
In any case, SAG-AFTRA's piecemeal approach to individual contracts means we might not see any single dramatic moment where the strike is declared over and work continues en masse, as we did when 2007's Hollywood writer's strike ended after 100 days. Instead, we could see both sides continuing to muddle through a new normal, where some projects move forward with professional union talent while others hold out and try to make do with other vocal options.
"What I think is, it is a cultural shift," Farley said. "It's a shift away from a culture of exploitation to a culture where people are paid fairly and where their health and safety are protected... There's a contract that would end this strike this afternoon. SAG-AFTRA has committed to individually negotiate each agreement."
Listing image by SAG-AFTRA/YouTubeCNN’s Jake Tapper asked Alabama Republican party chair Marty Connors whether or not he would vote for a “child molester” Friday.
WATCH:
On “The Lead With Jake Tapper,” the host asked, “Did you believe the accusers of Bill Clinton when they came out during the Clinton years? Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick and Gennifer Flowers and the others? Kathleen Willey, did you believe them?”
“Ah, I’m not sure about them. I do believe the blue dress,” Connors answered.
Tapper said, “I guess, here’s a question for you, if it came down, in an election between a Republican who had been proven a child molester or a Democrat, would you vote for the Democrat?”
Connors answered, “I would vote against the child molester if proven.”
Tapper asked, “And does it need to be proven in a court of law for you? Is that the standard?”
Connors said, “Well, I mean, what are we dealing with here? Facts? Or are we peddling gossip? And at this point, I think we’re peddling gossip.”
Follow Justin on TwitterDJ Mo Twister did not hold back when he called out Mocha Uson for using a photo of police from Honduras in a Facebook post that has once again got netizens either fiercely attacking or passionately defending the former sexy star.
Last May 28, the newly appointed Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCCO) Assistant Secretary posted a photo of soldiers kneeling and seemingly praying, via her Mocha Uson Blog. With their heads down, the soldiers were in full battle gear, carrying guns and wearing bulletproof suits in the photo. However, looking closely, a blue image which was believed to be a flag was noticed by netizens. It was then quickly ruled out that the photo was that of police from Honduras and not the Philippines. Thus started another wave of attacks on Uson.
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In response, via his Instagram account, the United States-based DJ lambasted Uson for the post and stated details about the photo.
“One issue lang. The photo isn’t our army. You see that little blue flag on each of the soldiers chest? That’s the flag of Honduras. These are their soldiers from 2015,” he said.
The ever-outspoken DJ stressed that such spread of wrong information has always been a practice of the newly-appointed assistant secretary.
“Mocha, the Assistant Secretary of the Presidential Communications Operations Office does this REGULARLY. Her and her followers will likely defend this by saying, ‘Okay, she used a picture to convey the message of prayer so don’t find negative in that,'” he added.
But what earned Mo Twister more reactions was when he directly referred to Uson as kuto (lice) and an “insult” to students and journalists.
“The problem is you’re insulting these soldiers, our soldiers, and everyone’s intelligence with your fake sh*t. Mocha, you are journalism kuto (lice). You are also an insult to every hardworking student or aspiring journalist,” he wrote.
To close, Twister attacked Uson’s appointment and lectured her to read up on a specific legislation: “You took away a job from someone more deserving dahil ‘yung ilong mo puno ng bahid ng t** ni (because your nose is filled with poop stains of) #DU30. @mochauson you read up on Section 4 of RA 6713, dumb***.”
Twister’s post was praised by his fans and followers, with some poking fun at the lice reference and Uson’s alleged “stupidity.”
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Meanwhile, Uson has replied to her bashers via her Facebook blog. In a post on May 30 at 2:58 p.m., she explained that her use of the photo was meant to be a symbolism for soldiers’ bravery and act of surrender to God. She also pointed out that her post should not be taken too literally.
“Ang caption ko lang ay ipanalangin natin ang ating mga sundalo. Hindi ko sinabi sundalo natin yan.”
(My caption only asked for prayers for our soldiers. I did not say that those [in the picture] were our soldiers.) JB
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On May 15, we sat in on a conference call with AMD to learn all about High Bandwidth Memory. If you haven't heard about HBM and our flurry of news posts on the exciting new memory for GPUs, this article will provide you with everything you need to know. HBM is an important step for AMD, as it is powering its upcoming Radeon R9 390X, with its new Fiji architecture.
AMD has spent the last seven years on the development of HBM, with the motivation behind it being that they wanted to solve one of the bigger problems of the future at the time - bandwidth - which was something that had to be solved, period. Performance-per-watt is very important to both AMD and NVIDIA, and the use of HBM is one of the key ways of getting there.
The development of HBM has taken close to a decade, and has its own unique challenges thanks to it being a very high density interconnect. But, the payoff would allow AMD to build many devices, from smaller APUs to the big bad flagship GPUs that we should expect with the upcoming Radeon R9 390X.
With GDDR5 'entering the inefficient region of the power/performance curve' as you can see in the above shot from AMD's slide, HBM is needed now, more than ever.Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan called for bipartisan support in his annual State of the State address on Wednesday. Republicans say he laid out all the important issues for the state, but some Democrats say it lacked details. News4's Chris Gordon reports. (Published Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016)
Republican Gov. Larry Hogan set forth priorities on fiscal responsibility, pro-business governance and tax cuts Wednesday in his annual State of the State speech to the Democratic-led legislature.
“[My agenda] will improve the lives of those who need it most: working families, retirees and small-business owners,” Hogan said.
Hogan cited a boost in education funding as one of his biggest successes during his first year in office.
“We increased spending to historic, record-high levels, adding a total increased investment of $830 million dollars more in K through 12 education,” he said.
Hogan also highlighted the struggles of the past year in his speech, including riots in Baltimore and his fight against cancer.
"This past year has been one of many milestones. For me, none more extraordinary than when I had the honor of being blessed by Pope Francis on behalf of cancer patients around the world,” he said, before he received a standing ovation from Democrats and Republicans alike.
Hogan maintained a bipartisan tone and called for cooperation between his party and the Democratic majority in the state Senate.
"There is so much we can find agreement on," he said.
Transportation was front and center during the speech, and Hogan highlighted major infrastructure expenditures.
“We are investing an unprecedented $2 billion into shovel-ready infrastructure projects to fix every single structurally deficient bridge in the state,” he said.
State Sen. Cheryl Kagan told NBC4 that Montgomery County is ready to proceed with a new interchange that will help the area with traffic problems. Construction was delayed in January.
“The Watkins Mill interchange is ready to go, and we hope we’re going to get it funded and start breaking ground so we can move forward,” Kagan said.
Republicans praised Hogan’s accomplishments in his first year.
"Better control of the way our governs functions. Not just increased money for education, but making sure that money works,” said Nic Kipke, Republican minority leader in the state Senate, “He's accomplished a lot over the last year and I'm very excited about where we're going in the future."
The state Senate Democratic leader, Thomas V. Mike Miller, Jr., said he felt some issues were not addressed in the speech.
"The issues that weren't addressed include transportation in Montgomery County. A hospital in Prince George's County. The problems and needs of Baltimore city,” |
boards in the final frame, including three on the offensive glass in the span of a minute. In an average game, he would be penalized for his 2-for-8 shooting and abysmal defense, but there needed to be a bright spot in these grades.
Martell Webster, SF 2 MIN | 0-0 FG | 0-0 FT | 0 REB | 0 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 0 TO | 0 PTS | -3 +/- The man played a whopping two minutes and five seconds and didn’t record a single stat, so what grade would you give him?
Rasual Butler, SF 36 MIN | 3-11 FG | 2-2 FT | 3 REB | 1 AST | 0 STL | 1 BLK | 4 TO | 9 PTS | -4 +/- On offense, Rasual Butler was pretty bad. He missed eight of his 11 shots, including six of his seven 3-point attempts, and turned it over four times. He missed open shots and he missed contested shots. On defense, however, that was a different story—he was abysmal in every way. He couldn’t stop anybody and is at least partially responsible for Middleton’s outburst, he picked up three fouls in the second period alone and inexplicably played the final 19:22 of the first half (not his fault, but still). He also deserves at least some of the blame for allowing Chris Johnson (to which all who didn’t see the game reply in unison, “Who?”) to go 3-for-5 with seven points in his first game with the Bucks.
Kevin Seraphin, C 8 MIN | 2-3 FG | 0-0 FT | 1 REB | 1 AST | 1 STL | 0 BLK | 1 TO | 4 PTS | +2 +/- Kevin Seraphin was a nonfactor Saturday night. He played just 8:20, all of which came in the second quarter, and he’s now received fewer than 10 minutes of action in three of the last four games. The big man is in part a victim of rotations that vary game-to-game and are seemingly chosen out of a hat, but he also rarely helps himself by holding the ball anytime it comes to him.
Ramon Sessions, PG 16 MIN | 4-7 FG | 1-1 FT | 2 REB | 1 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 0 TO | 10 PTS | +2 +/- Much like Gooden, Sessions’ grade gets bumped up slightly due to his teammates’ ineptitude. While the rest of the Wizards struggled to get anything going offensively, the newest member of the team converted a layup and sank a 3 in the fourth to help keep Washington afloat. His attempts to create weren’t always pretty—see his floaters for reference—but he deserves credit for at least bringing out the defibrillator.With technology evolution comes change, especially in industries where jobs currently done by humans could almost entirely be done by robots—and there may be a lot of those kinds of industries. Competition in the job market is getting serious, and this is obvious in the security sector as businesses are extended the opportunity to replace security guards and mall cops with products like Knightscope’s Autonomous Data Machines—full-time security guards that work more efficiently and response more rapidly.
The ADM’s are designed to perform most of the tasks human security guards can do. They can navigate around people and objects (indoor and outdoor) and, over time, will be able to see, feel, hear and smell as they become accustomed to an area. One immediate advantage of a non-human presence is availability; ADMs provide 24/7 patrolling and monitoring. The robots even find their way to a charging pad when necessary, rather than the classic coffee break. Working a 24-hour shift, while remaining alert and recording all activity, is pretty unrealistic for a human. For robots though, that’s par for the course.
Knightscope’s Security Operations Center allows clients to access a live-feed through a desktop or mobile app. The system uses advanced detection within a geo-fenced area to send real-time alerts to clients. For instance, if someone is trespassing, or if a car is parked in a restricted area, the ADM security guards will detect this and immediately dispatch an alert. Knightscope also programs the ADMs to detect license plate numbers and recognize media access control (MAC) addresses on mobile devices.
Of course, at the other end of the alert will likely be a human whose response is needed for authorization of action. If there is an issue onsite, immediate access to judgement, reason and risk can often be an invaluable asset. Also, facial recognition has yet to be incorporated into the Knightscope software, so false alarms and blind paranoia could be an issue, though there could very easily be a straight-forward scheduling, pre-authorization, or enhanced direct verification process introduced.
The 300lb robocops (coming in 2 sizes: the K3 model at 4ft tall and 2ft wide, and the K5 model at 5ft tall and 3ft wide) do offer a constantly observant, objective, authoritative presence, and perhaps it is that lack of available judgement, or human error, that may deter crime. Plus, humans can interact through the machines; their design includes intercom capabilities, which allows people on-site and central staff to connect remotely.
As you may have noticed, many of these functions can be performed by human security guards to an effective degree. That being said, the ADMs, of course, offer some advanced features that real guards just cannot offer. For instance, the autonomous robots can help prevent cyber-attacks and security breaches by sending alerts about devices that are trying to access databases, accounts or other devices within a private network.
Knightscope robots can also flag a person who is carrying an unusual number of devices, or a particular kind of item—like a gun, a USB key, or a pair of bolt cutters. Knightscopes ADMs can also provide endless amounts of time-stamped video and (presumably perfect) reports of property conditions.
There’s a little more complexity to the role though, isn’t there? Building guards are not only responsible for being the eyes and ears of a property, but they also serve as ambassadors of sorts. Guards are almost always available to provide directions, discuss the parking situation, help you find a first aid kit or a bathroom, or even let you know if an elevator is unavailable because of construction work; they can quickly climb stairs, ask if you’re choking, or unlock traditional doors which may be required during a fire or emergency. These are more “outside the box” features that Knightscope’s ADMs are not programmed to do at this time.
Will they need to? Maybe. As you would expect, much of this conversation will come down to a balance of costs. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average rate for a security guard is $13.68 per hour. Knightscope rents out a robot for less than $7.00 per hour; that’s less than minimum wage. How much personal touch can be sacrificed in order to cut labor costs by upwards of 50%? It could be a lot.
Human guards and robots both offer qualities that can benefit the safety and security of a building, and they both have claim to their own brands of exclusive skills. Robots are undeniably already a prevalent part of the workforce (they’re even floating around helping people in department stores), and ever since the advent of the video camera, the world of property security was headed in the same direction. For now, it’ll need to be a team sport, but the camaraderie may not last forever.WPC Ace Dota 2 League Preview September 21st, 2013 18:44 GMT Text by TanGeng Graphics by riptide WPC Ace
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WPC ACE League Preview
With the grand opening of The Shanghai E-Sports Competitive Center venue, WPC will be hosting the WPC ACE Dota 2 League, a bi-annual ACE Dota 2 League, featuring the best teams from China in an offline league running from September through December with a massive prize pool featuring a first place prize of $163,400. This is going to be one of the biggest Dota 2 leagues we have ever seen, and should help grow the eSports scene tremendously.
For this preview we will be bringing to you an introduction on WPC, ACE, SCNTV, and Jingruis, the organizations behind the ACE League. As we mentioned the top teams in China and the world will be competing, so we have a some
We hope you enjoyed our preview of the ACE Dota 2 League, please follow it on TL from our
Vici Gaming
Wednesday, Sep 25 8:00am GMT (GMT+00:00)
TongFu
Wednesday, Sep 25 11:00am GMT (GMT+00:00)
LGD International
Thursday, Sep 26 8:00am GMT (GMT+00:00)
Heart Get Together
Thursday, Sep 26 11:00am GMT (GMT+00:00)
WPC Selection Team 1 Sunday, Sep 22 12:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) Team DK vs.Wednesday, Sep 25 8:00am GMT (GMT+00:00) LGD Gaming vs.Wednesday, Sep 25 11:00am GMT (GMT+00:00) Invictus Gaming vs.Thursday, Sep 26 8:00am GMT (GMT+00:00) RisingStars vs.Heart Get TogetherThursday, Sep 26 11:00am GMT (GMT+00:00) RaTtLeSnAkE vs.WPC Selection Team 1
WPC: A Brief Introduction
The WPC, World Esports Professional Classic, is the host for ACE Dota 2 League and is positioning itself to become a huge eSports brand in China. While professional Dota 2 is the focus for the international audience, there are three major parties making this and possibly future iterations of ACE Dota 2 possible. Two of these parties are largely newcomers to hosting national and international class Dota 2 events. These two parties likewise are extremely ambitious and the theme of WPC appears to be going as big as possible. The success and failure of this new Dota 2 League can have massive ramifications for the professional eSports scene in the years to come.
ACE
At the center of the competition is ACE, Association of China Esports, an organization that represents players and teams involved in the eSports business. But in this case, ACE is most concerned with the success of the league as players and clubs interest align. The most prominent mission of ACE is in stablizing the professional scene such that both clubs and players are no longer in danger of disbanding or losing their teams at a moments notice. Part of this has been the enforcement of contracts within the eSports circle. Part of this has been to engage sponsors for a regular league that can secure income and livelihood for professionals.
Close to a year ago, ACE attempted a smaller but similarly unprecedented event in War3 Dota and produced ACE Dota League with GTV. The 10 prominent professional teams of the Dota landscape converged for a three-month long league tournament. While first play prizes weren't much larger than those of G-League tournaments, ACE gave 30000 yuan to all participating teams as compensation for their time. Unfortunately despite the initiative ACE would see Royal, Tyloo, WE, and DTS dissolve immediately after conclusion of the league and would watch NA linger for another two months before also capitulating as teams transitioned to Dota 2.
The WPC ACE Dota 2 League is a second and larger attempt at regular Dota league. If successful, WPC will become a host of a regular league with a massive prize pool, and ACE will be well on its way to fulfilling its most important mission. Yet, by luring in large money, ACE is opening itself up to being caught in the crossfire of political moves by the big commercial interests. It also potentially exposes a conflict of interest within ACE itself as it tries to balance the interests of the players, clubs, and the league, and after this initial success a whole new set of problems will be exposed in the eSports scene. At the same time, ACE must fend off criticism coming from nationalistic fans that see the organization as more of hindrance to scene and culpable for the disappointing performance of Chinese teams at TI.
Jingruis
Historically, Jingruis has been a real-estate development company, consistently ranking top 100 in the country over the last decade. Jingruis has a particularly strong presence in Shanghai and the surrounding cities. With this investment into WPC, reputedly around 40 million yuan, Jingruis is using its real estate assets to break into the eSports business and help professional gaming gain wide social acceptance.
Jingruis's investment at the Shanghai Esports Center, a 3000 square meters competitive arena, consisting of a competitive hall, training rooms, game demo area, and memorabilia shops and lounge space, and the WPC brand is not only for the ACE Dota 2 League. ACE Dota 2 League is merely the first major event to be hosted at the site. Jingruis envisions hosting competitions at all times of year and will use other games to fill up ACE Dota 2 Leagues's estimated six months of down time.
In the future, Jingrui expects to expand the arena and WPC brand with additional 160 million yuan in investments and can use its political clout to push eSports into mainstream television. Based on press releases, Jingruis expects to increase both viewership and revenue by orders of magnitude above present levels and looks to large professional athletic leagues like the NBA for inspiration. Presently, WPC ACE will already have broken the 1 million yuan mark for prize purse and will only look to push it even higher.
SCNTV
SCNTV was brought into the project by Jingruis for the production and broadcast of the ACE Dota2 League. However, compare to the more experience organizations of Gamefy/SiTV or GTV, SCNTV is a complete newbie to production of professional competitive events of Dota 2 and games of its genre. The majority of SCNTV's content in the past year has been Starcraft:Broodwar competitive games, and their only contact with Dota 2 has been in hosting Na`Vi during their China stay:
While SCNTV can apply the experience of involved with Netease's promotion of competitive Heroes of Three Kingdoms, a similar game to Dota 2, WPC ACE Dota 2 League will be a learning experience for the company and SCNTV may find itself out of its depth in the project. If on a few occasions, WPC ACE Dota 2 production appears rough around the edges, it is to be expect.
Team Previews by TanGeng/Kupon3ss
DK
The Absolute Dream Team of Asian DotA, featuring the finalists of the solo Mid competition at TI3, the best carry in the world, and a pair of the finest supports in China, this might be the most star-studded lineup we have seen in a long time. The team will be one of the favourites at any tournament as long as it performs at even a mere fraction of its on-paper potential. Mushi as the mid player and BurNIng on carry are almost undisputedly the ideal players for those positions, with more experience between the two of them than most teams. The key of the team will be a convergent style that treads a fine balance between the early game dominance of the SEA superstars and the more steady and solid Chinese late-game in a team that can play and excel at any style.
The question on everybody's minds, however, is how such a team would be able to work together. The last time a team this stacked came together the Invictus Gaming of yesteryear took 6 months before it coalesced into the team that took TI2, and DK's road to becoming a well oiled machine will likely be no less of a herculean task. With 4 Ex-captains on the payroll and the personalities of players like IceIceIce clashing, the team will definitely have sparks flying one way or another as it attempts to live up to the hype already pointing towards Seattle once again.
iG
A bit overshadowed by DK and coming off a pair of roster changes, iG's new players in Hao and Banana are expected to greatly change the dynamic of the team. Hao's supremely aggressive style and focus on the midgame might function better alongside the playstyles of 430 and YYF, as opposed to a 4-1 that looked more like 4 - - - - 1 than a team. Of the team, 430 performed the best at TI3 and there's no indication that he's not still one of the most fearsome mid players in the world, and absolutely capable of taking over the game. YYF's play, on the other hand, had been rather disappointing to say the least and the departure of his long-time teammate and friend, Chuan, might not have the best effect on the veteran who's on the closer side of 30. Faith and Banana as a support pair will likely shine less than Chuan did but bring some additional solidity and stability for the 3 core players to excel.
IG's never really had a problem with talent or skill, but rather one with personalities. Ever since their creation out of a pair of teams, conflicting ego and play-style has always been a thorn at the team's side. While Banana might be the happy-go-lucky veteran who's willing to go with the flow, Hao definitely brings fire wherever he goes and much of the team's future will rest on how well they will fit together and whether a command structure can be established with Zhou gone. If the team's performance during the Sina Cup was any indication, they're well on their journey of a thousand miles toward reclaiming their spot at the top of the world.
LGD.cn
The most disappointing of the major Chinese Teams at TI3 is also the one for whom the change has been the smallest, merely changing Sylar for Xiaotuji without any fundamental changes in either play-style or structure. The team's main failing has been how stagnant and predictable it has become up to Xiao8 to refocus the team more toward the game than on publicity and business. The core of the team remains intact and Xiaotuji definitely shows the potential to become another top carry as long as the team can find its footing. The biggest challenge is for the team to come to terms with the demise of the traditional 4-1 style and work on some that doesn't involve playing from behind from minute one.
The departure of Sylar was not on the best of terms and the rest of the team might be looking for a way to start fresh after the debacle at TI3. Xiao8, Yao, DD, and DDc have been friends and teammates for a long time and it will only be a matter of time before Xiaotuji integrates with the team. The problem in predictability and a slight deficiency in individual skill did rear its ugly head in their loss to TongFu during the SinaCup Loser Finals.
Rstars
Risingstars is an eclectic squad of players who've left their teams for one reason or another. The list of players is a healthy balance of seasoned veterans such as KingJ and 357 with talented newcomers like CTY and xDD playing around Sylar, who remains one of the best all-around carries in the scene. The key to the team will be discovering their identity and style as a mish-mash of ideas and players come together to start fresh. Will it be CTY's snowballing, Sylar's farming, or KingJ's methodical style that emerge as the soul of the team?
All of the players have baggage on their backs, and their own unfulfilled dreams riding on this new team as they try to show the world what a team of underdogs can accomplish.
Rsnake
Rattlesnake's run at TI3 was about what they expected, which is more than could be said of the other Chinese Teams. With the loss of Kabu and Lanm, the organization has decided to rest their hopes on a pair of untested talent in the form of AllBeautyMustDie and JoHnNyRecco. As a historically subpar team armed with unproven talent, not much is expected of the team now that it has lost its main star in Lanm. Yet as long as Luo remains and the team is willing to play the role of the spoiler, the Snakes may continue to surprise.
Tongfu
Of the major Chinese Dota 2 clubs, Tongfu is the team that acquired the greatest amount of potential upside in the flurry of player transfers. The three new players on the team are all high ceiling players that have either fallen from peak performance or are emerging talents bubbling to breakout. Zhou is the fallen star. In the months preceding TI, Zhou showed signs of degrading Dota 2 fundamentals and immediately found himself out of iG's future after the tournament. He will hope to recover the form that placed him among China's legendary carries of Dota. ZSMJ is a mixture of the fallen star and emerging talent in that ZSMJ made his name in Dota but retired in 2011 without ever playing Dota 2. Coming back of out retirement with VG, ZSMJ struggled to establish himself as a carry in the new game. Now, ZSMJ is plying his trade at support and his many fans will be cheering for him once again conquer the Chinese scene. Xtt is the budding talent now in his second year as professional gamer. Touted by YYF as a wonderfully solid offlane player, Xtt is hoping to prove all of his boosters correct and his doubters wrong.
Gone from Tongfu are stalwarts, KingJ and Banana, and aggressive carry, Hao, and the team will require at least several games to rebuild teamwork and coordination close to that of a serviceable team. Once that happens, should the new players at Tongfu fully unlock their power, Tongfu will once again be a formidable force and will be frontrunners for taking home the ACE Dota 2 championship. But if they do not, Tongfu will be the team most weakened by the roster shuffles and the organization will once again be relegated to the ranks of second tier Chinese teams. Tongfu will be a team to follow in ACE. The star power of the double Z's is nearly unrivaled, and it will be exciting to see if the upside of their roster materializes.
LGD.int
LGD.int were not in China for the photo shoot
As recent as ten days ago, this team wasn't even supposed to exist. Due to lack of interest and in light of commitments by former players to clubs in their respective home countries, LGD were very pessimistic in public announcements, suggesting that the organization was virtually giving up on the project. The LGD.int experiment seemed all but dead and buried. But now ACE Dota 2 League will be the debut of a new LGD.int roster that sees three members of its TI squad return while adding former Mouz carry, Black^, and former Zenith support, Freedom.
Ostensibly, the departure of G from the team should help the team, since the Russian's language limitations hindered communication and his suicidal initiation play-style made LGD.int strong but one-dimensional in strategies. However, the addition of Black^ at Pajkatt's original position will displace Pajkatt into the middle lane solo role. At the same time, LGD.int will be revisiting the aborted experiment of playing Brax in support and moving Misery to the hard lane. As for Freedom, the Singaporean feels like a fifth wheel in all of this. While LGD.int still somewhat feels like a team that is just thrown together, it big improvement over last year as the team retains three core players. Yet, the team may not replicate last year's success in G-League unless they can again uncover a dominating strategy that suits their new team.
For viewers and fans, the team's first couple games should not be used as any indication of the team's strength or potential, because out of all the teams, LGD.int will be the last to arrive in Shanghai. The team will will play its first match against iG cold and will have had virtually no time to practice as a team.
Vici Gaming
Vici Gaming was the first major Chinese team to finalize team rosters. The team quickly acquired Super and RotK from DK and announced the departure of ZSMJ and Cty. In making these roster adjustments, the team lost individual talent and potential but added leadership, drafting, and experience. After these transfers, team members now complement each other much better than before, and there is a veteran presence to help the team recover when the individual engagements don't go as planned.
Super, as solo-mid, is not flashy but is rock solid, and Vici Gaming can anchor their play around Super. This frees their talented support duo Fenrir and fy for playmaking without having to worry about Super unexpectedly diving into bad situations. Likewise, the addition of RotK improves VG's drafting by quite a margin. Of course, this improvement comes at the cost of potential aggressive feeding. The carry player on the team is Tutu, a long time understudy of Burning at DK and strangely has the same exact name as RotK.
WPC Selection Team 1
As part of its ACE Dota 2 League project, WPC embarked on the project of injecting new blood into the Dota 2 professional scene. Selection Team 1 exhibits just how far WPC is willing to go. The team is full of raw talent that have played at the pub level for years, but have little or no high-level competitive team experience. Four of the five members do not have any competitive achievements related to Dota or Dota 2 in the professional or amateur scene. The fifth and final member has only competed at the local level in Changsha, Hunan and took a few second and third places in those competitions.
It cannot be overstate how raw and inexperienced the team of cherry, uuu9, Mtsty, yj, and An are on an individual basis. Then add on the fact that they have been essentially thrown together like matchsticks by WPC, it is extremely unlikely that this team will be able to pose a challenge for even the weakest of professional clubs. Challenging for the championship slots is utterly out of the question. However, these individual will get a taste of life as professional gamers and perhaps one of them will be the diamond in a rough and shine as a brilliant star in the future.
Heart Get Together
In contrast to the first team, the team of wyt, xiaolv, cys, xiaohong, and ice is a more experienced pool of players from a competitive War3 Dota perspective. For example, xiaolv played on Ag-Fox for the second half of 2012, and the other members have achievements in various Dota 2 amateur and scholastic competitions of late 2012 as the professional scene was transitioning over to Dota 2. The second team is still a long shot to pose a challenge for professional teams. But compared to pure pub players, its team members here are likely to gel faster and develop good teamwork and less likely to breakdown due to player. incompatibilities.
Interview with Executive Wu Translated by CountChocula
Translator: CountChocula
Author: RN|MoWu
Source:
On July 31st 2013 the first dedicated eSports arena in China, Shanghai Esports Center, was inaugurated at the Four Seasons Hotel. Shanghai Esports Center is located at Baoshan, Shanghai at the Jingrui Plaza. It was built by investment from Jingrui Properties Ltd. and intended to be a base for the esports industry for tournament organizers, exhibition hall for new games, a training area for teams, as well as a development hall for young players. The purpose to make a center dedicated to eSports not just for Shanghai, but all of China. Along with the inauguration, it was announced that the World Esports Professional Classic (WPC) would be organized and hosted here. The secretary-general of the Shanghai Esports Association Chen Yaoji, the vice-chairman of Jinrui Properties Ltd. Wu Wei and the CEO of Jinrui Cultural Development Ltd. Yi Yuanyuan together pressed the button that began the grand opening.
Following the opening ceremony, media were able to interview the vice-chairman of Jinrui Properties Ltd. Wu Wei. Mr. Wu discussed with frank reassurance what it was that led Jinrui Properties Ltd. to choose the esports industry. Let us take a look together.
Executive Wu, what is your attitude towards the eSports industry?
Right now, esports is in a grassroots stage. I hope our entrance will bring a new order. Our cooperation with ACE will bring a new type of league and greatly improve sustainability and environment for clubs and players, so that players can feel at ease about the professionalization of their industry. Also, we've signed contracts with all the clubs to show respect for their interests.
Will Jinrui Properties Ltd. train its own club and professional players?
We won't be training our own club and professional players. We will emphasize on building the Dota 2 ACE League just like how NBA built an excellent league, and secure society's acceptance.
Will the World Esports Professional Classic (WPC) have foreign clubs attending?
Currently, we're focusing on top-tier domestic teams, but we won't eliminate the possibility of foreign teams attending in the future.
Jinruis Properties Ltd. chose to enter the esports industry and even built the Shanghai Esports Center. Where will the profit be for you?
Right now, I don't want to discuss how much money we can make. Currently, the eSports industry is not very sustainable, but we are hoping that through the ACE League we have helped to build, our profit margin will progressively grow. As long as the censorship bureau lifts its ban on eSports, this industry will develop rapidly (TL note: He is talking about a CCTV ban on esports programs on network TV dating back to 2004). Our profit margin will grow likewise.
Do you have any cooperation with Perfect World?
This is a trade secret, but I can tell you that us and Perfect World along with Valve have very good cooperation.
You mentioned the league will imitate the NBA. Can you divulge any particular similarities?
Things that NBA is successful at--like their annual draft and their salary cap. We'll also consult the regulations they've passed, their way of collecting money for emergency assistance funds, their way of getting players and clubs to comply, and not letting players switch teams without restriction. We want to create order, and allow clubs and players to prosper in a sustainable industry governed by rules, so that the industry can develop in a more professional direction.
What is your attitude towards the Dota 2 Super League (DSL) and the Fengyun Esports Studio? Will they become a rival to your league and your esports arena?
We rely on ourselves, while they rely on the government. However, there is something I can put this way, which is regarding their market dominance in the past. Their DSL earlier this year was due to us not having enough time. Our arena could only be completed in August. We didn't want the clubs to be affected by our time frame but, to put it bluntly, the latter part of your question won't happen, because us and ACE are in direct cooperation. In the future, leagues will happen in our arena. We have signed exclusivity contracts with ACE and the clubs to the effect that they can only attend our competitions. Of course international competitions are an exception.
Regarding the sustainable development of eSports, do you have any ideas on how new players can be found to replace the old?
Our long-term goal is to establish a two-tiered league with the bottom two teams doing relegation matches with the top Tier 2 teams.
What is your attitude towards the casting organization SCNTV?
We are in touch with a lot of casting organizations and we've evaluated them. Even though some organizations may not have as much experience and influence, they have the conviction and determination to grow in step with us. We want to give these organizations an opportunity. Also there are some organizations that are the exact opposite.
Are there any similarities between the eSports industry and the real estate industry you are in at the moment?
Both real estate and eSports are very exhausting industries to work in. A portion of the populace thinks real estate people are all ruthless and vicious housing developers, while eSports also faces an unsympathetic segment of public opinion. So is there nothing good in real estate and eSports? Definitely not! Both have the same sort of spirit--a spirit that strives unremittingly for success. This is why I want to make the eSports industry turn out well, relying on my industry-specific ability at promoting the game and my excellent resource integrating abilities, so we can show society and the populace the true potential of eSports. We are full of confidence in ourselves and the eSports industry.
CREDITS
Writers: TanGeng, CountChocula, Kupon3ss
Gfx: riptide
Editors: TheEmulator, Heyoka
Photograph by
Writers: TanGeng, CountChocula, Kupon3ssGfx: riptideEditors: TheEmulator, HeyokaPhotograph by Eugene Regis With the grand opening of The Shanghai E-Sports Competitive Center venue, WPC will be hosting the WPC ACE Dota 2 League, a bi-annual ACE Dota 2 League, featuring the best teams from China in an offline league running from September through December with a massive prize pool featuring a first place prize of $163,400. This is going to be one of the biggest Dota 2 leagues we have ever seen, and should help grow the eSports scene tremendously.For this preview we will be bringing to you an introduction on WPC, ACE, SCNTV, and Jingruis, the organizations behind the ACE League. As we mentioned the top teams in China and the world will be competing, so we have a some Team Previews for you as well. And to top it all off CountChocula was nice enough to translate an interview with Executive Wu, who is one of the main men running it all.We hope you enjoyed our preview of the ACE Dota 2 League, please follow it on TL from our LR Thread. Also visit the WPC/SCNTV website for more details.The WPC, World Esports Professional Classic, is the host for ACE Dota 2 League and is positioning itself to become a huge eSports brand in China. While professional Dota 2 is the focus for the international audience, there are three major parties making this and possibly future iterations of ACE Dota 2 possible. Two of these parties are largely newcomers to hosting national and international class Dota 2 events. These two parties likewise are extremely ambitious and the theme of WPC appears to be going as big as possible. The success and failure of this new Dota 2 League can have massive ramifications for the professional eSports scene in the years to come.At the center of the competition is ACE, Association of China Esports, an organization that represents players and teams involved in the eSports business. But in this case, ACE is most concerned with the success of the league as players and clubs interest align. The most prominent mission of ACE is in stablizing the professional scene such that both clubs and players are no longer in danger of disbanding or losing their teams at a moments notice. Part of this has been the enforcement of contracts within the eSports circle. Part of this has been to engage sponsors for a regular league that can secure income and livelihood for professionals.Close to a year ago, ACE attempted a smaller but similarly unprecedented event in War3 Dota and produced ACE Dota League with GTV. The 10 prominent professional teams of the Dota landscape converged for a three-month long league tournament. While first play prizes weren't much larger than those of G-League tournaments, ACE gave 30000 yuan to all participating teams as compensation for their time. Unfortunately despite the initiative ACE would see Royal, Tyloo, WE, and DTS dissolve immediately after conclusion of the league and would watch NA linger for another two months before also capitulating as teams transitioned to Dota 2.The WPC ACE Dota 2 League is a second and larger attempt at regular Dota league. If successful, WPC will become a host of a regular league with a massive prize pool, and ACE will be well on its way to fulfilling its most important mission. Yet, by luring in large money, ACE is opening itself up to being caught in the crossfire of political moves by the big commercial interests. It also potentially exposes a conflict of interest within ACE itself as it tries to balance the interests of the players, clubs, and the league, and after this initial success a whole new set of problems will be exposed in the eSports scene. At the same time, ACE must fend off criticism coming from nationalistic fans that see the organization as more of hindrance to scene and culpable for the disappointing performance of Chinese teams at TI.Historically, Jingruis has been a real-estate development company, consistently ranking top 100 in the country over the last decade. Jingruis has a particularly strong presence in Shanghai and the surrounding cities. With this investment into WPC, reputedly around 40 million yuan, Jingruis is using its real estate assets to break into the eSports business and help professional gaming gain wide social acceptance.Jingruis's investment at the Shanghai Esports Center, a 3000 square meters competitive arena, consisting of a competitive hall, training rooms, game demo area, and memorabilia shops and lounge space, and the WPC brand is not only for the ACE Dota 2 League. ACE Dota 2 League is merely the first major event to be hosted at the site. Jingruis envisions hosting competitions at all times of year and will use other games to fill up ACE Dota 2 Leagues's estimated six months of down time.In the future, Jingrui expects to expand the arena and WPC brand with additional 160 million yuan in investments and can use its political clout to push eSports into mainstream television. Based on press releases, Jingruis expects to increase both viewership and revenue by orders of magnitude above present levels and looks to large professional athletic leagues like the NBA for inspiration. Presently, WPC ACE will already have broken the 1 million yuan mark for prize purse and will only look to push it even higher.SCNTV was brought into the project by Jingruis for the production and broadcast of the ACE Dota2 League. However, compare to the more experience organizations of Gamefy/SiTV or GTV, SCNTV is a complete newbie to production of professional competitive events of Dota 2 and games of its genre. The majority of SCNTV's content in the past year has been Starcraft:Broodwar competitive games, and their only contact with Dota 2 has been in hosting Na`Vi during their China stay: http://navi.scntv.com. There is little |
further research or for licence fees for machines which either aren’t demonstrated, don’t work as claimed, or just plain don’t work. And while the inventors have pocketed a lot of money from their claims, the investors rarely see their investment money again.
Inventors may attempt to bolster their claims by saying that their device has been granted a patent. But patents aren’t proof an invention works; instead, they prevent other people from profiting from the inventor’s work.
Some have also claimed that there are conspiracies to suppress the development of free energy machines. But usually no evidence is provided to back up these claims. In any case, if a genuine free energy machine could be built, it would be far more profitable for a company to manufacture it and sell it than to smother the idea.
So next time you’re invited to contribute towards the work of someone developing what appears to be a free energy machine, please check carefully. You may be contributing to one of the greatest breakthroughs in science, or you may simply be contributing to a charlatan’s wallet.
Further reading:
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/people/people.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_machinesTypes of Government Systems
We have categorized types of government systems according to various factors like the philosophy applied, its rules, laws, etc. Governments can be broadly categorized as Types of Democracy, Republic Government, types of government that are based on Economic Systems, Types of Monarchy, Types of Oligarchy, Autocracy Examples and all Other Governments.Different types of governments have their own characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages. # Compare governments and find out the difference between them.
Political facts and Government Trivia
Some political facts and government trivia about different types of government are listed below:
1. The official name for the White House was given in 1901. Before that, it was called President's House, executive mansion or President's Palace.
2. At the time of the Commonwealth of England, the president as a term was used to describe the head of a government for the first time.
3. The shortest and the oldest written constitution of any of types of government system is considered as the U.S constitution. It has about 4400 words.
4. British Parliament is considered as an example or a model for most of the parliaments in the world. It is hence called as The Mother of Parliaments.
5. Sicilian Parliament is considered as the oldest parliament in the world.
6. In 1236 the term parliament as a government body came up for the first time.Spread the love
The mainstream media frenzy over the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is no surprise, as speculation has been ongoing for weeks—but the current obsession has been used to drown out serious accusations against the Royal Family that have been virtually ignored by the media.
From the moment reports claimed that Markle was dating the Prince, the rumor mill began speculating about when they would get engaged. However, when the second largest document leak in history painted the Royal Family in a much different light, attention from the mainstream media was nowhere to be found.
"Thrilled" and "so happy." Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are greeted with cheers at Kensington Palace after announcing their engagement. pic.twitter.com/p0KGDSsiro — NBC News (@NBCNews) November 27, 2017
The Paradise Papers, a leak comprised of 13.4 million documents from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, received very little media coverage—and the records implicating the Royal Family received even less.
As The Free Thought Project reported, among the world’s elite exposed in the Paradise Papers was Queen Elizabeth II. According to the leak, the Queen’s private estate has invested millions of pounds in a Cayman Islands fund that has a history of taking advantage of poor and mentally ill individuals.
It is a very serious matter that the Queen was implicated in extreme tax avoidance in #ParadisePapers AND that there has been no strong statement on the matter on her behalf. This reinforces the belief among super-rich that their behaviour is acceptable and not unpatriotic. — Tom London (@TomLondon6) November 14, 2017
The Paradise Papers also revealed that Queen Elizabeth II “has used offshore private equity funds designed to shield UK investors from having to pay US tax on their holdings.”
The documents were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. According to a report on the Paradise Papers from ICIJ:
“Queen Elizabeth II has invested millions of dollars in medical and consumer loan companies, Appleby’s files show. While the Queen’s private estate, the Duchy of Lancaster, provides some details of its investments in U.K. property, such as commercial buildings scattered across southern England, it has never disclosed details of its offshore investments. ‘Yes, the Duchy was aware that the Jubilee Absolute Return Fund was run offshore,’ said Chris Addock, chief finance officer of the Duchy of Lancaster. The records show that as of 2007, the queen’s private estate invested in a Cayman Islands fund that in turn invested in a private equity company that controlled BrightHouse, a U.K. rent-to-own firm criticized by consumer watchdogs and members of Parliament for selling household goods to cash-strapped Britons on payment plans with interest rates as high as 99.9 percent.”
The Queen’s investments were made in BrightHouse, Britain’s biggest rent-to-own retailer. The company was recently ordered to pay 14.8 million pounds to 249,000 customers after the watchdog Financial Conduct Authority found that it was guilty of overcharging customers and intentionally taking advantage of people with mental health problems and learning disabilities.
While investments from the Queen’s estate have reportedly been ongoing for the last 12 years, a report from the Guardian claimed that the Queen appeared to have around 519 million pounds worth of investments, as of the end of March.
The mainstream media’s hypocrisy is blatant when it comes to the Royal Family, and it serves as a reminder that when there is a new engagement to gossip about, there will be 24/7 coverage. But when documents are leaked showing that the Queen of England has reportedly made millions by exploiting poor and mentally ill individuals, the mainstream media has no interest in investigating.
Royal Family PR machine has been going into overdrive the past few weeks trying to distract from paradise papers leaks about the Queen haven't they. — Pierce Brosnan Fan (@KillSwitchFish) November 27, 2017In September 2009 I submitted an article to the feminist journal Women’s Studies International Forum, and in February 2010 I was informed that the journal had decided against publication. Nothing unusual in that, of course. No doubt the great majority of articles submitted to journals are rejected, for a multitude of reasons. But when I enquired why no reason had been given, the Editor-in-Chief replied that the paper had not been sent out for review as she did not feel that it had sufficient evidence in terms of references or citations to back up some of the claims that were made.
Now, whatever deficiencies there may have been in the article, insufficient citation was not one of them. In fact it was profusely referenced, with some sixty citations in an article of approximately 4000 words (Esterson 2009). The explanation was clearly spurious. Perhaps the subject matter, a critique of claims made in a Reader in Feminist Science Studies concerning the supposed contributions made by Einstein’s first wife to his celebrated 1905 papers, was inappropriate for the journal. Evidently not, as the journal previously published one of the most frequently cited articles on this very same subject: “Mileva Einstein-Marić: The Woman Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics” (Troemel-Ploetz 1990). I think we must look elsewhere for the explanation, which will perhaps emerge from an examination of the claims in question.
Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies (Wyer 2000) contains a chapter by the feminist sociologist Hilary Rose, reprinted from her book Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences: Love, Power and Knowledge (1994). In a section under the subheading “A dangerous combination of love and science” (1994, pp. 143-144; Wyer 2000, pp. 56-57) Rose purports to demonstrate that Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, made substantial contributions to his early scientific achievements, and that the failure to give her work due recognition exemplifies “the unbridled patriarchal power of appropriation” in the “early twentieth century scientific labour market”.
In the Introduction to the Reader in Feminist Science Studies, under the subheading “Scientific Behavior and the Scientific Method” the editors write: “In using the scientific method, it is assumed that scientists will adhere to a number of behavioral norms… They contain the essence, or spirit, of scientific enquiry…” (Wyer 2000, p. xix). Among five “scientific norms” the editors go on to list is that of “scepticism (all claims should be scrutinized for errors).” This should, of course, be an essential feature of all scholarly writings, and here I want to examine whether Rose’s historical contentions about Mileva Marić comply with to this exemplary precept.
After a very brief introduction in which she cites a biography of Marić by the Serbian author Desanka Trbuhović-Gjurić (1993 [1988]), Rose writes that the marriage was initially happy and mutually appreciative, exemplified by Einstein’s “explain[ing] to a group of Zagreb intellectuals that he needed his wife as ‘she solves all the mathematical problems for me’.”
Now one might have thought that the contention that Einstein’s first wife solved all his mathematical problems for him is something that required further investigation before endorsement. However, Rose is content to take the claim at face value. From her endnotes it is evident that she has not examined the biography she has cited, but relies on Troemel-Ploetz’s 1990 article for the information she is relaying (Rose 1994, p. 271, n.19; Wyer 2000, p. 66, n.9).
Had Rose consulted Trbuhović-Gjurić’s book she would have found that the “Zagreb intellectuals” were actually young comrades and friends of Marić’s medical student brother Miloš (1993, p. 93). Moreover, she would have seen that Trbuhović-Gjurić provides no reference for the quotation, nor even a specific occasion, so we are left to take the assertion on trust, something only too characteristic of the biography. Trbuhović-Gjurić’s evidence for such statements comes mostly third hand from friends and acquaintances of the Maric family obtained some sixty years after the events in question. Hometown folklore gathered from interested parties in such circumstances hardly constitutes reliable testimony.
One might have hoped that Rose would at least have made some attempt to ascertain whether the claim is tenable. Had she done so she would have found that whereas Einstein excelled in the mathematics he required in the early stages of his scientific career, it was Marić’s poor grade in the mathematical component (theory of functions) of her Zurich Polytechnic final teaching diploma examination (2.5 on a scale 1-6) that resulted in her failing the exam in 1900 (Albert Einstein Collected Papers, Vol. 1, 1987, doc. 67). Furthermore, the mathematics required for the 1905 papers to which Rose alludes in the following paragraph is not at a level that would have taxed Einstein’s mathematics abilities (Esterson 2006).
Rose now goes on to describe what she calls “two key episodes” that “document the process by which [Marić’s] work, if not actively appropriated, was certainly lost to [Einstein]”. She reports that “Mileva, through the collaboration with a mutual friend, Paul Habicht, constructed an innovatory device for measuring electrical currents. Having built the device the two inventors left it to Einstein to describe and patent…”
Here Rose is paraphrasing Troemel-Ploetz (p. 418), who in turn is quoting Trbuhović-Gjurić (1993, p. 83). But Trbuhović-Gjurić provides not a single reference to justify her assertions, and the only documents pertaining to this episode tell a very different story. There are around twenty letters exchanged between Einstein and one or other of the Habicht brothers (Conrad and Paul) in the years 1907-1911 in which the “little machine” (Maschinchen) is discussed, but there is no mention of any contribution from Marić (Collected Papers, Vol. 5, 1995). The development of the device for measuring small currents is well documented from the time Einstein reported his ideas for a new method of measuring very small quantities of electrical energy in a letter to Conrad and Paul Habicht dated 15 July 1907 (Fölsing 1997, pp. 239-241). (He had suggested the possibility of such a device in the final paragraph of a paper published in Annalen der Physik earlier that year [Collected Papers, Vol. 2, 1989, doc. 39].) Einstein and Conrad had become close friends since Einstein had moved to Bern in 1902, before his marriage the following year. Paul Habicht had started up a small instrument-making company in 1907, and used his laboratory for making and improving the device. There are nine letters from Paul to Einstein giving details of stages in the manufacture of the device, not one of which suggests that Marić was involved. At the end of three of these Paul adds conventional greetings to Einstein’s family, but he refers to “your wife”, not Mileva as one would expect if they had been working closely together in the way that Trbuhović-Gjurić claims. (In one letter to Einstein, dated 12 October 1908, Paul specifically refers to “your machine”.)[1]
In summary, the documentary evidence shows that it was Einstein who supplied the scientific knowledge and basic ideas that enabled Paul Habicht to manufacture the Maschinchen. There is not a single piece of evidence to support Trbuhović-Gjurić’s account of Marić’s major role in collaboration with Paul, and she supplies no information to indicate on what basis her contentions rest. But no matter. For Rose, this supposed episode illustrates “that the price of her selfless love… was that her work had become his.” (In the next sentence Rose makes the preposterous assertion that Marić “also lost her personal health through trying to do the mathematical work to support his theorizing and simultaneously take care of their children”.)
Rose next alludes is what she describes as “the even more disturbing episode of the articles published in 1905 in the Leipzig Annalen der Physik.” She continues:
Of the five key papers, two of the originally submitted manuscripts were signed also by Mileva, but by the time of their publication, her name had been removed. These two articles, written in what was widely understood as Einstein’s golden age, included the theory of special relativity which was to change the nature of physics, and for which he alone received the Nobel prize…
For this assertion Rose cites Troemel-Ploetz, who actually refers to three papers that “were written [by Einstein] together with his wife” – Rose has misread Troemel-Ploetz on this, and also when she erroneously writes that Einstein received the Nobel prize for his special relativity paper (Troemel-Ploetz 1990, p. 419; Trbuhović-Gjurić 1993, p. 97). However, the report by Trbuhović-Gjurić that is paraphrased by Troemel-Ploetz is an object lesson in how not to present an historical contention. She purports to provide the substance of a passage by the Soviet physicist Abraham Joffe in his article “In Remembrance of Albert Einstein”, published in 1955. Unfortunately she does not quote Joffe’s actual words, giving instead a paraphrase that includes the basic contention followed by supporting information that misleadingly reads as if it also came from Joffe. But the unreferenced supporting evidence is without foundation, as is her basic contention that Joffe stated that (in Troemel-Ploetz’s words) “the original manuscripts were signed Einstein-Marić”.
It is impossible in a short space to fully document the errors in Trbuhović-Gjurić’s contentions about Joffe, but this has been done in meticulous detail by John Stachel in his Introduction to the 1905 edition of Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics (Stachel, 2005, pp. liv-lxxii). As Alberto Martínez also documents, “Joffe did not claim that Marić co-authored or collaborated in any of Einstein’s papers. And he did not claim that her name was on the original manuscripts…” (Martínez, 2005, pp. 51-52). Martínez notes that in multiple places throughout his career Joffe acknowledged Einstein as sole author of the three papers. More specifically, relevant passages in Joffe’s book Begegnungen Mit Physikern (“Meetings with Scientists”) are inconsistent with all of Trbuhović-Gjurić’s contentions in the section in question (Joffe 1967, pp. 23-24, 92-93).
Rose claims that Stachel (whose name she gives as “Hackel”) “disturbingly… ignores the evidence” contained in Trbuhović-Gjurić’s biography, indicating that in this context she considers that “assertions” is a synonym for “evidence”. In fact Stachel had rebutted the main contentions at a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February 1990 (Stachel 2002, pp. 26-38). It is instructive to compare Rose’s cavalier attitude to what constitutes “evidence” with that of Stachel at that session: “I must emphasize that bare assertions, particularly by interested parties, do not constitute proof of such assertions, even when these assertions are repeated in print, even in a book” (Stachel 2002, p. 32).
In relation to the claims that she has recycled, Rose contends that Trbuhović-Gjurić’s biography has “raised doubts in the scientific community”, and cites a letter in Physics Today by Evan Harris Walker (Walker 1989; Rose 1994, p. 271, n.21; Wyer 2000, p. 66, n.11). Now Walker (who died in 2006) had a Ph.D. in physics, but he was hardly representative of the scientific community, having for some time been president of the Walker Cancer Research Institute. Rose writes that Trbuhović-Gjurić indicates that “Einstein was the creative thinker”, but he “could not have realized his theoretical insights without Mileva’s mathematics”. Leaving aside that only someone ignorant of the subject matter in question could write such scientific nonsense, one is left wondering how Rose can reconcile this statement with Walker’s contention in relation to the 1905 special relativity paper that “the background material, and most importantly, those most basic capricious ideas…came from Mileva, while the mathematics and proofs came largely from Albert” (Walker 1989, p. 11). That two of the original proponents of the thesis that Marić collaborated with Einstein on his 1905 papers can arrive at such opposite conclusions is in itself a measure of the paucity of the evidence on which the claims are based.
Contrary to Rose’s assertion about “doubts in the scientific community”, the historian of physics Gerald Holton and historian Robert Schulmann note that “All serious Einstein scholarship has shown that the scientific collaboration between the couple was slight and one-sided” (Holton and Schulmann 1995). (See Pais 1994, pp. 1-29; Holton 1996, pp. 170-93; Stachel 1996, pp. 207-219; Stachel 2002, pp. 26-38; Martínez 2005, pp. 49-56.) As for Walker’s contribution to the debate, Stachel stated in 1990: “I know nothing about cancer research, but if I had to judge Walker solely on the basis of his letter on Einstein, I would have to conclude that he is a fantasist, who judges reality on the basis of his own desires” (Stachel 2002, p. 26). (See also Esterson 2008.)
Illustrating the poor level of scholarship to be found in the article on which Rose relies, Troemel-Ploetz asks: “Why did [Einstein] not acknowledge in public that it was [Marić] who came up with the idea to investigate ether and its importance (Trbuhović-Gjurić 1983, p. 76)?” The reference is to a passage in Trbuhović-Gjurić’s biography containing the following quotation purportedly from Einstein:
Mileva believes in my abilities, she believes that I am able to perceive the truths in the processes of nature, regardless of the erroneous beliefs relating to them. It is she who first directed my attention to the significance of the ether presumed to exist throughout the universe. (Trbuhović-Gjurić 1993, p. 87 [my translation]).
Trbuhović-Gjurić states that Einstein made this statement to Miloš Marić, Mileva’s brother, supposedly in 1905. However, she provides no reference for the quotation, which certainly didn’t come directly from Miloš himself, as he stayed in Russia (later the Soviet Union) after being taken prisoner during the First World War, and didn’t return home before his death in 1944 (Trbuhović-Gjurić 1993, p. 161). In any case, we know the assertion in the second sentence is erroneous, as Einstein wrote an essay on the ether when he was only sixteen, before he had even met Marić (Collected Papers, Vol. 1, 1987, doc. 5). Furthermore, while there is no evidence that Marić had any specific interest in the ether, it was Einstein who wrote to her in August 1899 that he was “convinced more and more that the electrodynamics of moving bodies as it is presented today doesn’t correspond to reality”, and that the introduction of the term “ether” had “led to the conception of a medium whose motion can be described, without, I believe, being able to ascribe physical meaning to it” (Renn and Schulmann 1992, p. 10). In another letter the following month, at a time when Marić was revising for examinations, Einstein reported that he had come up “a good idea for investigating a body’s relative motion with respect to the luminiferous ether”, adding: “But enough of this! Your poor little head is already crammed with other people’s hobby horses that you’ve had to ride” (p. 14). Evidently interest in the ether was Einstein’s hobby horse, not Marić’s. That the words that Trbuhović-Gjurić attributes to Einstein contain an assertion that is documentably false serves to illustrate the unreliability of several like claims to be found in her biography.
Where does that leave us? A highly regarded feminist sociologist has uncritically reproduced claims about alleged contributions to Einstein’s celebrated 1905 papers by his first wife on the sole basis of an article which itself is almost entirely based on contentions in a book that fails to comply with the most fundamental scholarly standards. Trbuhović-Gjurić’s biography, containing no index or bibliography and almost entirely devoid of reference citations, is described, with justice, by the Einstein biographer Albrecht Fölsing as containing a combination of fictional invention and pseudo documentation (belletristischer Erfindung und Pseudodokumentation) (Fölsing 1990).
It is disappointing to find claims based on such dubious historical evidence further disseminated in a Feminist Science Studies Reader in the Introduction to which the editors enunciate the principle that factual claims should be treated with caution and scrutinized for errors. That Hilary Rose is by no means alone among feminist academics in failing to comply with this exemplary dictum in regard to Mileva Marić’s alleged scientific contributions is illustrated by a similarly misleading account by Andrea Gabor, deprecated by Holton and Schulmann for its “flights of journalistic fantasy” (Gabor 1995, pp. 3-32; Holton and Schulmann 1995; see Esterson 2007). In their treatment of this subject matter both authors reveal a propensity to endorse claims that are in accord with their preconceptions regardless of the calibre of the purported evidence. It is perhaps unsurprising that the editors of Women’s Studies International Forum are reluctant to be a party to revealing information of a nature likely to be unpalatable to many of its readers.
Note
1 It should be noted that, while lending no support to the story of Marić’s supposed leading role in collaboration with Paul Habicht, the biographer Carl Seelig writes of Einstein’s and Habicht’s “attempts to perfect [the machine] with occasional help from Mileva” (Seelig 1956, p. 60).
References
Einstein, A. (1987-2009). The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Vols. 1-12. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Esterson, A. (2006). Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics?: A Response to Troemel-Ploetz.
Esterson, A. (2007). Critique of Gabor (1995).
Esterson, A. (2008). Critique of Evan Harris Walker’s Letter in Physics Today, February 1991.
Esterson A. (2009). Maintaining Scholarly Standards in Feminist Literature: The Case of Hilary Rose and Mileva Marić.
Fölsing, A. (1997). Albert Einstein. (Trans. from the German by E. Osers.) New York: Penguin Books.
Fölsing, A. (1990). Keine ‘Mutter der Relativitätstheorie’. Die Zeit, 16 November 1990.
Gabor, A. (1995). Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth-Century Women. New York: Viking.
Holton, G. and Schulmann, R. (1995). Letter, New York Times, 8 October 1995.
Holton, G. (1996). Einstein, History, and Other Passions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Joffe, A. F. (1967). Begegnungen Mit Physikern. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner.
Martínez, A. A. (2005). Handling Evidence in History: The Case of Einstein’s Wife. School Science Review, March 2005, 86 (316), pp. 49-56.
Pais, A. (1994). Einstein Lived Here. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Renn, J. & Schulmann, R. (eds.) (1992). Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: The Love Letters. Trans. by S. Smith. Princeton University Press.
Rose, H. (1994). Love, Power, and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences. Cambridge: Polity.
Seelig, C. (1956). Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography. London: Staples Press.
Stachel, J. (1996). Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić: A Collaboration that Failed to Develop. In H. M. Pycior, N. G. Slack, & P. G. Abir-Am (eds.), Creative Couples in the Sciences, Rutgers University Press. Reprinted in J. Stachel (2002), Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’, Boston/Basel/Berlin: Birkhauser, pp. 39–55.
Stachel, J. (1989). Letter,
Physics Today, February 1989, pp. 11-13.
Stachel, J. (2002). Einstein from ‘B’ to ‘Z’. Boston/Basel/ Berlin: Birkhäuser.
(Einstein/Marić early correspondence, pp. 31-38.)
Stachel, J. (ed.) (2005). Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics. Princeton University Press.
(Rebuttal of the Joffe story, pp. liv-lxxii.)
Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1993). Im Schatten Albert Einsteins. Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić, (German translation of the original biography published in Yugoslavia in 1969. First German translation, 1983. Second German edition, edited and augmented,1988.) Bern: Paul Haupt.
Trbuhović-Gjurić, D. (1991). Mileva Einstein: Une Vie. (Trans. by N. Casanova of the 1988 German edition of Im Schatten Albert Einsteins. Das tragische Leben der Mileva Einstein-Marić.) Paris: Des femmes, Antoinette Fouque.
Troemel-Ploetz, S. (1990). “Mileva Einstein-Marić: The Woman Who Did Einstein’s Mathematics.” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 13, No. 5, 1990: 415-32.
Walker, E. H. (1989). Letter, Physics Today, February 1989, pp. 9-11.
Walker, E. H. (1991). Letter,
Physics Today, February 1991, pp. 122-23.
Wyer, M., Barbercheck, M., Giesman, D., Öztürk, H. and Wayne, M. (eds.) (2000). Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies. New York and London: Routledge.
Allen Esterson
April 2010A Vancouver landlord is apologizing for posting a rental ad demanding that any potential tenant not cook much, barely be home, and pay $1,400 for a two-bedroom basement suite on a busy street with no laundry.
The landlord told CTV News he’s been inundated with angry comments from renters saying he’s taking advantage of a tight rental market by making outrageous demands. But he says he was just trying to find a good fit.
“People took it the wrong way,” said Sunny. “We just put it up there so that we can not be like the other landlords where they have 500 people apply, and they hold them back from applying everywhere else.
“We just thought we’d put it out there and say ‘this is the type of person we’re looking for.’ It was taken out of hand and I think an apology is due to the people who did reply,” Sunny said.
CTV News is identifying him by his first name because he was concerned about more online retribution for the posting.
The landlord advertised the unit as being minutes away from SkyTrain and steps away from Commercial Drive, but said he’s only looking for “REALLY special tenants.”
What that means, according to his Craigslist ad, is people who won’t do much cooking, don’t have pets, and don’t plan to spend much time at home.
“Our ideal tenant would not cook much (only because the smell travels upstairs directly into our living room) and we are vegetarians so we don’t like the smell of meat either,” it read.
“Yes I know I’m asking for a lot but what the hey…”
Potential renters are also asked not to play loud music, party, or have many friends over.
Laundry isn’t included, nor is internet, TV, hydro or on-site parking. Still, for less than $1,500 a month, some home-seekers could potentially see it as a steal.
By comparison, a two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver's Kerrisdale neighbourhood is currently listed at $2,500, hydro and laundry included. Another two-bedroom home on the West Side is being offered for $1,800.
Sunny said he has two children and lives in the home with his wife. They purchased the property in 2004 and he said he’s grown up in the area.
His Craigslist ad was posted four days ago seeking a tenant for Oct. 15, but it has since been flagged for removal from the site.Blow jobs, cunnilingus and anal sex would all become illegal in Virginia if gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli II gets his way.
Cuccinelli, the state’s attorney general, has made the reinstatement of the Crimes Against Nature Law a focus of his campaign, according to his website.
The law, struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003, states: "If any person carnally knows in any manner any brute animal, or carnally knows any male or female person by the anus or by or with the mouth, or voluntarily submits to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a Class 6 felony."
While that includes everyone, gay or straight, young or old, married or single, Cuccinelli insists it’s all about the kids. His site names 90 child molesters prosecuted under the law.
But, according to the Washington Post, he voted against a 2004 measure to amend the law so it would no longer apply to consenting adults because he said "homosexual acts are wrong."(Image: Steffen Richter/Harvard)
Has the recent discovery of gravitational waves been reduced to dust? Not so fast.
The news that ripples in space-time, called gravitational waves, had been spotted stunned the physics community earlier this year. This week, rumours began swirling that the scientists who reported the find have now admitted to making a mistake. The team missed a key detail in its analysis of galactic dust, the rumours suggest, making it more likely that the signal came from a source other than gravitational waves.
But the team’s response to this claim is unequivocal: “We’ve done no such thing,” says principal investigator John Kovac at Harvard University. The validity of the discovery won’t be known until another group either supports or opposes their finding, which could happen later this year.
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In March, the BICEP2 collaboration announced that it had seen an imprint on ancient cosmic light that it says was created by gravitational waves. Those waves are thought to be products of inflation, a period of rapid growth during the first sliver of a second after the big bang. The finding was hailed as a smoking gun for the theory of inflation – and as evidence that theories of a multiverse may be true.
Misread map
Almost as soon as the buzz surrounding the discovery died down, doubts began cropping up. BICEP2’s signal was based on the alignment – or polarisation – of the first light emitted in the universe, a mere 380,000 years after the big bang. But other things could mimic the signal created by this light, such as the ashes of exploding stars or dust in our own galaxy.
The BICEP2 team strongly ruled out some of these alternative explanations, but there are others it can’t rule out yet. The first possible tiebreaker is expected to come from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which is set to release its own polarisation maps of the entire sky in October.
On 12 May, however, a rumour emerged on the physics blog Résonaances that the BICEP2 team has already admitted defeat. The blogger, particle physicist Adam Falkowski at CERN, says he has heard through the scientific grapevine that the BICEP2 collaboration misinterpreted a preliminary Planck map in its analysis. That map, presented at a conference, showed many possible sources of polarised light. The team reportedly used the map assuming that it only charted dust.
“The rumour is that the BICEP team has now admitted to the mistake,” wrote Falkowski.
Kovac says no one has admitted anything. “We tried to do a careful job in the paper of addressing what public information there was, and also being upfront about the uncertainties. We are quite comfortable with the approach we have taken.”
Dusty data trails
Even when Planck does release its complete map, the teams won’t be able to compare data side by side. The instruments on the Planck telescope produce noise that interferes with the signal, so the scope can’t tell exactly how much dust is in any isolated patch of sky, says Shaun Hotchkiss at the University of Helsinki in Finland. The BICEP2 team deliberately chose to look at a region that is relatively free of dust. The region had to be left off a preview map released by Planck last week because the small signal from the dust was difficult to distinguish from instrument noise, meaning Planck could not get an accurate polarisation pattern there.
The complete map from Planck will be able to tell how much dust there is in an average patch of sky, rather than specific areas. “A full-sky map from Planck where the dust polarisation fraction is quite large would be dangerous for BICEP,” says Hotchkiss.
Confirmation could also come from several other observatories able to spot ancient gravitational waves, such as the South Pole Telescope, the POLARBEAR experiment in Chile or the Keck Array – an experiment made up of five BICEP2-style telescopes that is led by the same team.
“That experiment has been observing this patch of sky for the past two years,” says Kovac. “We are working hard at analysing that new data, and we look forward to cross-correlating those data sets with others, including the South Pole Telescope and Planck maps when they become available. That’s where we are putting our focus.”Democratic Rep. Katherine Clark (Mass.) plans to skip the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE, the Boston Globe reports.
Clark, who was elected in 2013, said she believes attending the inauguration would "normalize" Trump's “bigoted, misogynist, anti-Semitic, and racist claims.”
Clark is breaking with the rest of the Massachusetts delegation, as all the other members from the state plan to attend the inauguration, the Globe notes.
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“I support the peaceful transition of power, but I don’t feel that I need to attend the pageantry associated with and for this President,” she said.
"There |
This was a handy 'confession', since Jack and Earl were both on the same team in terms of the cover up, and since it is now known that Jack worked directly with CIA in the assassination (see below.)
Proper response: This one can be difficult to respond to unless you see it clearly, such as in the following example, where more is known today than earlier in time... 'You are avoiding the issue with disinformation tactics. Your information is known to have been designed to side track
this issue. As revealed by CIA operative Marita Lorenz under oath, offered in court in E. Howard Hunt vs. Liberty Lobby, CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt, James McCord, et al., met with Jack Ruby in Dallas the night before the assassination of JFK to distribute guns and money. Clearly, Ruby was a coconspirator whose 'Solidarist confession' was meant to sidetrack any serious investigation of the murder AWAY from CIA. Why do you refuse to address the issues by use of such disinformation tactics (rule 20 - false evidence)?'
21. Call a Grand Jury, Special Prosecutor, or other empowered investigative body. Subvert the (process) to your benefit and effectively neutralize all sensitive issues without open discussion. Once convened, the evidence and testimony are required to be secret when properly handled. For instance, if you own the prosecuting attorney, it can insure a Grand Jury hears no useful evidence and that the evidence is sealed an unavailable to subsequent investigators. Once a favorable verdict is achieved, the matter can be considered officially closed. Usually, this technique is applied to find the guilty innocent, but it can also be used to obtain charges when seeking to frame a victim.
Example: According to one OK bombing Federal Grand Juror who violated the law to speak the truth, jurors were, contrary to law, denied the power of subpoena of witness of their choosing, denied the power of asking witnesses questions of their choosing, and relegated to hearing only evidence prosecution wished them to hear, evidence which clearly seemed fraudulent and intended to paint conclusions other than facts actually suggested.
Proper response: There is usually no adequate response to this tactic except to complain loudly at any sign of its application, particularly with respect to any possible cover up. This happened locally in Oklahoma, and as a result, a new Grand Jury has been called to rehear evidence that government officials knew in advance that the bombing was going to take place, and a number of new facts which indicate it was impossible for Timothy McVeigh to have done the deed without access to extremely advanced explosive devices such as available ONLY to the military or intelligence community, such as CIA's METC technology. Media has refused to cover the new Oklahoma Grand Jury process, by they way.
22. Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favorably. In this way, if you must actually address issues, you can do so authoritatively.
Example: The False Memory Syndrome Foundation and American Family Foundation and American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations fall into this category, as their founding members and/or leadership include key persons associated with CIA Mind Control research. Read "The Professional Paranoid" or "Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A." by Alex Constantine for
more information. Not so curious, then, that (in a perhaps oversimplified explanation here) these organizations focus on, by means of their own "research findings," that there is no such thing as Mind Control.
Proper response: Unless you are in a position to be well-versed in the topic and know of the background and relationships involved in the opponent organization, you are not well equipped to fight this tactic.
23. Create bigger distractions. If the above does not seem to be working to distract from sensitive issues, or to prevent unwanted media coverage of unstoppable events such as trials, create bigger news stories (or treat them as such) to distract the multitudes.
Example: To distract the public over the progress of a WTC bombing trial that seems to be uncovering nasty ties to the intelligence community, have an endless discussion of skaters whacking other skaters on the knee. To distract the public over the progress of the Waco trials that have the potential to reveal government sponsored murder, have an O.J. summer. To distract the public over an ever disintegrating McVeigh trial situation and the danger of exposing government involvements, come up with something else (Flight 800?) to talk about -- or, keeping in the sports theme, how about sports fans shooting referees and players during a game and the focusing on the whole gun control thing?
Proper response: The best you can do is attempt to keep public debate and interest in the true issues alive and point out that the 'news flap' or other evasive tactic serves the interests of your opponents.
24. Silence critics. If the above methods do not prevail, consider removing opponents from circulation by some definitive solution so that the need to address issues is removed entirely. This can be by their death, arrest and detention, blackmail or destruction of their character
by release of blackmail information, or merely by destroying them financially, emotionally, or severely damaging their health.
Example: As experienced by certain proponents of friendly-fire theories with respect to flight 800 -- send in FBI agents to intimidate and threaten that if they persisted further, they would be subject to charges of aiding and abetting Iranian terrorists, of failing to register as a foreign agents, or any other trumped-up charges. If this doesn't work, you can always plant drugs and bust them.
Proper response: You have three defensive alternatives if you think yourself potential victim of this ploy. One is to stand and fight regardless. Another is to create for yourself an insurance policy which will point to your opponents in the event of any unpleasantness, a matter which requires superior intelligence information on your opponents and great care in execution to avoid dangerous pitfalls (see "The Professional Paranoid" by this author for suggestions on how this
might be done). The last alternative is to cave in or run (same thing.)
25. Vanish. If you are a key holder of secrets or otherwise overly illuminated and you think the heat is getting too hot, to avoid the issues, vacate the kitchen.
Example: Do a Robert Vesco and retire to the Caribbean. If you don't, somebody in your organization may choose to vanish you the way of Vince Foster or Ron Brown.
Proper response: You will likely not have a means to attack this method, except to focus on the vanishing in hopes of uncovering it was by foul play or deceit as part of a deliberate cover up.
Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
by H. Michael Sweeney
<[email protected]>
copyright (c) 1997, 2000 All rights reserved
(Revised April 2000 - formerly SEVEN Traits)
1) Avoidance. They never actually discuss issues head-on or provide constructive input, generally avoiding citation of references or credentials. Rather, they merely imply this, that, and the other. Virtually everything about their presentation implies their authority and expert knowledge in the matter without any further justification for credibility.
2) Selectivity. They tend to pick and choose opponents carefully, either applying the hit-and-run approach against mere commentators supportive of opponents, or focusing heavier attacks on key opponents who are known to directly address issues. Should a commentator become argumentative with any success, the focus will shift to include the commentator as well.
3) Coincidental. They tend to surface suddenly and somewhat coincidentally with a new controversial topic with no clear prior record of participation in general discussions in the particular public arena involved. They likewise tend to vanish once the topic is no longer of
general concern. They were likely directed or elected to be there for a reason, and vanish with the reason.
4) Teamwork. They tend to operate in self-congratulatory and complementary packs or teams. Of course, this can happen naturally in any public forum, but there will likely be an ongoing pattern of frequent exchanges of this sort where professionals are involved. Sometimes one of the players will infiltrate the opponent camp to become a source for straw man or other tactics designed to dilute opponent presentation strength.
5) Anti-conspiratorial. They almost always have disdain for 'conspiracy theorists' and, usually, for those who in any way believe JFK was not killed by LHO. Ask yourself why, if they hold such disdain for conspiracy theorists, do they focus on defending a single topic discussed in a NG focusing on conspiracies? One might think they would either be trying to make fools of everyone on every topic, or simply ignore the group they hold in such disdain. Or, one might more rightly conclude they have an ulterior motive for their actions in going out of their way to focus as they do.
6) Artificial Emotions. An odd kind of 'artificial' emotionalism and an unusually thick skin -- an ability to persevere and persist even in the face of overwhelming criticism and unacceptance. This likely stems from intelligence community training that, no matter how condemning the
evidence, deny everything, and never become emotionally involved or reactive. The net result for a disinfo artist is that emotions can seem artificial. Most people, if responding in anger, for instance, will express their animosity throughout their rebuttal. But disinfo types usually have trouble maintaining the 'image' and are hot and cold with respect to pretended emotions and their usually more calm or unemotional communications style. It's just a job, and they often seem unable to 'act their role in character' as well in a communications medium as they might be able in a real face-to-face conversation/confrontation. You might have outright rage and indignation one moment, ho-hum the next, and more anger later -- an emotional yo-yo. With respect to being thick-skinned, no amount of criticism will deter them from doing their job, and they will generally continue their old disinfo patterns without any adjustments to criticisms of how obvious it is that they play that game -- where a more rational individual who truly cares what others think might seek to improve their communications style, substance, and so forth, or simply give up.
7) Inconsistent. There is also a tendency to make mistakes which betray their true self/motives. This may stem from not really knowing their topic, or it may be somewhat 'freudian', so to speak, in that perhaps they really root for the side of truth deep within. I have noted that often, they will simply cite contradictory information which neutralizes itself and the author. For instance, one such player claimed to be a Navy pilot, but blamed his poor communicating skills (spelling, grammar, incoherent style) on having only a grade-school education. I'm not aware of too many Navy pilots who don't have a college degree. Another claimed no knowledge of a particular topic/situation but later claimed first-hand knowledge of it.
8) BONUS TRAIT: Time Constant. Recently discovered, with respect to News Groups, is the response time factor. There are three ways this can be seen to work, especially when the government or other empowered player is involved in a cover up operation:
1) ANY NG posting by a targeted proponent for truth can result in an IMMEDIATE response. The government and other empowered players can afford to pay people to sit there and watch for an opportunity to do some damage. SINCE DISINFO IN A NG ONLY WORKS IF THE READER SEES IT -- FAST RESPONSE IS CALLED FOR, or the visitor may be swayed towards truth.
2) When dealing in more direct ways with a disinformationalist, such as email, DELAY IS CALLED FOR -- there will usually be a minimum of a 48-72 hour delay. This allows a sit-down team discussion on response strategy for best effect, and even enough time to 'get permission' or instruction from a formal chain of command.
3) In the NG example 1) above, it will often ALSO be seen that bigger guns are drawn and fired after the same 48-72 hours delay -- the team approach in play. This is especially true when the targeted truth seeker or their comments are considered more important with respect to
potential to reveal truth. Thus, a serious truth sayer will be attacked twice for the same sin.
I close with the first paragraph of the introduction to my unpublished book, "Fatal Rebirth":
Truth cannot live on a diet of secrets, withering within entangled lies. Freedom cannot live on a diet of lies, surrendering to the veil of oppression. The human spirit cannot live on a diet of oppression, becoming subservient in the end to the will of evil. God, as truth incarnate, will not long let stand a world devoted to such evil. Therefore, let us have the truth and freedom our spirits require... or let us die seeking these things, for without them, we shall surely and
justly perish in an evil world.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact The Professional Paranoid: email H. Michael Sweeney
[email protected]
P.O. Box 1941
Clackamas, OR 97015
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.proparanoid.com/post.htm
Disinformation in Action: Operation Mockingbird and the Washington Post
The very lengthy (25 pages typwritten) document below is actually a letter to the Washington Post by Julian C. Holmes, in which he takes the Post to task for decades of disinformation -- typically in the form of combating what the Post likes to describe as 'conspiracy theory' which,
in the end, turns out to be conspiracy fact. This uncopyrighted document was borrowed with permission from Michael Rivero's excellent Web site:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
In an unusual format, Holmes carefully documents each accusation with footnotes, a valuable
tool for the reader. This is no mere rant, no mere opinionated dissatisfaction, no angry response dashed off without thinking. No, it is an indictment. Nestled within the over 100 footnotes and the not quite as many individual examples of supression and distrotions of truth, and even fabrications of 'truth', is a root-most clue to the real problem -- a problem which reader should take care not to miss grasping...
That is the covert role played by the Washington Post in CIA's Operation Mockingbird, which is the infiltration and control of American media to insure that you and I never quite hear the truth as it really is. You will learn how the owner/publisher of the Post, Phillip Graham and graduate of the Army Intelligence School was literally the founding director of Operation Mockingbird on behalf of CIA. The significance is amplified when it is understood that Mockingbird was not simply the sell-out of a newspaper. It was the organized infiltration and in some cases the actual take over of the top 25 newpapers in the United States, major television networks, high-profile magazines, the wire services (Reuters was an outright CIA-owned and operated front until'sold' to 'private' interests) and even motion picture studios. Since then, of course, it has expanded further. For more information, visit Rivero's site and read the excellent piece found there by author Alex Constantine, "Tales From They Crypt."
We might expect a fascist dictatorship to use the motto-policy of "Do what we tell you or else!" We would prefer to believe that our own democratic and free nation's motto-policy would be "Do what you think best." However, thanks to a secret government and CIA, it is actually "Do what we tell you to think best." That may have been what Eisenhower was warning us about when he coined the the phrase "military industrial complex" in his farewell address. In my own writing, I have followed his lead and updated the phrase to that of simply: MIIM -- the Military Industrial Intelligence Media complex. Subscribe to the Washington Post, dear sheep, and welcome to the New World Order. Or, listen to Holmes and decide for yourself. It is still your choice to make, despite what they would have you believe...
April 25, 1992
Richard Harwood, Ombudsman
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street NW
Washington, D.C. 20071
Dear Mr. Harwood,
Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government "conspiracy," and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability the dreaded "CONSPIRACY THEORY"!!
It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko "CONSPIRACY THEORISTS."
Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.
Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post
sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2).
But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988, Leslie Cockburn published "Out of Control," a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this
discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5).
Sworn testimony before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations confirmed U.S. Government complicity in the drug trade (*6). With its coverup of the arms/drug conspiracy evaporating, the ever-accommodating Post shifted gears and retained Hosenball to exorcise from our minds a newly emerging threat to domestic tranquility, the "October Surprise" conspiracy (*7). But close on the heels of Hosenball and the Post came Barbara Honegger and then Gary Sick who authored independently, two years apart, books with the same title, "October Surprise" (*8). Honegger was a member of the Reagan/Bush campaign and transition teams in 1980. Gary Sick, professor of Middle East Politics at Columbia University, was on the staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. In 1989 and 1991 respectively, Honegger and Sick published their evidence of how the Republicans made a deal to supply arms to Iran if Iran would delay release of the 52 United States hostages until after the November 1980 election. The purpose of this deal was to quash the possibility of a pre-election release (an October surprise). which would have bolstered the reelection prospects for President Carter.
Others published details of this alleged Reagan-Bush conspiracy. In October 1988, Playboy Magazine ran an expose "An Election Held Hostage"; FRONTLINE did another in April 1991 (*9).
In June, 1991 a conference of distinguished journalists, joined by 8 of the former hostages,
challenged the Congress to "make a full, impartial investigation" of the election/hostage allegations. The Post reported the statement of the hostages, but not a word of the conference itself which was held in the Dirksen Senate Office Building Auditorium (*10). On February 5, 1992 a gun-shy, uninspired House of Representatives begrudgingly authorized an "October Surprise" investigation by a task force of 13 congressmen headed by Lee Hamilton (D-IN), who had chaired the House of Representatives Iran-Contra Committee. Hamilton has named as chief team counsel Larry Barcella, a lawyer who represented BCCI when the Bank was indicted in 1988 (*11).
Like the Washington Post, Hamilton had not shown interest in pursuing the U.S. arms-for-drugs operation (*12). He had accepted Oliver North's lies,and as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee he derailed House Resolution 485, which had asked President Reagan to answer
questions about Contra support activities of government officials and others (*13). After CIA operative John Hull (from Hamilton's home state) was charged in Costa Rica with "international drug trafficking and hostile acts against the nation's security," Hamilton and 18 fellow members of Congress tried to intimidate Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez into handling Hull's case "in a manner that will not complicate U.S.-Costa Rican relations" (*14). The Post did not report the Hamilton letter or the Costa Rican response that declared Hull's case to be "in as good hands as our 100-year-old uninterrupted democracy can provide to all citizens" (*15).
Though the Post does its best to guide our thinking away from conspiracy theories, it is difficult to avoid the fact that so much wrongdoing involves government or corporate conspiracies:
In its COINTELPRO operation, the FBI used disinformation, forgery, surveillance, false arrests, and violence to illegally harass U.S.citizens in the 60's (*16).
The CIA's Operation MONGOOSE illegally sabotaged Cuba by "destroying crops, brutalizing citizens, destabilizing the society, and conspiring with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and other leaders" (*17).
"Standard Oil of New Jersey was found by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice to be conspiring with I.G.Farben...of Germany....By its cartel agreements with Standard Oil, the United States was effectively prevented from developing or producing [for World War-II] any substantial amount of synthetic rubber," said Senator Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin (*18).
U.S. Government agencies knowingly withheld information about dosages of radiation "almost certain to produce thyroid abnormalities or cancer" that contaminated people residing near the nuclear weapons factory at Hanford, Washington (*19).
Various branches of Government deliberately drag their feet in getting around to cleaning up the Nation's dangerous nuclear weapons sites (*20). State and local governments back the nuclear industry's secret public relations strategy (*21).
"The National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and some twenty comprehensive cancer centers, have misled and confused the public and Congress by repeated claims that we are winning the war against cancer. In fact, the cancer establishment has continually minimized the evidence for increasing cancer rates which it has largely attributed to smoking and dietary fat, while discounting or ignoring the causal role of avoidable eposures to industrial carcinogens in the air, food, water, and the workplace." (*22).
The Bush Administration coverup of its pre-Gulf-War support of Iraq "is yet another example of the President's people conspiring to keep both Congress and the American people in the dark" (*23).
If you think about it, conspiracy is a fundamental aspect of doing business in this country.
Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24).
Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend $100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds" (*26), rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death" (*27).
Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft from the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of INSLAW's technology," says former U.S.
Attorney General Elliot Richardson (*28).
Or Watergate.
Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" (*29), where the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S. intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where bribery of prominent American
public officials "was a way of doing business" (*32).
Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil of California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to transportation companies throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles] (*33).
Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT). and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by General Motors in the early 60's (*34).
Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived, covered up, andcovered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35).
Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all 364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974 (*36).
Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug Diethylstilbestrol (DES), that was sold by manufacturers who ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37).
Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House, Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of the American people" will cost U.S.
tapayers many hundreds of billions of dollars (*38).
Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers, Federal Pacific, and General Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial equipment (*39).
Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT) officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs (*40).
Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge of medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41).
Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people of Nicaragua, a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into a more repressive force (*43).
Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere in the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions, and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of the legitimately elected government and the assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46).
Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the Panama Canal Treaties (*47).
Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy of American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of
Iranian Prime Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49).
Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice Lumumba (*50).
Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush, Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S. Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51).
Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates to head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52).
Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53).
Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of birth control or abortion" (*54).
Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve common purpose in Central America" (*55).
Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel (*56).
Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility (*57).
Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government of South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the 1968 U.S. presidential election (*58).
Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59).
Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60).
Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish "The Satanic Verses" in paperback (*61).
Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits big business or big government.
Such a conspiracy would be like our benevolent CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government to help out U.S. oil companies; or like our illegal war against Panama to tighten U.S. control over Panama and the Canal; or like monopoly control of broadcasting that facilitates corporate censorship on issues of public importance (*62). When the camouflage of such conspiracies is stripped away, public confidence in the conspiring officials can erode depending on how seriously the citizenry perceives the conspiracy to have violated the public trust. Erosion of public trust in the status quo is what the Post seems to see as a real threat to its corporate security.
Currently, the Post has mounted vituperative, frenzied attacks on Oliver Stone's movie "JFK", which reexamines the U.S. Government's official (Warren Commission. finding that a single gunman, acting alone, killed President John F. Kennedy. The movie also is the story of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's unsuccessful prosecution of Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried in connection with the assassination. And the movie proposes that the Kennedy assassination was the work of conspirators whose interests would not be served by a president who, had he lived, might have disengaged us from our war against Vietnam.
The Post ridicules a reexamination of the Kennedy assassination along lines suggested by "JFK." Senior Post journalists like Charles Krauthammer, Ken Ringle, George Will, Phil McCombs, and Michael Isikoff have been called up to man the bulwarks against public sentiment, which has never supported the government's non-conspiratorial assassination thesis. In spite of the facts that the Senate Intelligence Committee of 1975 and 1976 found that "both the FBI and CIA had repeatedly lied to the Warren Commission" (*63) and that the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that President Kennedy was probably killed "as a result of a conspiracy" (*64), a truly astounding number of Post stories have been used as vehicles to discredit "JFK" as just another conspiracy (*65).
Some of the more vicious attacks on the movie are by editor Stephen Rosenfeld, and journalists Richard Cohen, George Will, and George Lardner Jr (*66). They ridicule the idea that Kennedy could have had second thoughts about escalating the Vietnam War and declaim that there is no historical justification for this idea. Seasoned journalist Peter Dale Scott, former Pentagon/CIA liaison chief L. Fletcher Prouty, and investigators David Scheim and John Newman have each authored defense of the "JFK" thesis that Kennedy was not enthusiastic about staying in Vietnam (*67). But the Post team just continues ranting against the possibility of a high-level assassination conspiracy while offering little justification for its arguments.
An example of particularly shabby scholarship and unacceptable behavior is George Lardner Jr's contribution to the Post's campaign against the movie. Lardner wrote three articles, two before the movie was completed, and the third upon its release. In May, six months before the movie came out, Lardner obtained a copy of the first draft of the script and, contrary to accepted standards, revealed in the Post the contents of this copyrighted movie (*68). Also in this article, (*69). Lardner discredits Jim Garrison with hostile statements from a former Garrison associate Pershing Gervais. Lardner does not tell the reader that subsequent to the Clay Shaw trial, in a U.S. Government criminal action brought against Garrison, Government witness Gervais, who helped set up Garrison for prosecution, admitted under oath that in a May 1972 interview with a New Orleans television reporter, he, Gervais, had said that the U.S. Government's case against Garrison was a fraud (*70). The Post's 1973 account of the Garrison acquittal mentions this controversy, but when I recently asked Lardner about this, he was not clear as to whether he remembered it (*71).
Two weeks after his first "JFK" article, Lardner blustered his way through a justification for his unauthorized possession of the early draft of the movie (*72). He also defended his reference to Pershing Gervais by lashing out at Garrison as a writer "of gothic fiction."
When the movie was released in December, Lardner "reviewed" it (*73). He again ridiculed the film's thesis that following the Kennedy assassination, President Johnson reversed Kennedy's plans to de-escalate the Vietnam War. Lardner cited a memorandum issued by Johnson four days after Kennedy died. Lardner says this memorandum was written before the assassination, and that it "was a continuation of Kennedy's policy." In fact, the memorandum was drafted the day before the assassination by McGeorge Bundy (Kennedy's Assistant for National Security Affairs) Kennedy was in Texas, and may never have seen it. Following the assassination, it was rewritten; and the final version provided for escalating the war against Vietnam (*74) facts that Lardner avoided.
The Post's crusade against exposing conspiracies is blatantly dishonest:
The Warren Commission inquiry into the Kennedy Assassination was for the most part conducted in secret. This fact is buried in the Post (*75). Nor do current readers of this newspaper find meaningful discussion of the Warren Commission's secret doubts about both the FBI and the CIA (*76). Or of a dispatch from CIA headquarters instructing co-conspirators at field stations to counteract the "new wave of books and articles criticizing the [Warren] Commission's findings...[and] conspiracy theories...[that] have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization" and to "discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts, especially politicians and editors "and to "employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics....Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose....The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists..." (*77).
In 1979, Washington journalist Deborah Davis published Katharine The Great, the story of Post publisher Katharine Graham and her newspaper's close ties with Washington's powerful elite, a number of whom were with the CIA.
Particularly irksome to Post editor Benjamin Bradlee was a Davis claim that Bradlee had "produced CIA material" (*78). Understandably sensitive about this kind of publicity, Bradlee told Davis' publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, "Miss Davis is lying...I never produced CIA material...what I can do is to brand Miss Davis as a fool and to put your company in that special little group of publishers who don't give a shit for the truth." The Post bullied HBJ into recalling the book; HBJ shredded 20,000 copies; Davis sued HBJ for breach of contract and damage to reputation; HBJ settled out of court; and Davis published her book elsewhere with an appendix that demonstrated Bradlee to have been deeply involved with producing cold-war/CIA propaganda (*79). Bradlee still says the allegations about his association with people in the CIA are false, but he has apparently taken no action to contest the xetensive documentation presented by Deborah Davis in the second and third editions of her book (*80).
And it's not as if the Post were new to conspiracy work.
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* Former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, "believing that the function of the press was more often than not to mobilize consent for the policies of the government, was one of the architects of what became a widespread practice:the use and manipulation of journalists by the
CIA" (*81). This scandal was known by its code name Operation MOCKINGBIRD. Former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein cites a ^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^ former CIA deputy director as saying, "It was widely known that Phil Graham was someone you could get help from" (*82). More recently the Post provided cover for CIA personality Joseph Fernandez by "refusing to print his name for over a year up until the day his indictmen twas announced...for crimes committed in his official capacity as CIA station chief in Costa Rica" (*83).
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Of the meetings between Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed, a former CIA man recalls, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month" (*84). One may wish to consider Philip
Graham's philosophy along with a more recent statement from his wife Katharine Graham, current Chairman of the Board of the Washington Post. In a lecture on terrorism |
of the Charmant’s charm.
If you squint a little and imagine that the rear most passenger window isn’t there, then you’ll almost see a KE70 Corolla. They’re both the same chassis, but just with different exterior details. The lights, both front and rear, are larger and more unsightly than the Toyota equivalents. The boot area is different too, with a slight slope to it.
Bryan doesn’t seem to take the car too seriously, but the work involved in turning this into what it is today has been significant. It has undergone a complete and total restoration before it received a transformation, too.
Originally, this Daihatsu came with a lethargic Toyota 4K. The Charmant wasn’t created with performance in mind, so the 1.3-litre OHV engine was perfectly suited for what Daihatsu intended to be a comfortable saloon car. For what Bryan had in mind, the 4K was never going to suffice however, and a little bit of AE86 DNA would have to be injected into the equation.
Speedhunters readers will of course be familiar with the 4A-GE 16-valve engine and likely its 4A-GZE supercharged cousin, the latter of which Bryan chose as the base for a turbo conversion.
The sparkling pink paint in the engine bay was a deliberate choice; something to reinforce the idea of this Charmant being dull on the outside but quite the opposite underneath.
Rather than repeating the spec list below, I’ll just say that the engine work is considerable. There hasn’t been a dyno session, but power is estimated at around 190-200hp, which has been deduced from the Charmant pulling on a DC5 Integra Type R in a drag race. I mean, how else would you figure these things out?
One of the neatest parts of the build is the custom ‘Twin Cam 16 Turbo Charger’ cam cover. Utilising an original 4AG-ZE ‘Super Charger’ cover, the ‘Super’ portion was filled and smoothed before being re-machined with the ‘Turbo’ lettering. If anything, it’s probably the best example to show you the level of thought and detail that has gone into this project.
With the night growing colder courtesy of strong winds, we headed back to civilisation and took shelter beneath a bridge at a railway station. Under the brighter lights, it gave us a better opportunity to look closer at the car.
To accommodate the 4A-GTE and the increase in power, the original floorpan has been seam-welded to give an increase in strength. The K50 gearbox has been replaced with a rebuilt T50, too.
In order to completely remove the cable clutch operated setup of the factory 4K and K50 combination, Bryan used a CE70 Corolla’s hydraulic pedal box. The AE86 loaned many pieces to the puzzle too; a full AE86 wiring loom was used front-to-back along with a front cross-member and rear axle housing. The fuel tank too is an AE86 item, as is the brake bias valve which has been fitted inside the bulkhead, in order to hide the hoses and keep the engine bay as clean as possible.
The fitment is flush and functional. Diamond Racing SC Series wheels have been deployed front and rear in identical sizes (15×8-inch) but just with differing offsets (0 at the front and -12 at the rear).
The bumper-less rear wasn’t a purpose-made decision, rather it has just proved very difficult to source a rear bumper. Luckily for Bryan, the bumper-less look is quite strong at the minute and it adds a little bit of aggression to the overall look of the car.
The only real aesthetic addition is the front chin spoiler which he acquired second hand, its origins unknown.
The interior has been suitably upgraded too, with a 360mm Nardi wheel, a pair of Recaro SR2s and the factory rear seats having been re-trimmed to match the fronts.
The instrument cluster has been replaced with a custom item which houses the new gauges.
A Simple Recipe, Well Executed
Before we parted ways, I managed to grab a quick walk-around video to give you a better appreciation of the proportions and sound of the car. It’s a bit grainy but I’m sure you’ll survive.
I would expect a lot of people to turn their noses up at a car like this. I think in years previous, I probably would have too, especially if I didn’t bother to take a closer look.
But I love everything about this car. Even as we were wrapping things up, I still found myself trying to find other unexplored angles of the car. The whole idea behind the Charmant and the way it has all been executed is simply brilliant.
For me, it’s a car built for the right reasons. It was never meant to evolve this way, but this is what happens when you have someone who is so passionate about cars behind a project that they just have to keep taking it one step further.
Further to this, it’s the result of someone who built a car entirely for their own pleasure. I don’t recall seeing a single tweet, ‘gram or Facebook post about this car as it came together. It’s the result of one guy and some friends whiling away their time doing what they love. And while Bryan is the first to make a joke about the car, I really feel that it’s his way of showing affection for it, much like how many of us will take the piss out of our friends as an act of endearment.
You can call it ugly, you can call it whatever you want, because at the end of the day it puts a smile on the owner’s face, and that’s all that matters.
Paddy McGrath
Instagram: pmcgphotos
Twitter: pmcgphotos
[email protected]
Bryan Duggan’s 4A-GTE-powered Daihatsu Charmant
Numbers
Max Power: ~200hp
Engine
Toyota 4A-GZE long block, TRD 0.8mm head-gasket, ARP head studs, Toda 264 inlet & 256 exhaust cams with Toda cam pulleys, T3 small-port to big-port inlet manifold adaptor, Kelway exhaust manifold, T25G turbo with HKS actuator, A’PEXi 75mm air filter, 3-inch down-pipe, Trust MX cat-back exhaust, TRD engine mounts, Koyo radiator, Samco AE86 silicone hose set, Lancer Evolution IV intercooler, RS Chita sump baffle, HKS oil pressure increase kit with head oil feed restrictor, AE101 4A-GZE ECU and wiring loom, custom made Twin Cam Turbo Charger cam cover, various AN fittings for oil & fuel lines
Driveline
Rebuilt T50 gearbox, 4.1:1 6.7-inch rear end with Cusco RS 2-way LSD and kouki-spec shafts, TRD 212mm sport clutch with black-top flywheel
Suspension/Brakes
MCN short-stroke front inserts with coilover converted struts using Rix coilover sleeves & Faulkner race springs, Cusco front roll centre adjusters & camber plates, Cusco front & rear braces, Uras inner tie rods, P/S steering knuckles, Black Diamond drilled & grooved discs, Project Mu B-Spec front pads, D1 Spec rear pads, Goodridge braided caliper hoses, TRD green short-stroke rear dampers, TRD race height 6kg/mm rear springs, Cusco Formula Jr rear 4-link & Formula panhard rod, T3 traction brackets, various poly-bushings
Wheels/Tyres
Diamond Racing SC 15×8-inch 0 offset wheels with Advan Neova AD08 tyres (front), Diamond Racing SC 15×8-inch -12 offset wheels with Kingstar tyres
Exterior
Seam-welded floor pan, AE86 brake bias valve, AE86 handbrake, AE86 front cross member and rear axle housing, AE86 fuel tank with Walbro 255lph pump, full AE86 wiring loom front to back, CE70 Corolla hydraulic pedal box, front lip
Interior
AE86 carpet, Recaro SR2 seats with rear seat retrimmed to match colour, headlining re-trimmed in black suede, custom instrument cluster, GReddy 60mm gauges & Auto Gauge 80mm tacho, Ultra Speed Monitor for vehicle speed, Nardi Classic 360mm wheel fitted to HKB hub, Odyssey PC680 battery in the boot
More Engine Swapped cars on Speedhunters
Cutting Room FloorMinnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson is known for his bruising running style. But watching video in a recent meeting with NFL officials has the star player reconsidering how he runs the football.
Peterson explained his change of heart to the Star Tribune on Tuesday.
"How I'm going to attack it is just try to keep my head up at all times and not lower my head," Peterson said. "Not only because I could hurt someone else, but I could hurt myself as well. When I seen that play last night, you could sense how bad it could have been had I been hit the wrong way. So just being visual and seeing that, there is even more emphasis that I'm going to abide by that rule to protect myself."
Hits by Peterson and Cleveland Browns running back Trent Richardson were featured in the video screened by league officials as part of an effort to educate players on how the new crown-of-the-helmet rule will be called during the season.
-- Marcas Grant, contributing editorSen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on Sunday called the administration's proposal to avoid the term "Islamic extremism" in national security references "absolutely Orwellian and counterproductive."
Lieberman revealed on "Fox News Sunday" that he had sent a letter to the president's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, saying in part: "The failure to identify our enemy for what it is, violent Islamist extremism, is offensive and contradicts thousands of years of accepted military and intelligence doctrine to know your enemy."
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The chairman of the Homeland Security Committee said the letter was the product of him growing "so frustrated" with the White House over the terminology issue. He said the Defense Department omitted references to "violent Islamist extremism" in its report on the massacre at Fort Hood.
"Clearly, from the record, [Nidal Malik Hasan] was motivated by Islamist extremism, and they didn't mention that term there," Lieberman said.
"This is not honest," the senator said, adding that by dropping the clarification of extremism, "we disrespect the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are not extremists."
Lieberman said that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were not carried out by "some amorphous group of violent extremists or environmental extremists or white supremacist extremists."
"It's absolutely Orwellian and counterproductive to the fight that we're fighting at risk of great life every day to stop violent extremism of an Islamist base," he said.An outbound Metra Union Pacific Northwest Line train scheduled to end in Crystal Lake this afternoon was stopped after fatally striking a pedestrian, officials said.
Train No. 709, which was to arrive in Crystal Lake at 2:55 p.m., struck the pedestrian at 3:20 p.m., said Metra spokesman Tom Miller.
The incident happened near the area of Pingree Road just east of the train station in Crystal Lake, said Miller.
The train had left Chicago and was nearing the end of its run when the incident happened, Miller said. There were about 22 passengers on the train.
Outbound train No. 711, which was running behind the train that struck the pedestrian and was due into Crystal Lake at 3:55 p.m., also was delayed as the investigation continued, Miller said.
In addition to these outbound trains, inbound train No. 720, due into Chicago at 5:23 p.m., was stopped.
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Twitter: @ChicagoBreakingTownies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.
Last week we pierced our 6-month-old daughter’s ears. I know what you’re thinking: what kind of parents are you?
And if you’re from Miami: How could you have waited so long?
It’s true, Amalía is the only female baby born to a member of our hypnobirthing class who made it that long without earrings. I never pictured myself piercing my baby’s ears. I grew up in Massachusetts, where I had to wait until I was 10 to get my ears pierced at a Rob Roy salon. My WASP mother didn’t pierce her ears until she was well into her 40s, having been told by my grandmother that only gypsies had pierced ears. In the Greek mountain village where my father and aunts were raised during the middle of the last century, earrings only existed on the ears of Turkish harem girls in legends.
In the Greek village where my father was raised, earrings only existed on the ears of Turkish harem girls in legends.
But Amalía is half Nicaraguan. Where her father is from, they pierce the ears of female infants in the hospital as a matter of course, much the way the circumcision of male infants is handled in the United States. It is traditional for a baby girl’s godparents and relatives to give her earrings as a symbol of how adored she is. And there, a baby can be dressed up in pink butterflies, but if she’s earring-less, people will still call her a beautiful baby boy.
That’s not just true of Nicaragua, I learned in a hospital-sponsored prenatal class, where all of the other moms were Colombian, Venezuelan or Cuban-American. Moreover, piercing babies’ ears is the custom of the country where we all now live, which is to say Miami. When the visiting pediatrician noted that after the vaccinations given to 2-month-olds, a baby was free to fly and to get her ears pierced, an audible gasp rose around the room. “I guess we’ll have to take her little earrings out of the overnight bag,” a daddy-to-be said, sadly, as the other parents commiserated.
Patrick Leger
The truth is, even those of us here who aren’t Latin are Latin by association. All three doctors in my obstetrics practice were Latin men and they all kissed me on the cheek at the start and end of a visit. A New York friend told me, “We call that malpractice here,” but I grew to love it.
People like to call Miami the gateway to Latin America. For a while I called it the gateway to North America, insisting that the city, for all intents and purposes, is Latin American. But now, having lived in Miami for a year and a half, I know that it’s its own little nation, one that takes Latin traditions and makes them over with the addition of a few beachy, body-conscious touches (consider the diet mojito, made with Bacardi and Splenda).
When I took Amalía in for a checkup and asked our pediatrician about infant earrings, she told me that she resisted doing piercing “for years,” but knew a baby whose aunt pierced her ears in the hospital “right after she was born, with no medical personnel around.” Faced with the kind of demand that had desperate relatives performing stealth piercings in hospital rooms, the doctor came up with what I call the Miami Compromise. She began offering “beauty visits”; no medical tests or evaluations were performed, but she would pierce the baby’s ears, provided she was vaccinated and at least 3 months old, and the earrings used were one of the sterilized infant pairs her office provides. (Before Rush Limbaugh starts thinking of horrible names to call these babies, I’d like to point out that the piercing is not covered by health insurance; a “beauty visit” costs $50 out of pocket, earrings included.)
I was secretly relieved that the 3-month mandate bought me some time to consider the decision. It’s true, I felt nothing but resentment at having been forced to wait until an arbitrary age to have my ears pierced, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to slap earrings onto my baby before she was old enough to express a desire for them. While I like to think Amalía enjoys shattering expectations and blurring gender stereotypes, was I being cruel to deny my daughter something that everyone around her seemed to be consider a God-given right for a female? And while I wanted her to embrace Nicaraguan and Miami culture, I couldn’t help worrying about what my mother would say.
Not one to suffer silently, I agonized about the decision out loud and online.
“Consider her personality: is she the earring type?” an older female friend suggested.
So I looked for clues. Amalía flirts with every stranger who passes by, male, female or canine, and grins and poses if you point a cellphone or camera her way. Her favorite pastime is to look at herself in the mirror. And when we visited my parents in Massachusetts and had to put a snow hat on her, she didn’t rip the fluffy white beret off her head like most babies would. She smiled and looked around, as if waiting for applause. By the time she was 6 months old, I knew: this baby was the earring type.
“I’m going to mark dots on her ears where I’ll put the earrings, and then you can weigh in on if the placement is right or not, so we all share the responsibility,” the doctor, wielding a pen, told me and my husband. An aunt had warned me to make sure the earring holes weren’t placed too low or they’d get even lower as Amalía’s ears grew. The doctor confirmed that this was good advice; she knew people who had gotten plastic surgery to repair low-hanging piercings.
Once we approved the location, she shot the gold studs we had picked out into our baby’s ears. Amalía cried for a minute or so during the procedure — less than she did for the flu shot that followed a few weeks later. Then she smiled on cue as we started snapping her picture.
“She looks great,” the doctor said before leaving the room. “But I can tell you guys aren’t from Miami — everyone here goes with the fake diamonds.”
Townies welcomes submissions at [email protected].
Eleni N. Gage is the author of the memoir “North of Ithaka” and the novel “Other Waters.”A 15-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped by four people, including a private builder, in Southeast Delhi's Jamia Nagar area, police said on Monday. The builder is a resident of Saheen Bagh. The accused, a married man having four children, had allegedly raped the victim for over a period of six months in his flat.
VICTIM THREATENED
The victim is a student of Class 9 in a government school. She first met the builder through her classmate, who is a common friend, police said. "The accused had made her MMS and then started blackmailing her. He also threatened to upload it on the social media sites. He raped the victim in various flats located in South Delhi," a senior police officer said.
"The victim is three months pregnant. The victim had narrated the ordeal to her mother who then approached the police through a private NGO. The police registered a case of rape against the accused persons only after local residents and NGO workers intervened into the matter. The police are investigating the case and have recorded the statement of the victim. "We are looking for the absconding accused," the police officer added.
ALSO READ:
Delhi: Doctor and aides of government hospital accused of raping trainee intern
Gangraped US woman slams Delhi Police probe, asks why accused is yet to be arrestedDoctor Who series 10 is going to be deliciously crowded, with both Michelle Gomez as Missy and John Simm as the Master both back to raise merry hell in the BBC1 sci-fi.
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Actor Simm – who last played the rogue Time Lord back in 2009/2010 special The End of Time opposite David Tennant’s Doctor – recently confirmed his surprise return to the sci-fi show: “I can confirm that it’s true, thanks to the power of time travel I’m back.”
However, perhaps it’s a surprise that Whovians should have seen coming. With the help of time travel/looking at old YouTube videos, you can see that showrunner Steve Moffat teased Simm’s return way back in November 2015.
When asked about regenerating the Master into Michelle Gomez’s Missy at that year’s Doctor Who Festival, Moffat said that although the character had changed, “there’s no guarantee you don’t see John Simm again”. He went on to speculate there could be a multi-Master storyline with several evil Time Lords appearing at once.
““The Doctor experiences the universe out of sequence; it doesn’t mean you can’t have John Simm back as the Master. John Simm meets Michelle Gomez – oh dear Lord the children!” he said.
Who writer Mark Gatiss, who was also on the panel, picked up on the idea: “The Three Masters! Geoffrey Beevers!” he exclaimed, referring to the third actor to have played the Master, in 1981 Doctor Who serial The Keeper of Traken.
So, not only does this clip tell us Simm’s return was always in the back of Moffat’s mind, but it also suggests that the Master could team up with Missy. And perhaps even more regenerations of the Doctor’s foe.
Good luck, Doc. You’re going to need it.
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Doctor Who returns to BBC1 on Saturday 15th April at 7:20pmSaint Syncletice also said: “If you are troubled by illness, do not be melancholy, even if you are so ill that you cannot stand to pray or use your voice to say psalms. We need these tribulations to destroy the desires of our body; in this they serve the same purpose as fasting and austerity. If your senses are dulled by illness, you do not need to fast. In the same way that a powerful medicine cures an illness, so illness itself is a medicine to cure passion.”
~ Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 7.17
This is not an easy saying, but it is a very important one. So much so that I have reflected on it once before. The desert fathers (and mothers, as in this case) offer a different perspective on suffering than what the world teaches. St. Syncletice here teases out the implications of the saying of Christ: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain” (John 12:24). Sickness and suffering are little tastes of death. We can have a new, resurrected life but not without dying first. If we want new creation, we must first submit to the destruction of the old.
In fact, as I have written before, the whole of the Christian life can be understood in terms of a life—death—resurrection dialectic. Recently, however, I have come to see a parallel in (of all things) economics: the concept of creative destruction.
The term “creative destruction” was first coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. As a caveat, I will note that one need not agree with him about the good of the economic concept for the metaphor to work. For those adverse to the idea, I would only point out that Jesus often employed examples for metaphors that ought not to be literally imitated—an unjust judge, a thief in the night, and so on.
That said, we can examine the subject dispassionately. Schumpeter wrote,
[T]he contents of the laborer’s budget, say from 1760 to 1940, did not simply grow on unchanging lines but they underwent a process of qualitative change. Similarly, the history of the productive apparatus of a typical farm, from the beginnings of the rationalization of crop rotation, plowing and fattening to the mechanized thing of today—linking up with elevators and railroads—is a history of revolutions.
As the process happens new industries displace old ones. For example, the automotive industry displaced the blacksmith; the telephone displaced the telegraph; air travel displaced sea travel; online news is displacing print; and so on.
Temporarily, this process is painful. People lose jobs. Other people struggle to adjust to new technology. But the net societal gain is astronomical. The average person in the developed world today enjoys conveniences—indoor plumbing, heating and cooling, electric light, microwave ovens, dishwashers, washers and dryers for clothes, and so on—that no common person could ever have afforded, used, or even imagined at other periods of time.
On the one hand, this is not without negative consequences: people can feel entitled to these things; some of them can be abused and present great temptation (television, for example); abundance undermines simplicity; and so on. On the other hand, proper sanitation, heating and cooling, and many others do not simply make people more comfortable, they improve people’s health by preventing some really terrible diseases.
Ah—but that brings me back to Amma Syncletice. Bodily health, just like economic health, is only a relative good. The health of the soul takes primacy, for the soul gives the body life and determines the true quality of that life.
No technology will ever make human beings immortal. We are mortal by nature. Such everlasting life can only be received as a gift through a transformation of what we are. As a Christian, of course, I believe this to come by communion with God through Jesus Christ. Thus, just as in economic destruction through innovation, we must look beyond the moment to the greater gain, so much more so ought we to understand that “illness itself is a medicine to cure passion.”
This brings me to another point about creative destruction: it causes people to fear the destruction of their enterprise and sometimes motivates harmful behavior, rent seeking in particular. Rent seeking is when businesses, fearing the competition of future innovation, seek and acquire government privilege. They lobby for mandates that require specifications for a product that only their company provides, even if it is less efficient or demanded than others. They push out the competition not through their own ingenuity and production, but through the power of state regulations, all because of their fear of death.
According to St. Paul, it is through the fear of death that the devil keeps our souls in bondage (Hebrews 2:14-15). However, in Christ we can without fear face death (and every little death of this life, whether illness or hardship or most often the denial of our own wills). The ascetic life is a sort of creative destruction of the soul. We can respond like a greedy company who fears the loss of profits, or we can see each loss as the opportunity for self-improvement, like a fair company.
Fr. Robert Sirico recently reflected on this connection, this spiritual creative destruction of asceticism:
We humans benefit from “creative destruction” as well, although we don’t call it that. From a Christian perspective, we talk about sin, forgiveness and redemption. If we remain in sin, of course, nothing new grows. When we recognize the destruction of sin in our lives, and we desire change, the creative force that God has blessed us with allows us to recreate ourselves.
In our sin we seek to preserve our own will, rather than suffer the destruction of our desires. “Whoever desires to save his soul will lose it, but whoever loses his soul for My sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and forfeits his own soul?” asks Christ (Matthew 16:25-26).
I have amended this translation to reflect the Greek better. The first sentence typically says “life” instead of soul, but Greek has two words for life and the word used here is not one of them. Most translators seek to avoid what appears to be a contradiction, and that is fine so far as it goes, but I think that something is lost as well.
Another change is that the word “forfeit” is often translated as “lose,” despite the fact that a different word is used in the previous sentence. Indeed, in the first sentence “lose” carries the connotation of perishing or being destroyed.
There is something paradoxical here: when we try to preserve our own soul, it is lost. When we accept its destruction through “fasting and austerity,” it is gained. Seeking the world instead, for the sake of preserving our self, forfeits the highest part of ourselves, our soul.
Thus, as scandalous as it may sound, one essential calling of the Christian life is to welcome the destruction and loss of one’s soul.
This reminds me of a Hebrew concept, found in the Old Testament, called charem. Charem is when something is dedicated to God by being destroyed. All my thoughts, conceptions, feelings, prejudices—all of these need to go. All of them must be charem. Like St. Paul, I must “die daily” (1 Corinthians 15:31) in order to daily live the life of the resurrection.
When we welcome this inner charem, it transforms all those things that were given over to destruction. By losing them, they are truly gained. Lust can be transformed into mystical affection. Greed can be transformed into zeal for heavenly treasures. Seeking the esteem of others can be transformed into seeking the esteem of God.
When we allow these things to be destroyed, what was corruptible about them, sin, is purged from our souls.
Perhaps the best medicine for all that can go wrong in economic creative destruction is that more people would embrace this spiritual creative destruction. Then when others fall on hard times, we would not hesitate to help them in whatever way we can. Then when we face hardship, we would welcome it like St. Syncletice welcomes illness. And we would then sow the seeds of the destruction of our grief: hope in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.First, let's set the scene, or if you will, the justification used for the actions advocated by the "reformers" funded by the Billionaire Boys Club. At least since a Nation at Risk in 1983, the American people have been hammered with the theme that our students are falling behind in international competitions. We heard that again with the release by OECD of the most recent PISA scores. But we should remember the caution of Mark Twain he attributed in part to Disraeli, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Perhaps if we follow the logic of No Child Left Behind and insist upon a disaggregation of the scores on international tests we can see that the figures tell a story quite different than that pushed by the organizations backed by the Billionaire Boys Club.
Barkan reminds us that the latest figures for two of the three international comparisons - the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study - each done every five years and last releasted in 2006, break down the results by poverty. Those most recent results portray a very different picture when we take into account the high American rate of poverty:
students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
It is worth remembering that our own national statistic shows over 21% of American children living in poverty, as compared to well under 5% for Finland.
But this is an examination of the influence of the Billionaire Boys Club on schools, not on their not addressing the root causes of the differences in test scores.
Barkan seeks to explore 3 questions:
How do these foundations operate on the ground?
How do they leverage their money into control over public policy?
How do they construct consensus?
The smallest of the three, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, with assets of $1.4 billion in 2008 according to the Foundation Center, runs two training projects to move people from careers outside education into positions as superintendents and upper-level administrators at the school district level. Graduates of the Broad Superintendents Academy, according to the foundation's website,
currently work as superintendents or school district executives in fifty-three cities across twenty-eight states. In 2009, 43 percent of all large urban superintendent openings were filled by Broad Academy graduates.
The Residency Program places professionals with masters degrees " into full-time managerial jobs in school districts, charter school management organizations, and federal and state education department" while subsidizing their compensation during their first two years, and has placed over 200 people into fifty educational institutions include charter school management organizations, school districts, and the educational departments of the states and the national government. This approach allows Broad to leverage its money - placements from Broad hire other placements from Broad, creating a critical mass of like-minded individuals without having to directly take on the issues of educational policy in a manner that would allow the public to oppose the direction. The most notable success is the Los Angeles Unified School District, which at the start of 2010 had
Matt Hill, who oversees the district’s Public School Choice project that turns schools over to independent managers (Broad pays Hill’s $160,000 salary); Parker Hudnut, executive director of the district’s innovation and charter division (Kathi Littmann, his predecessor, was also a Broad resident); Yumi Takahashi, the budget director; Marshall Tuck, chief executive of the nonprofit that manages schools for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Mark Kieger-Heine, chief operating officer of the same nonprofit; and Angela Bass, its superintendent of instruction.
This was topped by the hiring in June of 2010 of John Deasy as #2 in the district with the clear intent of his becoming #1, which he has now done.
It is worth taking a moment to provide some background on Deasy. Full disclosure - he headed the school system in which I now work. From us he went to the assistant director for education at the Gates Foundations, from which, as Barkan notes, he was hired for LAUSD. Prince George's County Public Schools is a substantial district, with over 130,000 students, several hundred schools and during Deasy's tenure around 9,000 teachers. But that provides a very incomplete picture of Deasy's background. Prior to PG he ran Santa Monica's public schools, with less than 10,000 students. Deasy spent only 2.5 years of his 4 year contract with PG. In other words, in around 4 years he went from running a district with less than 10,000 students to running a monster - LAUSD has around 700,000 students and more than 45,000 teachers. At the time of his hiring, Deasy had a total of 12 years experience of running 3 districts. Key besides his time at Gates was that he was a graduate of the Broad Academy.
That connection between Broad and Gates occurs again and again, as they are common funders of many programs pushed by what some of the opponents of this approach call the educational "deformers." The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had $33 billion in June of 2010 and a commitment over a number of years of an additional $30 billion from Warren Buffett, is by far the nation's largest foundation (2nd is the Ford Foundation with just of $10 billion in assets). The career of John Deasy is one indication of the interrelationship between the Gates and Broad Foundations. Barkan notes another:
On September 8, 2010, the Broad Foundation announced a twist on the usual funding scenario: the Broad Residency had received a $3.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to Broad’s press release, the money would go "to recruit and train as many as eighteen Broad Residents over the next four years to provide management support to school districts and charter management organizations addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness."
There is no doubt Gates has been generous to public education, as the foundation also has been on some issue of health care, notably in Africa. Some are therefore reluctant to criticize. But it is worth remembering that the Foundation's first major educational effort was on small schools. Let me quote part of what Barkan offers on this:
he foundation didn’t base its decision on scientific studies showing school size mattered; such studies didn’t exist. As reported in Bloomberg Businessweek (July 15, 2010), Wharton School statistician Howard Wainer believes Gates probably "misread the numbers" and simply "seized on data showing small schools are overrepresented among the country's highest achievers...." Gates spent $2 billion between 2000 and 2008 to set up 2,602 schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia, "directly reaching at least 781,000 students," according to a foundation brochure.
The Foundationa has now pulled its funding for the effort, acknowledging that it was not a success, which did not surprise even advocates of small schools, such as Depaul University's Mike Klonsky, national director of the Small Schools Workshop, who has been critical of Gates' bigfooting of the movement for small schools. Barkan's quote from him is worth repeating in its entirety:
Gates funding was so large and so widespread, it seemed for a time as if every initiative in the small-schools and charter world was being underwritten by the foundation. If you wanted to start a school, hold a meeting, organize a conference, or write an article in an education journal, you first had to consider Gates ("Power Philanthropy" in The Gates Foundation and the Future of Public Schools, 2010).
Since the failure of the small schools initiative, the Gates Foundation has moved swiftly pushing for The Turnaround Challenge which just happens to provide the models that Secretary of Education Duncan used for Race to the Top - even though there is no research base that demonstrates success for any of the four models. Here I might add that most Americans first became aware of the impact of this approach when the superintendent of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island moved to fire all the teachers to meet the requirements of the turnaround model. Duncan supported the action. Only later did people begin to realize the real problem in Central Falls was very much the high degree of poverty. I might also note that several of the top aids to Duncan at the Department of Education came directly from the Gates Foundation. Barkan provides a description of the influence at the Department of Gates - and Broad:
Duncan’s first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from Gates; her replacement |
of 2010 they were convinced that Medvedev would get a second term. A special Medvedev re-election unit was set up inside the FSO, the Federal Protective Service which guards the Kremlin. Medvedev himself toyed skilfully with the retirement trap in the FSB. There was even a rumour circulating that Medvedev had prepared a list of up to a dozen generals who would be fired in the near future. The very existence of such a list froze the top FSB brass likes rabbits in the headlights.
Underneath them, the colonels fumed, their path upwards to the lucrative reaches of the top brass well and truly blocked. There are two consequences for a security service with an internal conflict, Soldatov said. "The first is that the channel for disseminating information is broken. Nobody talks to each other and if the colonels have good information about what is going on in opposition circles, they are not interested in passing it on to their generals, and if they did, the generals for their part would not trust it. The second is that under such a system it is difficult to form groups to support one particular general. Without support and resources, the FSB loses its control."
If the FSB, Putin's own service, was that dysfunctional, it is safe to assume other parts of his tightly drawn circles of advisers were affected by the same paralysis. Was it just the passing of time - 12 years in power - that had made Putin rusty? Or was there something predestined about the collapse of his image as the strongman of Russia?
Back to the future
There are two questions Putin faces in this third and final period of office. Can he separate himself from the dead hand of the elite around him – can he separate himself from Putinism? The second is even harder to achieve. Can Russia separate itself peacefully from him?
Putin, Pavlovsky said, is not a cynic: "He thinks man is a sinful being and it is pointless to try to improve him. He believes the Bolsheviks who tried to create fair people were simply idiots, and we wasted a lot money and energy on it … So Putin's model is that you need to be bigger and better capitalists than the western capitalists. And more consolidated as a state: there must be a full, maximum unity of state and business."
Sir Andrew Wood, former British ambassador to Moscow, agreed. "He prizes and gives loyalty to the gang, but is unforgiving to his enemies," he said. " 'The weak get beaten' is a constant theme. Rules for him are more for other people to obey than ones which bind the powerful. He has a powerful memory and ability to intuit others' needs and hopes, but in a suspicious way. He has no great attachment to truth if untruth suits his purposes. He is no stranger to violence. These qualities seem to me to be constants."
Putin by Pavlovsky's account is no great believer in independent political parties: "Putin doesn't believe that there is real competition between political parties in the west. He thinks of it as a game, a kind of golf in a private club: someone is stronger, someone is weaker, but that in fact there is no real competition. Putin imagines it like that. He imagines it as in the Federal Republic of Germany after the war under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer. So there are two parties, one of which has power, and the second waits, it may wait a long time. And then, Putin always said, at some time in the future the opposition will receive power, and when it does we must be ready for that moment. And by being ready, I mean we (the Kremlin) must be in both parties.''
For Pavlovsky, United Russia's collapse in the polls in December was obvious. "It was nothing more than a telephone system for conveying the Kremlin's orders. It transmitted a signal. It has absolutely not independence and can not act on its own. It needs full instructions – 1,2,3,4,5. If 3 and 4 are missing, it stops and waits for instructions."
The masses, in Putin's mind, cannot be trusted to rule. Pavlovsky said: "What is the Putin consensus? It is a construction of a pact between the ruling elite and the main groups of society in which society is guaranteed a degree of social distribution and an elite which feels free to move across borders. This state has no ideology. It will be a state without ideas oriented on common sense, the average man, the citizen. Nonetheless the masses must not be given access to power."
The Putin consensus began when Putin decided he was the sole bearer of that guarantee and he controlled the whole situation. But it ended at precisely point he decided to return to power as president: "That was his mistake. His decision to return was a certain delusion of grandeur, " Pavlovsky said.
Professor Richard Sakwa at Kent University agrees that Putin's system of governance is deeply flawed and that elections had become plebiscitary, ratifying decisions already made outside the electoral process. But he believes that Putin can change if he heeds the right advice. Sakwa is impressed with a former Kremlin insider like Sergei Mironov, the head of Just Russia, a party that the Kremlin created but has gone on to take its first gulps of air on its own.
"Mironov showed acute awareness of the dangers arising from the stalemated political situation in the country. He is a classic case of the former insider going into opposition. Just Russia represents yet another attempt to give expression to social democratic ideas in Russia, of the sort long advocated by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Mikhail Gorbachev", Sakwa said.
Mironov, in an interview, himself was cautious about the change going on in Russia; "Putin doesn't want fundamental change, and neither in fact do most Russians. Even those who came out on Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Avenue and those offended and humiliated by the cheating of the 4 December election. Every day they experience corruption and completely ineffective work of the state authorities and they understand that something needs to be done. But even they do not want fundamental, sudden changes. They are for evolution. Putin has positioned himself as the person who can ensure stability, but his stability looks like stagnation to me."
But the rest of Russia inhabits a different land. "My focus groups from provincial cities now indicate that the person the people want as president is the year 2000 version of Putin. So, if Putin comes out as being the same passionate reformer as he was then people are ready to vote for him. So if Putin could win in the first round, it can't be ruled out," Mironov added.
If Putin does re-invent himself, it will be only by taking on as prime minister one of the economists who first brought him to Moscow in the first place – Alexei Kudrin. Key liberal advisers to Medvedev like Igor Yurgens have already jumped ship and gone over to Kudrin's camp.
Fiona Hill said: "My best bet is that you will see more and more people being brought to the government and eventually taking it over. If Putin does not start doing that, he will risk a massive upheaval and all bets are off, because there is no system to take its place. What he did in 2000 was significant in terms of restoring the central state, but those means have come to an end. It all about regime survival for him now … Putin has forgotten about Russia, and the people on the streets are saying 'We are Russia too, but we are not part of your system'."
Putin faces a Hobson's choice: to select effective managers capable of running the show called Russia Inc is very dangerous for him personally, because they will by definition not be part of the team – his charmed circle from which no-one can escape. But the dangers for Putin and for Russia of staying with same time-serving crew of telephone engineers, the mere transmitters of signals, are even greater. Russia could end up, by splitting up altogether, as it threatened to twice in 1991 and 1999. That is still a real fear in Russian minds.
Sir Andrew Wood said: "The stagnation issue is present to the minds of the group. The fact that Putin goes out of his way to deny it is indicative. He and they have spoken of a bright future, but bringing in fresh blood if by that you mean fresh ideas as well would threaten group cohesion, and perhaps Putin's ability to arbitrate. If you mean replacing some of the lesser figures, then that would be a different matter. Nothing that has happened so far either in response to the protests or in what Putin has said in the course of the Duma or presidential campaigns indicates that he sees his return to the Kremlin as meaning the sort of renewal that would be the result of an election campaign elsewhere. The great themes are continuity and stability."
Putin left the restaurant that night in November the same way he came in. He stopped at the door and his favourite ski jacket reappeared on his shoulders. But he had lost his cool several times in the previous three hours, when the same question popped up: How does Russia move on without you? His answer was: "Don't bury me yet."
• This article was amended on 28 February 2012. The original should have named Rublyovka, not Dubrovka, as the playground of the rich outside Moscow. Owing to an editing error, the piece said that Vladimir Putin's parents lost their first son to diphtheria; that was actually their second son.
Pocket Profile
Born Leningrad, USSR, 7 Oct 1952
Career to date Spy, government fixer, prime minister, president. Chiefly known for reviving the Russian economy, the cold war and the spy movie genre. Otherwise to be found undertaking vigorous outdoor pursuits, often barechested and always bearing a passing resemblance to the former England cricketer Nasser Hussein
High point Winning things such as the presidential elections and wars with small, downtrodden Caucasus peoples
Low point Being booed at a wrestling match in November 2011, the moment at which it became apparent that a tsar was falling
He says "We'll follow terrorists everywhere. Should we catch them in a shithouse, we'll whack them in a shithouse."
They say "When I looked into Putin's eyes, I saw KGB." (Colin Powell)
"Medvedev continues to play Robin to Putin's Batman." (US ambassador John Beyrle)A new report claims that the NSA has installed malicious cybersnooping software onto tens of thousands of computer networks worldwide. According to the report by Dutch publication, NRC,the malware was hidden in systems belonging to telecommunications providers and others around the globe and is designed to remain dormant until the NSA wishes to collect personal data, at which point the bugs are activated and information is collected by the malware and provided to the NSA.
While this type of activity is clearly unnerving, what is perhaps most scary is the notion that the data collected might not be going to only the NSA. It self-evident from the fact that information about this and other highly secretive cybersnooping programs has leaked (via Edward Snowden) that the NSA’s internal security is not impenetrable; one must wonder if there are foreign agents, terrorists, or criminals who have also managed to gain access to the NSA’s treasure trove of personal information.
Furthermore, the fact that the government is alleged to have installed malware onto civilian networks is seriously troubling. While reports of NSA cyberspying are not new, there is a fundamental difference between simply snooping on communications (which is problematic in its own regard) and spreading malware. Malware, by definition, utilizes resources in its host computers; even if its author did not intend for it to do so, it can harm its host as a parasite – adversely impacting performance and causing crashes and other system problems due to conflicts with legitimate software. While one can justify the use of such a cyberweapon against enemy military targets – Western powers are believed to have successfully attacked Iran’s nuclear program with malware several years ago – intentionally spreading malware to nonthreatening systems is not just cybersnooping, it is an actual cyberattack against innocent civilians and civilian enterprises. It is with good reason that in many jurisdictions such an activity is a crime.
Malware infections resulting from government actions are probably going to become a way of life. Even if Americans’ personal computers were not the primary targets of the NSA’s malware they are at risk because malware spreads; an attack may even rely on mass proliferation in order to reach its target. The attacks on Iran, for example, produced millions of infected computers as collateral damage.
But, such a reality does not justify a government intentionally targeting noncombatants, or creating malware that actually performs nefarious tasks (such as stealing data) when running on the systems of innocent parties. Legal scholars and judges will debate whether the NSA’s alleged activity violated the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights and other laws, but, in any case, a government that is ostensibly “of the people, by the people, for the people” should not be treating the people as if they were suspects, criminals, and legitimate targets.
While it is unlikely that the NSA will comment on what it has or has not done vis-à-vis malware, it is certainly time for Congress to provide some serious oversight. And, while no anti-malware technology is perfect, this episode should serve as a reminder for everyone keep her Internet security software up to date on all of her computers, including both classic-form-factor machines such as desktops and laptops, and newer devices such as smartphones and tablets – all of which are vulnerable to malware attacks. There are plenty of non-governmental bodies spreading malware for evil purposes, and if the US government is on the attack, many other governments may be as well (in fact, the British government is believed to have targeted a Belgian network). Remember, even if the government does not intend to spy on you, its malware, which may turn out to be far more robust than has been reported to date, may spread unintentionally to your machines and inflict harm.
I share advice and great articles from a variety of authors via Twitter.
Follow me at @JosephSteinberg© Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images (L-R) Anne L'Huillier, member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, Goran K Hansson, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Olga Botner, member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, sit in front of a screen displaying the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 Takaaki Kajita (L) and Arthur B McDonald during a press conference of the Nobel Committee to announce the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics on October 6, 2015 at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden. Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Canada's Arthur B. McDonald won the Nobel Physics Prize for work on neutrinos.
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for discovering that tiny particles called neutrinos change identities as they whiz through the universe, proving that they have mass.
By uncovering the "chameleon-like" nature of neutrinos, the laureates had solved a long-standing puzzle in particle physics that could alter our grasp of the cosmos, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
"The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe," the academy said.
Kajita, 56, is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at the University of Tokyo. McDonald, 72, is a professor emeritus at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.
"Neutrinos are among the fundamental particles (which) we do not know how to subdivide any further," McDonald told reporters in Stockholm by phone. "Therefore, their position within the models of physics at the most fundamental level is very important," he said.
"When you do not know whether they have mass, it's otherwise difficult to understand how to incorporate them into those theories that give us a more complete understanding of the world of physics at the most fundamental level. Discovering this property helps us tremendously in this regard."
Kajita seemed flummoxed at a news conference organized by his university. "My mind has gone completely blank. I don't know what to say," he said after taking the stage.
After getting his composure back, he stressed that many people had contributed to his work, and that there was much work still to do.
"The universe where we live in is still full of unknowns. A major discovery cannot be achieved in a day or two. It takes a lot of people and a long time. I would like to see young people try to join our pursuit of mystery solving," he said.
For decades the neutrino remained a hypothetical particle until American researchers proved that it was real in 1956.
There are three kinds, or flavors, of neutrinos and the laureates showed they oscillate from one flavor to another, dispelling the long-held notion that they were massless.
Kajita showed in 1998 that neutrinos captured at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan underwent a metamorphosis in the atmosphere, the academy said.
Three years later, while working at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, McDonald found that neutrinos coming from the sun also switched identities.
McDonald said that scientists would still like to know the actual masses of the various forms of neutrino. And experiments are looking at whether there are other types of neutrinos beyond the three clearly observed.
Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the universe after photons, "so any property of neutrinos can have dramatic repercussions on the life of the universe and on its evolution," said Antonio Ereditato, director of the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics at the University of Bern, Switzerland. "This is really one of the milestones in our understanding of nature."
Robert G.W. Brown, chief executive officer of the American Institute of Physics, said the laureates' work helps scientists understand how much mass exists in the universe. Brown said it's also a success for the theory known as quantum mechanics, which deals with fundamental particles and their interactions, because that's the only way to explain how neutrinos can change from one type to another.
"We are really down to understanding of the most fundamental aspects of science as we know them," he said.
The winners will split the 8 million Swedish kronor (about $960,000) prize money. Each winner also gets a diploma and a gold medal at the prize ceremony on Dec. 10.
On Monday the Nobel Prize in medicine went to scientists from Japan, the U.S. and China who discovered drugs that are now used to fight malaria and other tropical diseases.
The prize announcements continue with chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics award next Monday.
___
Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Frank Jordans in Berlin and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.Getty Images
One in 25 bosses may be psychopaths — a rate that’s four times greater than in the general population — according to research by psychologist and executive coach Paul Babiak.
Babiak studied 203 American corporate professionals who had been chosen by their companies to participate in a management training program. He evaluated their psychopathic traits using a version of the standard psychopathy checklist developed by Robert Hare, an expert in psychopathy at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Psychopaths, who are characterized by being completely amoral and concerned only with their own power and selfish pleasures, may be overrepresented in the business environment because it plays to their strengths. Where greed is considered good and profitmaking is the most important value, psychopaths can thrive.
LIST: Top 10 Worst Bosses
They also tend to be charming and manipulative — and in corporate America, that easily passes for leadership. But, as the U.K.’s Guardian reported:
The survey suggests psychopaths are actually poor managerial performers but are adept at climbing the corporate ladder because they can cover up their weaknesses by subtly charming superiors and subordinates. This makes it almost impossible to distinguish between a genuinely talented team leader and a psychopath, Babiak said.
In fact, it can be hard spot the psychopath in any crowd (according to Hare, psychopaths make up 1% of the general population). They’re not all ruthless serial killers; rather, psychopaths who grow up in happy, loving homes might end up channeling their energies in a less violent way — say, by becoming a CEO. “Psychopaths really aren’t the kind of person you think they are,” Babiak said.
MORE: When You Go Hunting for Psychopaths, They Turn Up Everywhere
Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.Resident Evil: Escape from Raccoon City starting on September 20, is the latest maze added to Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights 2013.
As if the RESIDENT EVIL video-game series didn’t immerse you enough in terrifying zombie action, now you’ll truly be able to live it as its themed haunted house.
To construct RESIDENT EVIL: Escape from Raccoon City, theme park’s entertainment team has joined forces with the creators at Capcom.
“It’s such a great delight to work with Universal on a haunted house based on the RESIDENT EVIL games,” says Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, producer of RESIDENT EVIL 6.
Director Michael Aiello said, “RESIDENT EVIL is a perfect final addition to Halloween Horror Nights 23. We were able to create incredibly elaborate sets that plant you right in the midst of Raccoon City’s apocalyptic nightmare, along with terrifying adversaries that will send them running.”Battle to Warped Tour Finals at Club Halo - 21+
Club HALO is proud to host WARPED TOUR Battle of the Bands. Finals held on Saturday, May 30th. There is no cover for this show - free. This and all club HALO shows are 21+. Doors at 8pm, rock starts about 9pm. For more information log on facebook and search "21+ Battle to Warped Tour FINALS" or visit facebook.com/clubhaloak. More about this event // the 9th annual Anger Management Battle to Warped Tour is nearing an end. Join us Saturday May 30th, at Club HALO. We will be selecting ONE overall winner who will get to play the Oregon and Washington state dates of the Vans Warped Tour. In addition, the top 2 scoring bands will be selected to play the Road to Warped Tour show at the Sullivan Arena parking lot on June 17th. Bands who have made it to the finals include: Sovereign Shadows PJ Franco and the BurnOuts Zombie Unicorn Mutual Manslaughter Transitions Thunderfish The Battle to Warped Tour is brought to you by: Anger Management,Family Tree Presents, and Anchoragenightout Rockthestate.
Categories: Concerts & Tour Dates
This event repeats daily until May 31, 2015:Where were you on November 5th, 2013? I can’t remember, but if you’re an NC700X fan, like many of us here at MO, you may remember it as the day the European market got an upgraded bike – but those of us here in the USA didn’t. Well, better late than never, because American Honda announced the NC750X as a USA model, with all the improvements and new features of the Euro-bike.
2016 Honda NC700X Long-Term Review
For 2018, the NC gets a boost in displacement and other tasty engine upgrades. The bore is now 4mm wider, for a 75cc increase to 745cc. That should net a few more horses (I’d guess around 49 or 50 horsepower at the wheel), but power will now be even more accessible, thanks to the DCT’s new upshift ceiling at 7,500 rpm. There’s also the addition of two-level Honda Selectable Torque Control (HSTC), Honda’s traction-control system. Also, Honda has added “Adaptive Clutch Capability Control” for smoother stops and starts with the DCT transmission.
We already saw improvements to the seat, windscreen and styling, so there are no changes on that front. Expect to see the new NC in dealers in the summer of 2018. There is no information on pricing as yet.
Follow the rest of our 2017 EICMA show coverageThe latest tripe from the Republican Party attempts to distract from its purposeful obstruction of all initiatives or legislation designed to create new jobs, by accusing the Obama Administration of fostering a "part-time" economy.
In reality the prevalence of "part-time only" jobs arising from the residue of the Bush Recession reflects the gradual realization by corporate America that it no longer needs to hew to the pretense of actually caring about workers and can, with impunity, impose hiring policies designed solely to fatten its bottom line. An expanded field of semi-skilled workers constantly warned against unionizing, a population of nervous and insecure skilled workers deathly afraid of losing their health care and livelihoods, and the propagation of anti-union legislation funded by right-wing think tanks and their Republican tools in state legislatures have all led to an atmosphere of passive acquiescence to predatory hiring practices. This has little or nothing to do with the Administration and much to do with a relatively new ethic of corporate greed and indifference run amok. It implicates businesses and corporations at every level, but it is particularly visible in retail and service industries.
About 27.4 million Americans work part time. The number of those part-timers who would prefer to work full time has nearly doubled since 2007, to 7.5 million. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 47 percent of part-time hourly workers ages 26 to 32 receive a week or less of advance notice for their schedule. In a study of the data, two University of Chicago professors found that employers dictated the work schedules for about half of young adults, without their input. For part-time workers, schedules on average fluctuated from 17 to 28 hours a week.
Today's New York Times shines a light on the brutish "take-it-or-leave-it" nastiness of certain employers seeking to boost their profits by juggling part-time workers and creating institutional obstacles for them to attain full-time jobs.
The Times solicited and received hundreds of reader comments in reaction to this article detailing efforts by a few states and municipalities to curb exploitation of part-time workers by regulating "on-call" and other abusive but widespread practices which throw peoples' lives into turmoil. Representative George Miller from California also plans to introduce legislation at the Federal level this summer to rein in such practices. Of course, those efforts will go nowhere due to solid Republican opposition in Congress.
These are the types of stories the Times heard:
A worker at an apparel store at Woodbury Common, an outlet mall north of New York City, said that even though some part-time employees clamored for more hours, the store had hired more part-timers and cut many workers’ hours to 10 a week from 20. As soon as a nurse in Illinois arrived for her scheduled 3-to-11 p.m. shift one Christmas Day, hospital officials told her to go home because the patient “census” was low. They also ordered her to remain on call for the next four hours — all unpaid. An employee at a specialty store in California said his 25-hour-a-week job with wildly fluctuating hours wasn’t enough to live on. But when he asked the store to schedule him between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. so he could find a second job, the store cut him to 12 hours a week.
Fatimah Muhammad said that at the Joe Fresh clothing store where she works in Manhattan, some weeks she was scheduled to work just one day but was on call for four days — meaning she had to call the store each morning to see whether it needed her to work that day. “I felt kind of stuck. I couldn’t make plans,” said Ms. Muhammad, who said she was now assigned 25 hours a week
“How is it so many, and Obama, believe that workers have the right to tell their employer what hours they will work?” she added. “I’m thinking many here need to go to Europe or some other country. See how that works for you. Our government has no right to dictate, only to protect workers from abuse, and part-time is not abuse.”
Corporate groups protest that such measures undercut efficiency and profits. “The hyper-regulation of the workplace by government isn’t conducive to a positive business climate,” said Scott DeFife, an executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association. “The more complications that government creates for operating a business, the less likely we’ll see a positive business environment that’s good for the economy and increasing jobs.”
A middle-aged New Yorker who lost his teaching job of two decades because of a budget squeeze in his school district said he had applied for retail jobs and was shocked by what he found. “You had to be available every minute of every day, knowing you would be scheduled for no more than 29 hours per week and knowing there would be no normalcy to your schedule,” he wrote. “I told the person I would like to be scheduled for the same days every week so I could try to get another job to try to make ends meet. She immediately said, ‘Well, that will end our conversation right here. You have to be available every day for us.’
Vermont and San Francisco have adopted laws giving workers the right to request flexible or predictable schedules to make it easier to take care of children or aging parents. Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, is pressing the City Council to take up such legislation. And last month, President Obama ordered federal agencies to give the “right to request” to two million federal workers.
A national campaign — the Fair Workweek Initiative — is pushing for legislation to restrict these practices in places including Milwaukee, New York and Santa Clara, Calif. The effort includes the National Women’s Law Center, the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the Retail Action Project, a New York workers’ group. “Too many workers are working either too many or too few hours in an economy that expects us to be available 24/7,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative and an organizer at the Center for Popular Democracy, a national advocacy group. “It’s gotten to the point where workers, especially women workers, are saying, ‘We need a voice in how much and when we work.' ”
* * *Of course, not all business owners have signed on to these practices. One reader who ran a business was "baffled" why Fortune 500 companies plotted out such varying schedules for their employees, noting that predictability and uniformity were key to the his own success. The fact that such companies have made a careful, accountant-vetted cost benefit calculation in establishing these policies seems to have escaped him. The more common attitude was expressed by another reader:It's interesting how this reader equates workers demanding fair treatment with "Obama." Business groups, whose interests are represented largely by the Republican Party, are quoted in both Times articles as uniformly opposing regulatory efforts to introduce stability and uniformity into part-time employee scheduling, citing seasonal issues affecting certain businesses, and the impact of the Bush Recession (although they don't call it that). But the main objection, delivered in language that sounds like something written by the Republican National Committee, appears tied to maximizing company profits at the expense of individual workers:One reader aptly describes the Catch-22 situation of being unable to find regular full-time work and thus forced to jump through the hoops of a company's part-time regime:The Times article from earlier this week detailed some of the local efforts being introduced to combat these practices:A national campaign grounded in part by organized labor is also beginning to take shape:In the meantime, the Republican Party will continue to do as much as it can to make the "part-time economy" a permanent fixture of American life.Image: Shutterstock
Every year, Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list recognizes people blessed with both youth and exceptional talent in their field—including celebrities, startup founders, doctors, and artists. These are smart, savvy professionals—and when some of them include information security pros, they’re bound to go poking around for vulnerabilities.
That’s what Yan Zhu, a privacy engineer who made the 2015 list, was doing when she found a gaping privacy hole in the way Forbes handles recipients’ personal information.
Once you make the list, Yan told me in a Twitter direct message, Forbes asks you to register for its annual Under 30 Summit conference. “They send you a link for conference registration, but it's not tied to your email address,” she said. “So you can literally enter anyone's email address who is also a 30 Under 30 member and it shows you their personal info.” That information carries over into all future years, she said.
Motherboard reviewed an email from Zhu to Forbes in September alerting the company to the issue, with no response. I contacted Forbes about the privacy issue today, and the person behind their general feedback email responded and said they’d look into the issue and resolve as soon as possible. It appears that soon after, Forbes fixed the issue on Tuesday afternoon by requiring more verifying info: Now, you need an email address, phone number, company name, and title to access your registration.
Before the fix, I tested this flaw with a previous recipient’s name and email address, and the form asked if I was this person. I said I was (I definitely am not), and the site accepted that answer without any additional verification. It then allowed me continue the in-progress registration of that person, and displayed their personal information: Phone number, company revenue range, company size, date of birth, and email address. A field for payment followed, but since I used a former recipient, the ticket was comped and there wasn’t a place to fill in—or access—credit card information.
At first glance, this information isn’t wildly damaging, even in the hands of someone gathering it with ill-intent. But it is a fairly obvious and easily accessed flaw, and identifying information could be (and frequently is) used to harass or harm individuals online. It’s also telling of how prestigious award programs or conferences can mishandle basic information.Top members of the Judiciary Committee indicated Wednesday that they will move forward with their own investigation into Russia's election meddling, after meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller.
"We appreciate Special Counsel Mueller’s willingness to meet with us, and both parties have committed to keeping an open dialogue as we proceed," Sens. Chuck Grassley Charles (Chuck) Ernest GrassleyOvernight Health Care: Senators grill drug execs over high prices | Progressive Dems unveil Medicare for all bill | House Dems to subpoena Trump officials over family separations Senate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' GOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system MORE (R-Iowa), Dianne Feinstein Dianne Emiel FeinsteinSenate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' Hillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Ocasio-Cortez adviser says Sunrise confrontation with 'old-timer' Feinstein'sad' MORE (D-Calif.), Lindsey Graham Lindsey Olin GrahamWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration GOP lawmaker says panel to investigate drug company gaming of patent system Sixteen years later, let's finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission MORE (R-S.C.) and Sheldon Whitehouse Sheldon WhitehouseSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight This week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks MORE (D-R.I.) said in a joint statement after the meeting.
They added that they had a "very productive discussion" on how their respective investigations "can proceed without impeding the other."
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Senators were largely tightlipped earlier Wednesday, upon leaving the meeting with Mueller, noting they would be releasing a joint statement.
Mueller has been meeting with lawmakers this week to map out boundary lines of the several ongoing investigations.
He met with the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday evening.
Mueller, a former FBI director, is in charge of the FBI-Department of Justice investigation into Russia's election meddling, including potential ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. He's also investigating President Trump for potential obstruction of justice, according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, a Judiciary subcommittee overseen by Graham and Whitehouse is digging into Russia's election interference.
The full committee is also looking into former FBI Director James Comey's firing, potential contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow, and any moves by the Justice Department — in the Obama and Trump administrations — to interfere with FBI investigations.About one in six American adults reported taking at least one psychiatric drug, usually an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety medication, and most had been doing so for a year or more, according to a new analysis. The report is based on 2013 government survey data on some 37,421 adults and provides the finest-grained snapshot of prescription drug use for psychological and sleep problems to date.
“I follow this area, so I knew the numbers would be high,” said Thomas J. Moore, a researcher at the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit in Alexandria, Va., and the lead author of the analysis, which was published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. “But in some populations, the rates are extraordinary.”
Mr. Moore and his co-author, Donald R. Mattison of Risk Sciences International in Ottawa, combed household survey and insurance data compiled by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. They found that one in five women had reported filling at least one prescription that year — about two times the number of men who had — and that whites were about twice as likely to have done so than blacks or Hispanics.
Nearly 85 percent of those who had gotten at least one drug had filled multiple prescriptions for that drug over the course of the year studied, which the authors considered long-term use. “To discover that eight in 10 adults who have taken psychiatric drugs are using them long term raises safety concerns, given that there’s reason to believe some of this continued use is due to dependence and withdrawal symptoms,” Mr. Moore said.Through the ACA's'state of the game report', which has been lodged with CA, they have also proposed that the BBL in the long term be moved from the current spot on the schedule to October. The Big Bash has been an attendance and ratings success. Credit:Getty Images Katich, whose Scorchers are preparing for a February 5 semi-final against Sydney Sixers at the SCG, argues there has been too long between matches at the tail end of of this season's BBL. "There is no doubt it has dragged on too long," Katich said. "To think that we |
could easily turn out to be more solvable than is currently thought.
How to assess it
Crowdedness Score What is the direct annual spending on the problem? What is the number of full time staff working on the problem? What is the number of active supporters of work on the problem? 12 $100,000 or less 1 or less 1,000 or less 10 $1 million 10 10000 8 $10 million 100 100000 6 $100 million 1000 1 million 4 $1 billion 10000 10 million 2 $10 billion 100000 100 million 0 $100 billion 1 million 1 billion (i.e. everyone)
A challenge – direct vs. indirect effort
Often resources are unintentionally dedicated to solving a problem by groups that may be self-interested, or working on an adjacent problem. We refer to this as ‘indirect effort’, in contrast with the ‘direct effort’ of groups consciously focussed on the problem. These indirect efforts can be substantial. For example, not much money is spent on research to prevent the causes of ageing directly, but many parts of biomedical research are contributing by answering related questions or developing better methods. While this work may not be well targetted on reducing ageing specifically, much more is spent on biomedical research in general than anti-ageing research specifically. Most of the progress on preventing ageing is probably due to these indirect efforts.
Indirect efforts are hard to measure, and even harder to adjust for how useful they are for solving the problem at hand.
For this reason we usually score only ‘direct effort’ on a problem. Won’t this be a problem, because we will be undercounting the total effort? No, because we will adjust for this in the next factor: Solvability. Problems where most of the effective effort is occurring indirectly will not be solved as quickly by a large increase in ‘direct effort’.
One could also use a directed-weighted measure of effort. So long as it was applied consistently in evaluating both Neglectedness and Solvability, it should lead to roughly the same answer.
More tips on how to assess
Rather than trying to assess neglectedness directly, you can also consider rules of thumb like the following:
Is there any reason to expect this problem not to be solved by: (i) markets (ii) government (iii) other individuals looking to have a social impact?
Within research, is this a new field, or at the intersection of two discplines? These areas are most likely to get neglected by academia. (Read more about choosing a research topic.)
If you don’t work on the problem, how likely is it someone else will step in instead?
If you work on this problem, will you learn more about how pressing it is compared to other problems?
Thinking through these questions can increase your confidence you haven’t missed anything in your estimate.
Note that it’s important to assess scale and neglectedness as a pair. Ultimately we care about the ratio of the two, so you need to make sure you’re assessing the same problem in both cases. If you use a different definition of the problem in each case, it will throw off your results.
If several different kinds of input are being dedicated to a problem, use the column with the lowest score. That will be where most of the total resources are: e.g. if $10bn per year is invested in a problem and 1,000 full-time people work on it, then the money dominates, so the score is 4, not 8.
Finally, we are reluctant to give very high scores for neglectedness. Even obscure problems usually attract the attention of some group in the world, and we may simply not know about them. So unless we’ve done a comprehensive search to show otherwise, we will assume that at least $1 million is being directed towards a problem.
How to assess how solvable a problem is
Definition
If we doubled direct effort on this problem by, what fraction of the remaining problem would we expect to solve?
Why is it important?
Even if a problem is hugely important and highly neglected, that doesn’t mean it’s an important cause to focus on. There might simply be very little we can do about it.
For example, ageing is a problem that is huge in scale: almost two thirds of global ill health is a result of ageing in some way. It’s also highly neglected: there are only a tiny number of research institutes focused on trying to prevent the causes of physical ageing (rather than to treat its symptoms, like cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and so on). However, one reason it’s neglected is because many scientists believe it to be very hard to solve, which is a major reason against working on the problem right now (though its other advantages could be enough to offset this downside).
How to assess it
We use this rubric:
Solvability score The doubling of the direct effort described in ‘Neglectedness’ would be expected to solve this much of the problem (defined in Scale): 8 100% 6 10% 4 1% 2 0.1% 0 0.01%
Some rules of thumb we consider include:
Are there cost-effective interventions for making progress on this problem with rigorous evidence behind them? (ideally high up the hierachy of evidence).
Are there promising but unproven interventions that can be cheaply tested?
Are there theoretical arguments that progress should be possible, such as a good track record in a related area? (e.g. we can’t prove that medical research will be effective ahead of time, but the area has a strong track record, and rough estimates suggest it’s very effective).
Are there interventions that could make a huge contribution to solving the program, even if unlikely to work?
In general, we’re looking to find the best interventions to make progress on the problem, then evaluate them based on (i) potential upside (ii) likelihood of upside. We consider all forms of evidence, from rigorous trial data and speculative arguments. We take a Bayesian approach to evaluating the both factors – our prior is that the intervention isn’t very effective, then we update away from that depending on the strength of the evidence (see an example). Read more about making these kinds of estimates.
Challenges in assessment
This is typically the hardest of the three factors to score because it required anticipating the future, rather than simply measuring things that currently exist.
In some cases, you can estimate solvability based on the cost-effectiveness of existing techniques in a field. For example, we have a sense of how many lives would be saved by increasing spending on global health interventions based on past experience tackling HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and so on.
In other cases – where solving a problem requires innovative techniques – the scores are usually assigned based on judgement calls, ideally based on a survey of expert opinion.
Some approaches to solving problems are incremental (e.g. distributing bednets to reduce exposure to malaria carrying mosquitos); others offer some chance of solving a lot of the problem all at once (e.g. inventing a new malaria vaccine). For scoring we use the ‘expected value’ approach. That is, a 10% chance of solving all of a problem is scored the same as a project that would definitely reduce it by 10%. (While ‘risk aversion’ about different outcomes means that these aren’t necessarily equally valuable, it’s a good approximation.)
As discussed above in Neglectedness, problems for which most of the work is being performed indirectly (e.g. by for-profits doing related things) will likely be solved more slowly through an increase in ‘direct’ work. This is because many promising approaches will already have been attempted by other groups.
What do the summed scores mean?
To do a sanity-check we can add these scores and convert them back into a measure of actual impact from one additional person working on a problem:
If the problem has this score: One extra person working on a problem... One extra person working on a problem... 28 Saves 1 million QALYs per year Reduces existential risk by 0.001% 24 Saves 10,000 QALYs per year Reduces existential risk by 0.00001% 20 Saves 100 QALYs per year (2 lives) Reduces existential risk by 0.0000001%
However, these figures are extremely approximate, so we don’t recommend putting weight on them specifically. Rather, we prefer to use the scores to make relative comparisons rather than absolute estimates.
How to assess personal fit
While personal fit is not assessed in our problem profiles, it is relevant to your personal decisions. If you enter an area that you find totally demotivating, then you’ll have almost no impact. Within a field, the top performers often have 10 to 100 times as much impact as the median.
If you are comparing different problems you can use these extra scores to give a bonus to problems you are well suited to tackling.
Definition
Given your skills, resources, knowledge, connections and passions, how likely are you to excel in this area?
How can it be assessed?
What’s your most valuable career capital? Is it especially relevant to one problem and not the others?
How motivated do you expect to be if you worked on this problem?
What specific roles could you take in this problem, and do you expect you’d excel at them?
Here’s our introductory advice on how to assess personal fit, and some further questions for making predictions.
Here’s a rubric you could use:
Personal fit score How well matched are your skills for this area? 4 You are exceptionally well-suited to the area. You are well-motivated and could be a world-leader in the field. 2 You are a reasonable fit for the field. Quite motivated and some relevant skills. 0 You are an actively bad fit for this field because you couldn’t be motivated to work on it or have no relevant skills.
Note that the importance of personal fit depends on how you’re planning to contribute. A great entrepreneur or researcher has far more impact than an average one, so if you’re planning to contribute in either of those ways, personal fit matters a lot. However, if you’re earning to give, personal fit is less relevant because you’re sending money rather than your unique skills. So to assess personal fit in more depth, you could estimate your percentile in the field, then multiply by a factor that depends on the variation of performance in the field.
Bear in mind that it’s easy to underestimate the extent to which you can become knowledgeable and passionate about a new problem. We’re biased towards continuing with what we’ve done before—the ‘sunk cost fallacy’—and we underestimate how much our preferences and passions will change.
Finally, remember that a single problem can often be tackled in multiple ways. If you want to work on global health, you could work on the ground in the developing world, conduct biomedical research, go into politics and many other options besides. If one isn’t a good fit for you, another might be.
Other factors for comparing career opportunities
To come to an all considered view on whether to take a job, you also need to consider the other factors in our career framework, such as:
How influential a role you can get. How much career capital you can get. The value of information of working on this option.
In this article, we only cover comparisons of problem areas, but that’s not all that’s relevant.
How should we interpret the results?
If you’ve used our rubric above, you can add the scores together to get a rough answer of which problem will be more effective to work on. Bear in mind that these scores are imprecise, and adding them increases the uncertainty even further, because we only measure each one imprecisely. This means you need to take your final summed score with a grain of salt – or rather a lot of salt.
Within 80,000 Hours, if the difference in score between two problems is 4 or larger, we have a reasonable level of confidence that it’s a more effective problem to work on. If the difference is 3 or smaller it looks more like a close call
The scores we get when using this framework suggest that some problems are 10,000x more effective to work on than others. However, we don’t believe that the differences really are that large. For one, our scores have to be tempered by common sense judgements about the world. If the score for one problem seems very high, then it’s possible we’ve simply made a mistake and don’t realise it. For two, because the future is so unpredictable work on problems that don’t seem pressing could turn out to be very useful in expected ways. That puts a limit on how much more pressing one problem can be than another.
Some other reasons for being modest about what such prioritisation research can show us are discussed here.
For more tips on making difficult judgement calls, take a look at our checklist.
How does this approach compare with ordinary cost-effectiveness analysis?
What we want to know is this: ‘if I add an additional unit of resources to solving this problem, how much good will be accomplished’? The approach above looks at a problem from a bird’s eye view, and tries to assess how important it is to allocate more resources to solving it.
An alternative approach would be to look at the cost-effectiveness of past interventions to tackle different problems, and compare them directly against one another. For example, you could look at studies of different approaches we know about to improve education or health, and then calculate which one would help people more with an additional $1 million in funding. If this kind of cost-effectiveness data is available, and you already have a common outcome yardstick, this is a sensible approach. For instance, in health economics, people often calculate “QALYs per dollar” for different interventions.
If you’re comparing two problems that use different yardsticks, you can still compare them so long as you have a conversion factor, though the comparisons become much more uncertain. For instance, you could compare health interventions to climate change interventions by defining the rate at which you’d trade 1 QALY for 1 tonne of carbon dioxide averted. Our rubric in the scale section above shows roughly how we’d trade some yardsticks against others.
Alternatively you can try to convert all the benefits into dollar terms, and perform a ‘cost-benefit analysis’. This is expressed as a ratio of costs to benefits, both in dollars.
The main reason not to take this approach is that it’s extremely hard in many cases:
Political advocacy, in which the circumstances you are working with are constantly shifting. Original research, where no-one knows how long it will take to make a new discovery. Any field in which no interventions are known, or the ones that we know about are not well studied.
It’s for this reason we have created the alternative framework above that can be applied to almost any problem.
Advantages and disadvantages of quantitative problem prioritisation
There are several benefits to going through the process above:
Explicitly quantifying outcomes can enable you to notice large, robust differences in effectiveness that might be difficult to notice qualitatively, and help you to avoid scope neglect.
Going through the process of making these estimates is a great way to test your understanding of a problem, since it forces you to be explicit about your assumptions and how they fit together.
A clearly laid out analysis can help others to understand and critique your reasoning, further helping you to understand the problem and how pressing it is.
But there is a major downside we need to keep in mind:
In practice, these types of estimates usually involve very high levels of uncertainty. This means their results are not robust: different assumptions can greatly alter the conclusion of the analysis. As a result, there is a danger of being misled by an incomplete model, when it would have been better to go with a broader qualitative analysis, or simple common sense.
This is why we don’t simply go with the results of our scores. Rather, we consider other forms of evidence in our problem profiles to make an overall assessment.
For more on this topic, see GiveWell’s discussion of the weaknesses of ‘sequence thinking’ (which corresponds to an approach that’s heavily reliant on cost-effectiveness analysis) compared to ‘cluster thinking’. You can also see a discussion of the pros and cons of quantification.
Conclusion
We’ve shown how to compare different problems on each of our framework factors – scale, neglectedness, solvability and personal fit.
While it is hard to measure effectiveness precisely, the differences identified between problems are often very large. This suggests that even inaccurate measurements could be a useful guide, compared to relying on intuition alone.Trump on Muslim Immigration: "I Didn't Say 'Shut It Down.' I said you have to be very careful." Wait, what?
�Frankly, we�re having problems with the Muslims,� he told Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo. All right, fair enough. All right, fair enough.
"These attacks are not done by Swedish people. That I can tell you. We have to be smart. We have to look at the mosques and study what's going on. There is a sick problem going on." All right, can't argue. All right, can't argue. Trump said the incident shows why the U.S. should be wary of Middle Easterners. "I would be extremely careful about people from the Middle East coming into our country," he said on "CBS This Morning." "We should be vigilant at our borders." When pressed for specifics, Trump said he would want "good documentation" from travelers. Wait a second -- you previously called for a ban on Muslim travel to the US, until "we can figure out what the hell is going on." Wait a second -- you previously called for aon Muslim travel to the US, until "we can figure out what the hell is going on." Now you just want to be "careful" and have "good documentation?" Now you just want to be "careful" and have "good documentation?"... Trump said his main focus is on better immigration surveillance, not a total shutdown. "I didn't say shut it down," he said. "I said you have to be very careful. We have to be very, very strong and vigilant at the borders. We have to be tough." I'm sure this is just further evidence of what a good brain Trump has, a brain that says a lot of things. I'm sure this is just further evidence of what a good brain Trump has, a brain that says a lot of things. Trump's "tells you exactly what he thinks" scores will continue going up. After all, only someone who "tells you exactly what he thinks" would have such a hard time keeping a consistent line on what he actually thinks. Trump's "tells you exactly what he thinks" scores will continue going up. After all, only someone who "tells you exactly what he thinks" would have such a hard time keeping a consistent line on what he actually thinks. Why, it's almost as if he has one set of claims he makes to a Republican audience, guessing what they want to hear, and now has a second set of claims he's trotting out for a general election audience, now guessing what they want to hear. Why, it's almost as if he has one set of claims he makes to a Republican audience, guessing what they want to hear, and now has a second set of claims he's trotting out for a general election audience, now guessing whatwant to hear. Posted by: Ace at 11:43 AM
MuNuvians MeeNuvians Polls! Polls! Polls! Frequently Asked Questions The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick Top Top Tens Greatest Hitjobs News/ChatToday we’re being transported to Hawaii, but a vintage Hawaii (think 1950s), and in Los Angeles! Jessica + Tim fell in love with Maui, Hawaii when they went three years ago for Jessica’s birthday and developed an affinity for the old-school Hawaiian aesthetic. After toying with the idea of an island wedding, they knew they wanted to have their wedding in Los Angeles, so that they could share their beloved city with their loved ones from all over the world. Ultimately this led to the idea of bringing a little bit of Hawaii to Los Angeles River Center in Downtown LA.
The couple met at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater doing comedy and they are known for their great sense of humor and being able to throw a killer party. They wanted their wedding to be a blend of classic Old Hollywood glamour meets fun, tropical tiki, without feeling too themed. Their first move was to bring in full service event design and planning team, Boldhouse, to carry out their vision. Working together, every decision and detail had meaning, including custom coaster save the dates, their Beverly Hills Hotel inspired invitation suite, building an authentic tiki bar, and combining it all with lush tropical florals, bamboo accents and classic signage.
Ready to see some tropical festivities, all captured by Hazelnut Photography? Let’s go!!
Boldhouse crafted this cool + tropical-inspired invitation.
Simply STUNNING!!
The bride’s dress is by Dalaarna from Bride Boutique in Echo Park.
How gorgeous is she?! We love the red lip + bold makeup look by Claire at S Studios, which paired perfectly with her classic + elegant hair.
The sparkly dress + this orchid bouquet by The Bloomin Gypsy = A match made in heaven!!
Our Musical Choices Processional: Pachelbel's Canon + Here Comes The Bride on the Organ Recessional: Wedding March on the Organ First Dance: Sleepwalk by Santo & Johnny
Our Favorite Memory From The Wedding It would be hard to top the moment our Bruce Springsteen impersonator appeared and surprised guests with a performance! But all of our speakers were truly, jaw-droppingly amazing — from our officiant, to Jessica's dad, to our siblings, each person so clearly spent a huge amount of time writing something deeply affecting that came from the heart.
All the coconuts!!
The gorgeous tabletop rentals are from Dish Wish, while the funky furniture is from Classic Party Rentals.
Totally digging her nails!! The bride’s stunning engagement ring + wedding band are vintage pieces from Platt Boutique Jewelry in West Hollywood.
So fun!! Lawry’s Prime Rib Beverly Hills provided all the catering + drinks.
Our Advice To Those Planning Now Go on a honeymoon as quick as possible after the wedding! Many couples told us that was a regret for them, so we planned ours immediately after our wedding weekend. That's obviously not always an option for everyone, but we would recommend planning some kind of mini-trip to catch your breath after such an eventful stretch and get to reflect on your wedding together as a newly married couple!
So SWEET! Congrats to the two of you, Jessica + Tim!!
photography: Hazelnut Photography // venue name: Los Angeles River Center, Los Angeles, California, USA // event design: boldhouse // planning: boldhouse // florals: The Bloomin Gypsy // wedding dress: Dalaarna // wedding dress boutique: Bride in Echo Park // bride's ring: Vintage from the 1950s, from Platt Boutique Jewelry in West Hollywood // hair stylist: Sheyenne Humphries // makeup artist: Claire, S Studios // groom's ring: Platt Boutique Jewelry in West Hollywood // paper goods: boldhouse // calligraphy: boldhouse // catering: Lawry’s Prime Rib Beverly Hills // cake: Sheila Mae // tabletop rentals: Dish Wish // furniture rentals: Classic Party Rentals // linen rentals: La Tavola // music: DJ Gianna CostaEven after a couple of decades as a skeptical activist I can still encounter new dark recesses festering with pseudoscience. The human capacity for nonsense seems endless.
A report in an alternative news outlet from the American Institution of Alternative Archeology (AIAA – the tag “alternative” is a huge red flag) claims that the Smithsonian Institution “destroyed thousands of giant human remains during the early 1900′s.”
Why would they do this? The AIAA has an unconventional view of human history. Apparently based on mention in the bible that giants once walked the earth, they believe that the mound building cultures of the Americas were not the product of early Native Americans but rather an earlier race of technologically advanced giants. Reading the comments after the article, it also seems that the belief these giants were white and Aryan is popular.
This is an excellent example of how a narrative develops from a combination of religious beliefs and cultural biases, and then history is rewritten and conspiracy theories woven out of whole cloth in order to support the preferred narrative. Science and evidence do not guide the narrative, but rather it is the other way around – a hallmark of pseudoscience.
The WorldNewsDailyReport, and the AIAA, would have you believe that (as quoted from AIAA spokesman, James Churward):
“There has been a major cover up by western archaeological institutions since the early 1900′s to make us believe that America was first colonized by Asian peoples migrating through the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago, when in fact, there are hundreds of thousands of burial mounds all over America which the Natives claim were there a long time before them, and that show traces of a highly developed civilization, complex use of metal alloys and where giant human skeleton remains are frequently found but still go unreported in the media and news outlets.”
That the convenient thing about conspiracy theories, they are remarkably immune to facts. You can, in fact, make up whatever facts you wish, and ignore others, all as part of the conspiracy.
According to the AIAA, somehow the Smithsonian was able to monopolize all of American archaeology, to such a degree that they had complete control over evidence from hundreds of thousands of mounds. They allegedly destroyed thousands of giant skeletal remains, important archaeological evidence, because it did not fit the official story.
A comprehensive survey of such mounds was published by the Smithsonian in 1848 (before Darwin published his theory of evolution), a reference still used by archaeologists today. I guess the conspiracy was already underway. and they were supporting the theory of evolution even before they knew it existed.
It is true that when Europeans encountered Native Americans they were largely unaware of who built the mounds. That is because they were built by their ancestors thousands of years ago. The ancestors to modern Native Americans likely arrived around 12 thousand years ago. The exact history is still being worked out. It is unreasonable to assume that there would be continuous cultural knowledge across thousands of years.
It should also be obvious that if there were a race of giant humans walking around, leaving thousands of skeletons behind, no one organization could possibly control such evidence. If the Smithsonian decided to suppress such evidence (itself a bizarre idea), then their competitors in New York or at the Peabody in New Haven could have easily preserved and described the undeniable evidence.
You would have to expand the conspiracy to involve all of archaeology – all museums, universities, researchers, etc.
Of course, all the AIAA would have to do to expose this giant conspiracy and catapult themselves to fame is to produce a single verifiable giant skeleton. Bones from a few thousand years ago would be well-preserved, could not be hoaxed in such a way to evade detailed scientific scrutiny, and would even likely contain DNA. If there are hundreds of thousands of such mounds, it seems likely the Smithsonian goons would have missed a stray femur or skull.
Of course, we always have claims that such things exist. We never get to see them, however. The report also claims that the Smithsonian is being forced by the court to reveal documents that will prove the conspiracy, to be released in 2015. Somehow I suspect that these documents are not going to be what the AIAA would have us believe (if they even exist).
That is also a common feature of such conspiracies – they are always about to be broken wide open with incontrovertible evidence, evidence which somehow never seems to materialize. It’s like a carrot being held in front of the believers, keeping them going for one more cycle. Or it is just a way to get sensationalized articles and headlines – promising dramatic evidence right around the corner, then counting on the short attention span of the public to not follow through.
Conclusion
In the end the giants of the mound building culture is just another bizarre conspiracy theory being supported by rank pseudoscientists. In this case there seems to be a socio-religious belief system driving the conspiracy, one with not subtle undertones of racism.
As is often the case, all the claims and accusations can be settled with one verifiable piece of evidence. In this case it seems particularly implausible that such evidence could not be produced if the claims were true.
Addendum: The source linked above for this story appears to be a satirical site. However, the giant mound builders conspiracy theory is real, pretty much as stated in the article. (see here, and here, for example) The AIAA appears to be made up also.Modern Television is almost unrecognizable from past decades. It’s not just the inflated budgets or big name actors taking television roles, but the content. The plucky sitcom still exists, but it shares airtime with Game of Thrones, American Horror Story,Breaking Bad, and a myriad of other programming meant for very mature audiences. Even mainstream comic books are not just filled with icons of truth, justice, and the American way, but with hard tales of vengeance, murder, and illicit sexual conduct. What caused this change? Was it the natural progression of storytelling and pushing boundaries? Or have we as a society changed and become more cynical?
It’s in human nature to push further than those who came before us. To stand on the shoulders of the giants in our history and to push the sky back another inch. There was a time when KISS was considered to be satanic enough to cause small protests. What would those same protesters and concerned mothers think of Marilyn Manson, who is quickly being eclipsed in content and visuals by hundreds of modern day metal bands? Applying this to television and film also works. The Twilight Zone took us to the darker corners of the human psyche, but they could only press so far. There were still heroes and villains, good and evil.
A show like Breaking Bad comes along and it changes the paradigm. It makes the bad guy the very center piece of the show. We watch a man lose his soul and fall into greed and despair. True Detective is steeped in darkness and angst so thick it might make your TV depressed. When people talk about these shows it is often remarked that they are more realistic, less predictable. There isn’t a single character in Game of Thrones who is safe. Think a character will be around a few more seasons? Well, off with his head. The idea that the hero always has to win is being brutally dismantled.
The desire to see heroes fall may come from a place of cynicism. Knowing that the superhero always wins can be uplifting but it also steals the narrative power. A writer is left with different roads leading to the same result which makes a story have less impact. On top of this, people deal with failure every day in their own lives. They are the heroes of their own stories, but most have a hard time dragging themselves to work in the morning. Watching the Ubermensch with perfect features and a trophy spouse destroy an ever more “powerful” bad guy of the week starts to ring hollow.
This leads to an audience that wants to watch someone who has been kicked around. A character who deals with adversity, who struggles with ego and pride and sometimes even makes the wrong decision. A character that is a mess that they can relate to rather than feel separate from. Anti-heroes, or at least the grittier protagonists like Rust Cohle and John Wick, offer a different kind of emotional outlet than The Flash.
This isn’t to say that the bright and safe shows and books aren’t necessary, only that an audience is demanding more. Many people can’t watch a show like Game of Thrones or enjoy Daredevil because it is unrelenting in its grim nature. People who do enjoy these darker shows understand that nature itself is harsh and uncaring, and that the sugar coated existence of a sitcom is at minimum a farce and is at worst insulting to humanity as a whole.
Whether these dark forms of media expose human nature or simply give an outlet for it is hard to gauge. Their growing popularity seems to indicate a lingering dissatisfaction with generic popular media. If it is born out of cynicism then it might be an indicator that society as a whole is dissatisfied with the current course of events. If it is boredom rather than dissatisfaction that causes these stories to be so well liked, then writers need to know the formulas of the past will not work to keep people interested.
Personally, I get energized when I watch a show like Game of Thrones. The tension makes my palms sweaty, and it makes me want to write, to be a complete sadist to my characters, and never let any of them (or my readers) feel safe. It isn’t about horror or hurting people, it’s about telling a story that actually hits on an emotional level. If I have to go to dark places to make people feel that, then I’m not afraid to. It feels like show runners and movie makers are starting to understand the nature of unrepentant storytelling, and I hope that this bravery toward dark and gritty fiction continues to grow.
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Tony Southcotte: Tony hails from the Rocky Mountains somewhere around the state of Colorado. Possibly raised by grizzly bears, this gritty denizen of the arena now spends most of his time grappling with Java updates and dysfunctional RAM. With not much fiction under his belt, it might seem tempting to bet against Mister Southcotte, but an impressive knowledge of everything from PVC pipe to psychedelic drugs makes Tony a storehouse of fiction waiting to hit the paper. Plus, you know, there’s the possibility of him ripping you apart like a grizzly bear.This is political hypocrisy at it’s finest. Right after Nancy Pelosi’s accusations against Republicans over Jeff Sessions’ alleged meetings with the Russian ambassador, she showed some revealing body language which shows there is clearly more than meets the eye as far as Nancy Pelosi is concerned as she did the same the same thing as Sessions when she was asked a similar question. Since the body doesn’t’ lie, Pelosi’s body language says it all and it looks to me like she was taken aback. Does she herself have something to hide?
Politico reporter Jake Sherman directly asked Pelosi “You’ve been in Congress a little bit and you’re in leadership, have you ever met with the Russian ambassador?’
Pelosi was shocked! this was revealed in her immediate awkward silence which took much longer than a person who had nothing to hide answering the question. Pelosi phumfered “Not with this Russian ambassador, no,” before she quickly tried to change the subject and move on. When you put the word “no” at the end of a sentence, there is often trouble brewing. When you are being open and forthright you say No at the beginning of the sentence and then go on to explain. So immediately it put a huge red flag up for me.
Thne she explains herself. When you give an open honest answer you don’t explain and sound defensive and have a catch in your tone. Then Sherman asked “Is it normal to meet with ambassadors?” and her reply was “Yeah,” She did not says “yes it certainly is, or yes or yes it is. She blurted out a yeah.
Her body language also seemed to me to scream many signals of deception.
First she shows the back of her hand which is the first bad signal.It shows she is shocked at the question as she looks away.
Then she holds up her finger as to admonish and subconsciously and angrily say, “don’t ask me this question”. She doesn’t even look at Sherman but give him an askance glance which illustrates anger.
Then she closes her eyes as if not to deal with the question- to shut it out literally. She also reaches for her throat which is the most vulnerable part of your body. It is a form of self protection and means she is feeling really vulnerable at this question being thrown at her.
No here she is super angry as she makes a karate chop gesture as you can see the movement of her hand which is caught in the photo.She also looks away as she can’t even face the interviewer which is another bad sign. In essence her karate chop gestures says “cut it off.”
She is still showing the back of her hand and not the palms which is yet another red flag signal to me. She also does not look at the interviwers which is yet another signal red flag moment.
Now this is a very serious moment for me red flag wise as she shows how vulnerable she is now that she in essence got busted. She reaches for her vulnerable area- her throat region.
Now her facial expression really shows how angry and upset she is that she got “caught with her pants down” so to speak. She is no dummy when it comes to the game of politics and she knows the repercussions of this question and her mind is spinning at 100 miles per hours to see how she can now spin her answer to look good to the public. The hand on the throat which remains is now even more telling when matched with her upset facial expression.
Now she can no longer face her interviewers and shuts down with closed eyes and cups her hand over her vulnerable throat area into a fist indicating she wants to shut out what just happened and she is angry about it as revealed by the fist like posturing of her hand.
So there you have it- one politician call the kettle black when her pot is just as black. This my fans and friends and readers is why I detest politics. It is full of these lies, these games, and this hypocrisy which we have just seen. It is why I support no party over the other and no candidate over the other. It is why I am impartial and neuutral because they both end up doing and saying the same thing at one time or another. So it is a waste of time to keep it all straight as far as I am concerned.
Politics is a game as we just saw and it is a very serious and dangerous game. It is about besmirching one to others and vice versa. So if you ever dare to accuse me of being partisan or representing one candidate over another I will refer you to this Pelosi blog I just did.
AdvertisementsA rumor that emerged earlier this week in the right-wing political blogosphere claims that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (FSV) has in its possession at least 20,000 emails obtained from the private unsecured email server that Hillary Clinton used for official communications during her tenure as the U.S. Secretary of State. The rumors also claim that Kremlin officials are debating whether to release the emails.
Although the rumor has been circulated widely in the right-wing blogosphere, and Fox News’ senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano referred to it during an interview on The Kelly File, a brief online investigation reveals that the claims originated from notorious online conspiracy theory sources.
For instance, Front Page Mag sourced its report from a European Union Times (EUT) article published on May 6.
EUT is a far right-wing website with Neo-Nazi links. The website is known to have originated several conspiracy theories and fake new reports in the past.
A copy of the report by EUT also appeared on the website What Does It Mean, another notorious online source of conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated reports.
And despite the doubtful sources of the report, there has been |
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